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

[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".