In praise of John le Carre, master of the spy novel

John le Carre has produced his greatest, and probably his last, spy novel.

The master, who stole the spy fiction genre from the greedy clutches of Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond, is after all 86 years old. As the dust jacket for A Legacy of Spies relates, in modest fashion, he has “lived by the pen” for the past 55 years.

Before that, he was a spy. He has abided by the spy’s code and spilled none of Her Majesty’s secrets. But he has single-handedly transformed the world of spy fiction, above all by giving that world moral gravity, of a sort missing in the action-oriented ranks of spy novels. Of course, John le Carre also gave us intriguing characters — above all, George Smiley; a wonderful, and mostly made-up, espionage lingo (some subsequently adopted by British intelligence); and tons of tradecraft. I fear there are spy services out there in the world still trying to imitate John le Carre’s “Circus” agents.

A Legacy of Spies returns to le Carre’s first spy novel triumph, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, published in 1963 and subsequently made into one of the best Cold War films, starring Richard Burton as the doomed Alec Leamas, in 1965. Returning to triumphal ground after a halfcentury is a bold and risky move for a novelist. But le Carre succeeds in pulling it off. Out of the shadows comes one of George Smiley’s acolytes, Peter Guillam.

Guillam, like Smiley, is long retired. He has silver hair, needs hearing aids, and lives a bucolic existence on his inherited Breton farm. He does no spying, except out to sea from among the Stonehengelike (le Carre’s description) ruins of Hitler’s Atlantic wall. But Guillam is forced to relive the entire story of a Cold War spy operation, code named Windfall, which is linked to the Leamas-Gold tragedy in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.

As the Windfall story unfolds we are treated to what John le Carre has always done best, a classic Cold War spy story with a morality tale at its heart. It’s not the same conflicted morality story as in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, with its contending ideas of spies keeping everyone (less politely “the moronic masses”) safe in their beds; and spies upending all human values. It’s a different morality tale told through an entirely new character — an East German woman, codenamed “Tulip,” who is a major intelligence source for the British, who has to be exfiltrated in a hurry, and who ends up … badly.

Reading A Legacy of Spies is a treat, and will bring readers who find it so to a doubleheader. Going back to The Spy Who Came in from the Cold will be irresistible. Fair warning, as they say on the auction floor.

But why read le Carre at all? If you are a devotee, no question. But for others, with all the glittering choices (and so little time!)?

The answer, I think, comes in threes.

First, we need fictional spy stories because we live in the midst of an ever-growing avalanche of real-life spy stories — Snowden, counter-terrorism, Russian election meddling, what to make of Kim Jong Un’s (Donald Trump’s rocket man) nuclear weapons program.

We need a counter-point. That counter-point can be pure fictional escapism — fair enough. But it can be more. With secrecy still the reigning ethic in the great game of spying, the best spy novels can give us some insights into what makes espionage tick — its people, its organizations, its methods and its outcomes (for good or ill).

This is a good reason No. 1 to read le Carre.

Second, we need spy novels because they tell political stories and the best, as in le Carre, are deeply anchored in historical truths. On the surface, spying seems a world of constant flux — new threats, new technologies to scope them. But in fact espionage is deeply rooted in history. You can read lots of good histories of espionage (fewer of Canadian intelligence), but if that is not where your reading tastes take you, you can also get some of the historical buttressing from spy novels. Le Carre is a master of fictional archeology, no more so than in A Legacy of Spies.

Finally, we need spy stories because they can be moral parables about the inevitability and human cost of taking sides. Alec Leamas is the vessel for this story in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. A half-century later, it is Peter Guillam who rediscovers love and its sundering in the ashes of the Cold War.