Animal planet

I’m reading The Honourable Schoolboy. I like it, but I think the general tone of it can be inferred from this one paragraph:

The whole childish exchange would not have caused him another moment’s thought had it not been for the way things turned out afterwards.

If you know anything about the way I read, you will know that I really do not like bad surprises at the end. I guess this doesn’t really qualify as a surprise — it’s pretty clear that something bad is going to happen at the end. I think. Also, I do like Jerry Westerby, but I kind of care more about George Smiley. It’s like expanding circles of things going bad — something’s going to go wrong for Jerry, which is going to cause something to go wrong for George — whom we are only hearing about through the thoughts of Guillam. We’re pretty removed from the person we ultimately care about, which increases the sense of unease. But I guess that’s the point — we, like Jerry, are pretty much operating in the dark.

It reminds me also of the Erast Fandorin books by Boris Akunin that I’ve been reading — after the first one we generally see Fandorin through the viewpoint of a new and different character. Funny.

Okay — that’s all I’ve got. It’s Friday after all.