Some Thoughts on John le Carré’s Silverview

The truth is, old boy … we didn’t do much to alter the course of human history, did we? As one old spy to another, I reckon I’d have been more use running a boys’ club.

 

There are a lot of reasons to be sad about the passing of John le Carré, and let’s be honest, the least of them should be that we won’t get any more of his novels. There’s more important stuff going on. He’d already given us a cool twenty odd novels, a good three or four of them inarguably masterpiece quality. How many masterpieces have you written? The man didn’t owe us anything anyway and he definitely didn’t owe us more. 

Well, selfish as it is, le Carré was going through something of a resurgence towards the end of his life, in this reviewer’s humble opinion. Now, I haven’t read everything by him, but having read the Karla trilogy, I don’t think you could look at A Most Wanted Man, Our Kind of Traitor, A Delicate Truth, and conclude that le Carré was working at his previous best. Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot to admire about his choices in the ‘90s and ‘00s. He didn’t want to become a tribute act for himself and he’s never written historical fiction. With the fall of the wall, he had to find new global crises to write about, and I am sorry, but the dirtiness of international banking, or New Labour’s moral grayness, just isn’t as interesting a subject as The Cold War. How lucky for all involved that global tensions have been rising, then, because A Legacy of Spies and Agent Running in the Field were both excellent and had me really looking forward to his next. 

Like I said, he didn’t owe us anything, and the last thing we should be worried about is how good his most recent novels have been. That said, I am glad that his son, Nick Harkaway, agreed that in the event of his father dying while working on a novel, he would step in and finish it off. Harkaway is an accomplished writer of fiction in his own right, but those are big shoes to fill, and he says as much in his postscript. Luckily, Silverview, the last le Carré novel, was about 95% done and just needed polishing. 

Silverview has the most le Carré of le Carré plots; trying to track down and catch a double agent. You cannot complain about him coming back to this. It’s a plot that’s always going to be interesting, even if this one is more fatalistic than usual. We get two perspectives on the hunt. A seasoned counterintelligence operative doing the standard le Carré thing of having jargon heavy conversations in drawing rooms, and the emotional thread, a wide eyed innocent who is draw into this clandestine world and provides us with what I feel is a pretty fresh look at all this stuff le Carré has made us so used to. Look, I love this stuff. This is real nectar.

I did see someone mention that in this last novel he was circling back around to The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, and I think the comparison is apt. Betrayal of family and country are prime themes, I mean even more than usual in one of these novels. You come to know most everything even if it’s not confirmed. You realise what the opening scene was about. You know who the betrayer is. You find out why. The only thing you don’t know is whether he’ll get back over the wall or not, at the end. 

And it all takes place in a sleepy seaside town brought lovingly to life by le Carré’s writing. He did always write beautifully when he wrote of England, even when he was writing about the grotty parts. 

I don’t want to spoil too much. To be honest, I’d probably have to re-read it to get the real intricacies of the plot, which isn’t a mark against his clarity as a writer, and hopefully isn’t a mark against my reading comprehension skills; I would argue it is a mark of a great writer producing one last really great, dense work, that’ll reward close attention and re-reading the way his characters obsess over stories and evidence. It was his way of bringing us along, and bloody hell do I miss him.