The Honourable Schoolboy (The Penguin John le Carré Hardback Collection)

As Saigon falls, George Smiley is given control of a Circus decimated by the mole it harbored for years. His campaign to rebuild British intelligence and identify what Moscow Centre is hiding leads him to a suspicious pattern in a Hong Kong gold seam, and he dispatches journalist-operative Jerry Westerby to trace the money. Westerby's journey into the collapsing world of Southeast Asia during the final days of the Vietnam War becomes a portrait of a postcolonial order folding in on itself.

Simon Vance brings the full weight of le Carré's moral seriousness to the Karla trilogy's central volume, and his performance understands that The Honourable Schoolboy is both the most geographically expansive of the three novels and the most emotionally devastating. His Smiley is the work of long familiarity with the character, and his ability to give Westerby the romantic idealism that makes his fate so affecting distinguishes this performance. Vance makes the Cold War's human cost feel specific and personal.