The Honourable Schoolboy (George Smiley, #6; Karla Trilogy #2)

by John Le Carré

In our game there’s two views of history: conspiracy and fuck-up.

For forty years, give or take, war had been Saigon’s staple industry, but the American pull-out of ’73 had produced a slump from which, to the end, the city never properly recovered, so that even this long-awaited final act, with its cast of millions, was playing to quite poor audiences.