John le Carré’s A Legacy of Spies: A Story for Our Times?

As a comparatively late baby-boomer, I remember a childhood framed with vague political terrors—the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis, “Duck and Cover” public service messages, rumors of the odd nuclear close call, stories of citizens being shot at from the Berlin War. So John le Carré (David John Moore Cornwell) was hands down the best suspense writer for the Cold-war generation. Cornwell actually worked in British intelligence services (MI5 and MI6) from 1950 until 1963 when he left to pursue his writing career. (There are some rumours to the effect that he had to leave the Intelligence Services because his cover was blown by real-life “mole” Kim Philby!)

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963) was enormously successful, and this paved the way for his brilliant Karla Trilogy—tinker, Taylor, Soldier, Spy (1974); The Honorable Schoolboy (1977); and Smiley’s People (1979). The trilogy got its name from the Soviet master-spy Karla, a sinister adversary to George Smiley, the British intelligence officer. Smiley must weather monumental adversity and indignity to track down an embedded agent (codenamed Gerald) who is in league with Karla and intent on neutralizing British and US anti-soviet espionage. Then he must go about bringing Karla down. In this masterful series of works, le Carré managed to convey the essence and the subtleties of Cold War espionage and counterespionage. What distinguished his work was the absence of violent, dramatic 007-like action sequences. Instead, the reader was immersed in a high-stakes and terribly understated chess game whose moves and counter moves were often unfathomable. Le Carré was adept at creating layers of irony—at the center the savvy players (Smiley, Control, Karla) and at the periphery the hapless agents and citizens (and ultimately, the readers) who desperately attempted to follow the events and lost track at their peril.

Glasnost, perestroika—and finally the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the dismantling of the Berlin Wall—were the worst things that could have happened to le Carré. The “Karla” novels of the 70s were written almost contemporaneously with the events they depicted—one was hearing about moles, defections, and covert assassinations in real life and then, in short order, seeing equivalent events depicted by le Carré. At the end of the Cold War le Carré brought his considerable talents to bear on other conflict areas around the globe—the Middle East, South America, Africa—but the subsequent works grew more and more tepid; they lacked the extreme moral contrasts, and they never achieved the taughtness, the precision, or the seamless credibility of those early works.

That is why— O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!—i was intrigued to hear that le Carré was resurrecting Smiley, at least for one last work—a Legacy of Spies. In fact, this latest work seems to square some sort of circle because its events are actually drawn from those depicted in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. A Legacy of Spies centres on Peter Guillam, Smiley’s right-hand man through most of his conflicts with Karla. Guillam, enjoying his retirement in Brittany, is suddenly called to London to answer some serious charges. The offspring of some of the casualties of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold are bringing lawsuits against the British Government and its intelligence services for the suffering and hardship caused by the cold-blooded actions of Guillam & Co.

But the Service that Guillam now answers to has no recollection of the Cold War, no real appreciation for the nuances or the subtleties of the “Great Game” of the mid-twentieth century. Guillam’s interlocutors are young, irreverent, prone to profanity, tech-savvy, legally smart, and all about PR and damage control. They refer to Guillam, a senior intelligence officer in his 80’s, as “Pete”, and speak very loudly once they notice his hearing aids. They discover that vast swathes of documentation dealing with the events of the early 60’s have disappeared, and that there still exist several safe-houses and interrogation complexes that do not appear on any contemporary radars. They are determined to rake old “Pete” over the coals.

One senses le Carré’s enthusiasm as he immerses himself once more in his original genre. But the stark and clear conflict between Soviets and Brits has been supplanted by a murkier conflict which pits 21st Century moral standards and egalitarian values against the bleak pragmatism that ruled in the depths of the Cold War. One is struck by the similarity to a variety of issues in our current news cycles— the #metoo movement, #idlenomore, the payments to victims for wrongful convictions and wrongful renditions. In all cases the claims (of greater or lesser legitimacy) involve the confrontation between an older, more traditional morality and power structures on one hand, and contemporary liberalism and ideas of social justice on the other.

Guillam is forced to retrace all his painful steps through the events of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, and through this process the reader is brought into close contact with the emotional and social consequences of the brutality of the Cold War. Guillam is obliged to use all his skills to try to obscure the past from his interrogators while finding a way to achieve some closure for the hapless victims...

Smiley does appear in this work, but not in a key role. By some reckoning, based on the chronology of the novels, Smiley must be at least 105 at the time of this novel. Le Carré is clearly relying on the “willing suspension of disbelief” to carry readers through. Astonishing is the fact that le Carré is able to resurrect, through 50-year-old, moth-eaten intelligence reports all the dread tension that haunted the original work. The pleasure of the work is short lived—with 14 point font and 260 odd pages it doesn’t really match the substance of the original works. Still—a Good Read, and available via Interlibrary Loan.

Happy New Year from the staff and volunteers of the Lennoxville Library!