Le Carré's Honourable Schoolboy And A Problem With The Narrator's Voice?

* John Le Carre´'s 'The Honourable Schoolboy' - the problem with the narrator's voice? Will the best of Le Carré be somewhat read a century from now? I hope so. And what will date?

The Karla trilogy is written in the third-person: there is a narrator of sorts. Do most authors have a 'blank' third-person? Whatever 'angle' there might be is more divined from what is left out by the author than from some 'voice' that the third-person has. But Le Carré's third-person often does have a 'voice'.

He controls it, he keeps it on a lead, but it is there. And perhaps this is what might date over the decades? Le Carré has a political brain, and political brains, perhaps unavoidably and yet stupidly, simplify their enemies. They don't hear the complications for if they did they could not enjoy their anger. Communism is simplified. The American presence on the world stage is simplified. 

And the narrating 'voice' in The Honourable Schoolboy is arch. It is knowing; or rather it thinks it knows. Off politics, the working-class do not and never have spoken like that; they never have sung those songs while they worked. And women? The admittedly rare sweeping comments made by the 'third-person' (ones made by characters are of course merely that) hold up undoubted truths about the uglinesses committed by many women, perhaps truths that really ought to be known by successive generations of boy readers coming of age and which are mentioned far less than the uglinesses of men, but they hold up nothing else. It is simplification. 

And - most of all - this third-person narrator will deliver arcane British spy-world habits in its own knowing manner; it will put its own slant on the action.

This 'third-person' is what might date The Honourable Schoolboy and other books. It's not yet obtrusive though, and currently the Honourable Jerry Westerby is a most meaty and satisfying read.

* The Honourable Schoolboy is an enormous work. Call it bloated, three times as long as it could be, if you want - but for some people that is exactly the appeal. It's like one of those films that used to have an interlude and free liniment to rub on the back-pain.