John le Carré

John le Carré is too fascinated by watching history repeat itself to stop weighing in, said in The New York Times. Now 85, onetime British Secret Service officer David Cornwell could be forgiven if he retired the le Carré pseudonym and quit his second career after 56 years of producing spy novels that read as high literature. But espionage still stirs his imagination. His latest book, A Legacy of Spies, even brings back spymaster George Smiley, who, when he last appeared in a le Carré novel, in 1990, was lamenting that he and his fellow spooks had had little effect on the Cold War. The author had come to wonder what such operatives would make of their efforts now. “I wanted to take the characters,” he says, “and place the whole story in this vacuum in which we live at the moment, which is occupied by really threatening forces.”

But A Legacy of Spies is a striking departure, because it presents the Cold War–era MI6 as “unquestionably the good guys,” said

in The Atlantic. While Smiley slips into a supporting role, his former protégé Peter Guillam becomes embroiled in a lawsuit brought by the families of two field agents killed during an operation featured in 1963’s The Spy Who Came In From the Cold. The spies under fire for past deeds appear notably more heroic than they did in that distant era when their creator gave them life. “What marks the Cold War period is that at least we had a defining mission,” he says now. “At the moment, our mission is survival. The thing that joins the West is fear. And everything else is up for grabs.”