Nearing the end of The Honourable Schoolboy

[cimorene]

...and I am so, so sick of these gross middle-aged male characters who are grossly obsessed with various women and/or with all women all the time, like so sick of them that I don't actually care that that's the point and they're gross on purpose and the obsession is potentially their downfall and it's not even really unrealistic. (At least I presume not.) Like, just let me out of this gross POV character's head.

UGH.

(And that's not actually the hardest part about the book. All the White Man's Burden stuff is worse.)

(But Smiley is great. My favorite Smiley moment so far in this book is when Connie Sachs and Peter Guillam are watching him reading files to himself in his weird little eccentric way and she mouths "Isn't he a love?" at Guillam, much to Guillam's strangely intense righteous fury [even though he himself has just been thinking how cute it is].)

Comments

[aurumcalendula]

Ugh. I honestly can't tell if Le Carre is doing it on purpose or not.

This is one of my least favorites of his works, tbh.

[cimorene]

I think he, like GRRM, does it on purpose but like... perhaps with some underlying motives that don't look so great that they're not necessarily aware of? There's an almost obsessive quality to the granularity with which the gross pov is conveyed, to my eye.

But I suppose that doesn't HAVE to mean there's prurience underneath. Or sympathy. Maybe it's obsessive disgust, or intellectual curiosity about the psychology of it all. But there's definitely a greater tolerance for looking at it than I have.

[devon]

I find that a lot of things are more painful now that I am "woke," as the kids say. We were re-watching Bruce Willis in "Unbreakable" (in advance of "Glass"), and the opening scene has his character hitting on the woman in the airplane seat next to him. She keeps looking away, going back to her magazine, smiling briefly and then not. And I'm just shouting at the TV, "You asshole! Leave her alone!"

Stuff that I didn't notice as much 10 years ago. I knew he pushed it for too long, but it wasn't apparent by the second sentence out of his mouth, the way it is now.

[cimorene]

Lol. Do you ever just wish you could have a 1980s level of, like, moderate wokeness with which to read? I'm p. sure that level would be like, "He's kind of a chauvinist but his heart is in the right place and he doesn't KNOW you shouldn't sort of stalk women just because they're pretty and dating the targets of your espionage".