What is the 'it'?

In case you were wondering (see previous entry), after a brief and (perhaps) dignified pause I managed to force myself back to “Karla’s Choice”.

Possibly as a result of having put it aside for a bit too long, possibly because outside of work I am not the world’s most attentive reader (lol), but also possibly because of the irrevocable damage caused by its use of “creek” instead of “creak”, my feelings towards this book are not as warm as they originally were. Smiley is still Smiley, and I have no complaints about how he is being served. But I am now three-quarters of the way through the book, and I find myself in a fog of confusion as to a lot of what is going on. Yes, this is a spy novel, so the arcane and obscure workings of “tradecraft” are never going to be entirely transparent, but Le Carre himself was always able to bring you along with him, even when you were never sure of whose allegiances were where. I sometimes find myself thinking that this book is the product of a longer book having been edited down to what was perceived to be a marketable length. (To which I would counter that “The Honourable Schoolboy” and “The Little Drummer Girl” are both literal doorstoppers, and yet neither of them carries an ounce of fat.)

I was skeptical about this project when I first heard of it. Nick Harkaway himself as good as admitted that he was on a hiding to nothing. As I said in the previous post, it’s not a Le Carre novel, but it is a Smiley novel. And, on that metric, it’s far from embarrassing. I do wonder, though, if his intended audience might possibly have ended up being Le Carre himself rather than, as it really should have been, the readers of Le Carre novels.

Nevertheless, I pushed on, in the hope that all would become clear by the end. But then I got to page 205, where I read the following:

“He didn’t think that would stick for more than a heartbeat if the Soviets put the screws into Lehrmann, but he could if necessary point to any infraction as a violation of a direct order, and a minor but offensive sleight by the Russians of East German democratic socialist sovereignty.”

The problem is not the length of the sentence. Nor is the problem that the sentence doesn’t exactly soar or sing. And it isn’t the possibly deliberate but also possibly just unhelpful separate references to the Soviets and the Russians. No. The problem is with the word “sleight”. Admittedly, it isn’t a terribly common word. It is usually seen in the immediate vicinity of the words “of hand”, and seems to mean something along the lines of a subtle form of deception – which is, I suppose, the kind of behaviour you would find in a spy novel. But that doesn’t seem to work here. More likely is that the author was looking to use the word “slight”, which, as a noun, means something in the nature of a put-down. That, in context, makes a lot more sense to me. But – as with “creak”/”creek” – it isn’t the word that ended up in the book. In fact, I’m prepared to make the call that “sleight” is the wrong word – that it is an error. How would one “sleight” the sovereignty of a country? What would that even mean?

“Karla’s Choice” was always going to be a big seller; there are likely millions of us around the world who would give anything (“anything”, in this case, being $35 for the first-release paperback) to have the chance to read another George Smiley book. It carries the Penguin brand. It has (or we would be forgiven for assuming that it has) been professionally edited. I am not blaming the author for either of these errors. But neither am I at all happy to have encountered them. I would be horrified if I saw them in a published judgment, especially one that I had been responsible for proofing.

Precious? Moi? I just want things to be right. Is that too much to ask?