Le Carré’s farewell

Silverview

By John le Carré Viking £20

Julian Lawndsley, notionally the protagonist of John le Carré’s last novel, arrives in a Suffolk seaside town to put aside his past in the City and start a highbrow bookshop.

He is befriended, half against his will, by Edward, a charming Polish émigré (immigrant is the wrong word for him) who is nursing a dying wife, a retired spy. Elsewhere, a senior spy, Stewart Proctor, is investigating a data breach. Everyone is keeping things from everyone else.

As always in le Carré, the characters are cynics with a streak of innocence. They face moral dilemmas, in the strict sense of a choice between options that both involve doing something wrong. It is possible for an act of integrity to be an unforgivable betrayal, and for an act of kindness to be suicidal.

Readers may well suspect a publisher’s swizz in a ‘final’ novel, rescued from a drawer by executors and agents after the author’s death, and who can be more suspicious than a le Carré reader?

Perhaps the gentlest way to put it is to say that Silverview ought not to be anyone’s first encounter with le Carré.

The two plotlines – Julian’s friendship with Edward, and Stewart Proctor’s investigation – converge rather predictably. The central mystery is a little too simple to sustain the attention, and several of the plot’s many twists will provoke no surprise. The writing lacks the intensity and tautness of le Carré best prose. Aspects of the main characters’ motivations – the details of which would be spoilers – are baldly stated without the detail that might make them psychologically credible.

The best parts – the flashbacks to the moments a spy or double agent is recruited – feel familiar from other books by le Carré. He did it compellingly with the East German agent Dieter Frey, a central figure in his first book, the excellent and underrated Call for the Dead (1961).

Even in the last book to be published in his lifetime, Agent Running in the Field (2019), the charming, badminton-playing recruiter is a more fully realised character than anyone in Silverview.

Someone coming to Silverview a le Carré virgin could reasonably wonder what the fuss has been about. But a posthumously published swansong by a major British writer, pre-eminent in a sub-genre he could plausibly be said to have invented, asks to be treated with more respect.

And there is much here to respect. The portraits of the spy as an old man or a dying woman, spending their days reading in the newspaper about the prices of houses they will never live in, have a tragicomic poignancy. The landscape of rural Suffolk is beautifully and succinctly evoked: ‘The one café was a clapboard shack squeezed behind a row of Edwardian beach huts under a blackened sky packed with screaming seabirds.’

Since the early 1990s, it has been asked what le Carré would write without the Cold War to sustain his imagination. Books such as The Night Manager (1993), about arms dealers, and The Constant Gardener (2001), about pharmaceutical money, were a decisive riposte to such critics.

In any case, the question is wrongheaded. The Cold War was le Carré’s setting, not his subject. His subject was the moral character of peacetime espionage. His great gift was to create a world that could satisfy seekers after thrills even while he insisted, persuasively, that the spy’s biggest secret is that much of his job is a bore.

From those unpromising materials, he assembled a corpus that raises serious questions still worth asking. Does the spy’s honour stand and fall with the morality or ideology of the government he spies for? Can one be on the side of the angels and yet do the devil’s work? Like a serious version of the Nazi in the David Mitchell and Robert Webb comic sketch wondering, ‘Are we the baddies?’, his characters – George Smiley only the most celebrated – are always asking the question: are they, as they hope, tragic heroes, or, as they fear, tragic villains?

Either way, of course, they are tragic figures, who will take their uncertainties to their graves. In Silverview, the central plotline involves a cybersecurity breach, and in its predecessor a central character ranted at some length about Britain’s exit from the EU. But the impression of up-to-the-minuteness is a distraction.

The questions that concerned le Carré have always been the oldest ones.