A Second Monday selection. I had never read this before and loved it – I went on to watch the 2011 movie and also started the BBC miniseries (which clearly inspired the wonderful Fry & Laurie “Control and Tony” sketches).
I looked up just one thing: hibitane, a brand name for the disinfectant chlorhexidine but genericized.
Short quotes
- “…the late Mr. Maltby, the pianist who had been called from choir practice to help the police with their inquiries, and as far as anyone knew was helping them to this day, for Maltby’s trunk still lay in the cellar awaiting instructions.”
- Ricky Tarr: “‘To possess another language is to possess another soul.’ A great king wrote that, sir, Charles the Fifth.” (It’s widely attributed to Charlemagne but I’d love to find an authoritative source).
- Lacon: “I once heard someone say morality was method. Do you hold with that? I suppose you wouldn’t. You would say that morality was vested in the aim, I expect. Difficult to know what one’s aims are, that’s the trouble, specially if you’re British.”
- Connie Sachs: “Her formless white face took on the grandmother’s glow of enchanted reminiscence. Her memory was as compendious as her body and surely she loved it more, for she had put everything aside to listen to it: her drink, her cigarette, even for a while Smiley’s passive hand. She sat no longer slouched but strictly, her big head to one side as she dreamily plucked the white wool of her hair.”
- Connie again: “‘Poor loves.’ She was breathing heavily, not perhaps from any one emotion but from a whole mess of them, washed around in her like mixed drinks. ‘Poor loves. Trained to Empire, trained to rule the waves. All gone. All taken away. Bye-bye, world.’”
- The Hotel Islay: “The traffic roared past it all night. But the inside, though it was a fire-bowl of clashing wallpapers and copper lampshades, was a place of extraordinary calm.”
- Control: “a carcass of a man by then, with his lank grey forelock and his smile as warm as a skull.”
- Allwyn: “an effeminate Marine who spoke only of weekends. Till Wednesday or so, he spoke of the weekend past; after that he spoke of the weekend to come.”
- “‘I’m Joy,’ she said, in a theatrical voice, like ‘I’m Virtue’ or ‘I’m Continence.’ It wasn’t his coat she wanted but a kiss. Yielding to it, Guillam inhaled the joint pleasures of Je Reviens and a high concentration of inexpensive sherry.”
- Mendel to Guillam: “Cheer up, Peter, old son. Jesus Christ only had twelve, you know, and one of them was a double.”
- “in the hands of politicians grand designs achieve nothing but new forms of the old misery”
- “I rather like Karla’s description of committees, don’t you? Is it Chinese? A committee is an animal with four back legs.”
- Guillam when Hayden’s betrayal has sunk in: “Haydon was more than his model, he was his inspiration, the torch-bearer of a certain kind of antiquated romanticism, a notion of English calling which—for the very reason that it was vague and understated and elusive—had made sense of Guillam’s life till now. In that moment, Guillam felt not merely betrayed but orphaned.”
- “Bill had loved it, too. Smiley didn’t doubt that for a moment. Standing at the middle of a secret stage, playing world against world, hero and playwright in one: oh, Bill had loved that, all right.”