“All One Vanishing World”: Postimperialism and Communism in John le Carré’s The Honourable Schoolboy

Abstract

This essay argues that John le Carre’s Southeast Asian-set espionage novel, The Honourable Schoolboy (1977), is an illustration of “postimperial melancholia,” simultaneously mourning and denying the British Empire in determining Britain’s new global role. The first half of the essay argues that these postcolonial anxieties are addressed, firstly, by assertions of imperial innocence; secondly, by claims of colonialism as parental self-sacrifice; and thirdly, via subliminal assertions of British superiority to dominant America. This latter is mainly revealed through analysis of a tour secret agent, Jerry Westerby, takes through Southeast Asia’s collapsing European colonies. The essay’s second half considers the novel’s more submerged theme of Communism, reexamining Westerby’s tour in the light of mid 1970s Communist anti-colonialism. Contra the critical consensus, the essay reveals a trenchant anti-Communism in le Carre, with Communism becoming the object of Britain’s postcolonial “civilizing” mission. Yet the true subject of The Honourable Schoolboy is, as ever, the securing of British interests.