George Smiley returns in a new Cold War saga by John le Carré
John le Carré’s most celebrated character is back in a novel that relives past treachery.
Throughout the 1940s, 50s and 60s, at the height of the Cold War and the nuclear arms race, Britain’s intelligence services were thoroughly penetrated by Soviet spies. Members of the UK’s educated elite, they were recruited as undergraduates at Cambridge University by communist lecturers and tutors and encouraged into careers in MI5 and MI6.
Some of them were uncovered – Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Kim Philby – but they fled to Moscow before anyone could arrest them, tipped off by moles widely presumed to have remained active at the highest levels of British intelligence. All of the agencies’ subsequent operations – including attempts to recruit double agents in Soviet and East German intelligence – were conducted in the shadow of that ongoing betrayal.
This world of perpetual treason and fear is occupied by John le Carré, real name David Cornwell, a former intelligence officer and the great Cold War novelist. It is a world where nothing is black and white. Everything
– from the faded linoleum floor of an ageing civil servant’s office in Whitehall to the concrete walls of a Stasi torture chamber in East Berlin, and the occupants of each – is a shade of grey; the distinction between heroes and villains is blurred into obscurity.
Since the collapse of the Soviet empire, le Carré has turned his cold, bleak gaze towards other subjects: international arms dealers in The Night Manager and the war on terror in Absolute Friends and A Most Wanted Man. But Legacy of Spies – his 24th novel, published at the age of 86 – is a return to his old haunts: divided Germany and post-war London; the twilit struggle between East and West. It also sees the return of his most celebrated creation,
master spy George Smiley.
Smiley is, famously, the anti-James Bond. Small, fat, bespectacled and balding, he operates in the background, manipulating events from the shadows. Bond always got the girl,
but pretty girls were just
Small, fat, bespectacled and balding, he operates in the background, manipulating events from the shadows.
another piece on the board for Smiley; tools to manipulate weaker men. And if they needed to be sacrificed? Well, tragic things happen in wartime. Smiley never fired a gun, but he had an awful lot of blood on his hands.
Le Carré’s books are always complicated. Legacy of Spies harks back to his early books and is more intricate than most. It jumps about in time and place, intersecting with previous operations, previous plots; old, familiar characters flicker in and out like ghosts.
Those who haven’t read The Spy Who Came in From the Cold and the Karla trilogy – Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Honourable Schoolboy and Smiley’s People – are advised to start there. But le Carré’s regular readers will welcome this chance to lose themselves in one more labyrinth, with a fat, bald man in a cardigan in wait at the end of it, wondering aloud what all that betrayal and death was really for.