Honourable schoolboys...(more on Le Carre)

I've long thought that The Honourable Schoolboy must be the perfect title for a Le Carre novel. At least it was for that period of his career when he was addressing both the Cold War and the post imperial decline of Britain. When Smiley takes charge of the Circus at the beginning of the second novel of the 'Karla' sequence he's a positive force for change coming in and shaking things up in an institution previously in decline, a metaphor for just what Le Carre imagined the British state then needed (of course, the new broom for the malaise of British politics in the mid-70s eventually turned out to be Thatcher, a solution which I don't imagine Le Carre liked very much).

In his Biographical Dictionary of Film, David Thomson suggests of the actor James Fox that he 'has mined the uneasy ground on the fringes of the English upper class'. So many of Le Carre's characters seem to come from a similar place, that hinterland between the upper middle class and the actual aristocracy. They're people you only have to look at to know they've been to the right schools, even if it's only a minor public school. The kind of sad and faded institution featured in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, clearly drawn from Le Carre's own experience of teaching at such an institution. It's more than that though, they're also characters marked by their schooldays, the way that some of us are. You could look at most of the cast of Tinker, Tailor and easily slot them into suitably cliched roles at their schools. 'The best days of my life...' is a cliche that conceals as much as it reveals. Perhaps it's a consequence more common for those who have attended public schools, a form of institutionalism.

It's interesting to note that the two characters clearly marked as coming from a different cultural place are Ricki Tarr, a working class thug eventually manipulated by everyone, and Toby Esterhase. Esterhase's name may link him with the real life aristocratic Esterhazy family, but he's still obviously not quite 'one of us', the weak link in the upper circle who run the Circus in Tinker, Tailor. Marked as an outsider because of his foreignness. Ricki Tarr is a character that the new film definitely gets better than the old BBC series, if only because Tom Hardy is just better in the role than Hywel Bennett was back in 1979.

It was the casting of Colin Firth which put me in mind of the David Thomson quote above. Watching the trailor, because I knew the story and characters, I could guess exactly who was cast as who. The casting of Firth as the bisexual, upper class traitor Bill Hayden is almost too obvious. Perhaps you can't associate him with the upper class in quite the same way as Thomson does with James Fox, but coming after I last saw him as King George in The King's Speech, it has a fascinating echo. King George must now rank as one of his defining roles, along with Darcy in the BBC Pride and Prejudice. Both characters are representative of a British establishment, fundamentally honest, patriotic, upstanding. It's fascinating to place this portrait of corrupt Englishness against these two earlier roles, have them echo each other, the contrasting surfaces of the British establishment.