Call for the Dead (George Smiley, #1)

by John Le Carré

perspicuity.

The novelist, I know now, frequently regards his characters with the veiled mystification of a child among grown-ups. He views them with the same callousness and the same suspicion, the same pain, marvel, and the same fickle love. And as he watches them, he adds them to his secret bestiary, to admire, to imitate, to reject, to punish. For its inmates, the sheltered world of intelligence can be wonderfully conducive to preserving this childish vision. From inside its walls, we young recruits were able to regard ourselves as mature to a fault. But let us loose upon the grown-ups, and most of us were lost children.

egregious

Everyone seemed to smell a little of failure.

But Smiley was a sentimental man and the long exile strengthened his deep love of England. He fed hungrily on memories of Oxford; its beauty, its rational ease, and the mature slowness of its judgements. He dreamt of windswept autumn holidays at Hartland Quay, of long trudges over the Cornish cliffs, his face smooth and hot against the sea wind. This was his other secret life, and he grew to hate the bawdy intrusion of the new Germany, the stamping and shouting of uniformed students, the scarred, arrogant faces and their cheapjack answers. He resented, too, the way in which the Faculty had tampered with his subject—his beloved German literature. And there had been a night, a terrible night in the winter of 1937, when Smiley had stood at his window and watched a great bonfire in the university court: round it stood hundreds of students, their faces exultant and glistening in the dancing light. And into the pagan fire they threw books in their hundreds. He knew whose books they were: Thomas Mann, Heine, Lessing and a host of others. And Smiley, his damp hand cupped round the end of his cigarette, watching and hating, triumphed that he knew his enemy.