Review of "The Honourable Schoolboy" by John le Carre

Another good one from le Carre, though it took me a while to get into it. Whereas "The Spy Who Came in From the Cold" is taut and economical, this is a bit flabby, and some episodes seem to take forever, to no really obvious purpose. I won't attempt to summarise the plot, which is really convoluted and defies a quick description.

Eventually I was hooked, though, and engaged with most of the characters (though there were some that were a bit fuzzy for me, so that I had trouble remembering who they were). There's a lot of stuff about the nastier aspects of the Cold War, and no punches pulled about the bad things that "our side" did - in particular involvement in the opium trade. The parts set in Hong Kong, and Indochina, are really evocative - I can actually smell the places he describes.