Silverview by John le Carre
This book, published after the great (espionage?) novelist’s death in 2020, is his final novel. According to his novelist son, Nick Cornwell, who downplays his tidying up of the draft text, his father passed on to him a fully formed novel – short and focusing on the same range of concerns that had adorned his most famous books.
Now I don’t think of myself as a le Carre fan. I have never rushed to read one of his novels. Yet, starting with The Spy Who Came In From The Cold which I read in the 1980s at one of the most dangerous periods of the Cold War, and then more recently when I read Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy at the same time as I saw the Oldman film, I have enjoyed his tales of the men and women who live in the shadows protecting their country’s security. Some of my reluctance is to do with the nature of these books … and it’s not because I have a literary snobbishness about thrillers. Mark Kermode says that Jaws is not really about a shark, and similarly le Carre’s books are not really about spying. They are about spies, the type of people drawn to such a discombobulating role, and the corrosive effect on their characters that a job description built on secrets and deceits inevitably causes. It seems to bother me that he always returns to these damaged lives and the unreasonable sacrifices the state imposes on them. There’s always a moment when the agents and the reader are asked to consider whether what they are doing, the damage they cause to themselves and others, makes a difference for the better and has a moral purpose.
Le Carre returns to that theme with added force in this novel, which is unsurprising as the last few years have seen western democracies begin to lose confidence in the superiority of their institutions, systems and values, and the international world order they created. This is the novel of someone looking back. Therefore, his spies are all people of a certain age who look at the world they have tried to shape with a degree of ambiguity.
After a rather perplexing first scene where a bit of espionage business takes place that only makes sense much further into the novel, we are introduced to the everyman, Julian Lawndsley, who will provide some form of outsider perspective on the secret world of the spooks. After a successful career in the city he opens a bookshop in an East Anglian town and becomes embroiled in an unlikely relationship with a Edward Avon, a Polish immigrant who has recast himself as an elderly English eccentric. Lawndsley is intrigued by Avon. We learn that the older man is a retired MI6 agent and Lawndsley’s fascination is in part because he perceives that Avon seems to be performing his life with a hinterland of mystery. Lawndsley not only meets his Avon’s dying wife, Deborah, a high ranking, establishment figure in British intelligence but begins a relationship with his daughter, Lily. And unbeknown to both, he involves himself in a secret transaction in a London cinema, set up by Avon, with a mysterious foreign woman.
At the same time, we are aware of a security issue which may or may not involve Avon that is being investigated by Stewart Proctor, MI6’s head of domestic security. He is a world weary Smiley figure and le Carre uses him to articulate a sense of Britain’s decreasing global influence and the fracturing of the post second world war settlement. Le Carre, a passionate Remainer, allows this likeable character to voice his disillusion with what he perceives as the country’s increasing Little Englander character.
Eventually, the different strands of the novel become entwined and Lawndsley is dragged into Proctor’s investigation. Avon has been a committed communist in his youth before violently rejecting this ideology and building a career running agents with great success for MI6. Now, in his old age, has that passion that has been a feature of Avon’s approach found a different cause to support? Proctor doggedly moves towards an answer to that conundrum.
Despite my reluctance to become a le Carre superfan, there is no doubt that this an entertaining, suitably tense and well written novel. There may be quibbles about the quick and neat wrapping up of the different strands of the story. And, yes, Lawndsley may sometimes seem to serve the needs of the plot rather than behave as an autonomous character. Those are, though, quibbles – there is plenty to enjoy from a master of this genre in this, his final peek into a world that hides in plain sight.