Le Carré’s ‘ Legacy’ reheats the Cold War
Probably the only thing that’s as perilous as being a spy is reviewing spy thrillers. So many are counting on you to keep secrets; in the case of the reviewer, it’s the author, the publisher and, most especially, the reader. No one wants you to ruin things by disclosing too much. In spying or in reviewing spy novels, revealing “the end” is the very last thing you want to do. So I won’t.
But there’s a problem with taking on A Legacy of Spies ( Viking, 264 pp.,
eeeE), the latest thriller by the revered and seemingly unstoppable 85year- old John le Carré. Your reviewer is obliged to reveal crucial details from his first commercial success, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold.
Granted, that groundbreaking 1963 novel was a blockbuster best seller and then a Richard Burton movie. So, given that A Legacy of Spies is a kind of sequel to Spy, does this notoriously wily and resourceful author have anything new to say about its characters?
A Legacy of Spies is told from the world- weary point of view of Peter Guillam, whom longtime le Carré readers will recognize as the cool, circumspect British secret agent who was the Doctor Watson- esque sidekick and sounding board for George Smiley, the stout, owlish and implacably brilliant spymaster.
Guillam is now a senior citizen living in bucolic retirement tending his ancestral farm in Brittany. When Guillam is beckoned back to his onetime workplace ( in le Carré speak, “The Circus”), he suspects it’s not for a happy reunion.
It isn’t. The younger folks who now run The Circus inform Peter that their outfit is facing “frivolous civil action or private prosecution” by the adult children of both Alec Leamas and Liz Gold, the luckless couple who were shot dead decades before at the Berlin Wall because of a Circus operation with morally questionable motives
and sordid results.
This is the rumpled, hard- drinking, short- tempered Leamas who in The
Spy Who Came in From the Cold was used as bait by his bosses — Smiley included — to ruin an evil East German Stasi chief. Leamas did, except that a) the scheme instead brought down a different, slightly less vile Stasi chief and b) Liz, a librarian with whom he’d fallen in love, was used as an innocent pawn.
Since they can’t seem to find Smiley anywhere ( wait, he’s still alive?), the present- day Circus chiefs compel Peter, as Smiley’s right hand, to go over all the case files to determine the degree to which the spy service was culpable in Leamas and Gold’s deaths. Guillam’s search for illumination through Circus records forces him to face a series of grisly, often heartbreaking consequences.
One wonders at first why le Carré would bother revisiting territory whose possibilities were realized so successfully 50- odd years ago. While
A Legacy of Spies may not occupy the upper tier of le Carré’s body of work, it’s as swift and satisfying a read as the book from which it is derived. Through its beloved characters,
Legacy also revives old, yet still relevant questions about whether the “ends” compelled by the long- moribund Cold War — or any war — were worth the questionable “means.”
But what you all really want to know is whether George Smiley is still alive. You won’t find out here. We need to keep some secrets secret, right?