READING SILVERVIEW BY JOHN LE CARRÉ

 

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. 

Stewart Proctor, a middle-aged English spy-boy, pays a visit to former colleagues, Joan and Philip, now retired and enfeebled. They offer Proctor this opinion, while giving him a lead. Proctor’s fear of a leak and his fret about his wife’s fidelity become more acute. 

Betrayal, or more accurately the possibility of it, is universal. 

Planting these lines in the heart of his last (?) novel, the late John le Carré, broadcasts the futility of the work of spies. And it’s not resignation at the approach of the death-bed that calls up this stark view. It has been present from the very start. 

When asked what he believed in, Alec Leamas, the semi-hero of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, le Carré’s breakthrough novel, said

I believe an eleven bus will take me to Hammersmith. I don't believe it's driven by Father Christmas. 

The world le Carré creates for his spies is a laboratory in which he experiments with human behaviour, particularly with regard to loyalty, love, fidelity, betrayal and futility.

Out of the secret world I once knew, I have tried to make a theatre for the larger worlds we inhabit.

That le Carré drew on his own experiences in the British Foreign and Secret Services is well-documented. That he insisted he was writing stories, a theatre of action and dialogue, is less affirmed. For le Carré, spying is the priceless gold-seam he mined for his literary work. Priceless, because it provides a lens through which to view the most venal and the most admirable of human behaviours. 

The one thing you can bet is that spying is never over. Spying is like the wiring in this building — it's just a question of who takes it over and switches on the lights. It will go on and on and on.

Le Carré later revamped the thriller genre to fit his remarkable ambitions, uploading the form to tackle Big Pharma and money laundering.

Silverview marks a return to post-imperial wars running as proxies between the Big Powers. The war-zones are Bosnia and Gaza, but they are held at a remove. There is never a sense of being on a front-line.

The story is anchored by Julian Lawndsley, whom we meet in Chapter 2, after a teaser opening in which we meet Stewart Proctor, the spy-sleuth whose efforts to uncover a leak and the leaker drive the novel.

Lawndsley, aged 33, drops out of London’s financial rat-race. He has enough money from casino-capitalism to set himself up in a small seaside town in East Anglia, south-east England, where he opens a bookshop. He becomes a rural bourgeois, complete with Land Cruiser. It’s never very clear why he makes such a drastic change in his life. He is, in effect, a slightly older version of the ‘honourable schoolboys’ (public school, of course) who appear in le Carré’s works.

Lawndsley continues trading, but no longer for Mammon, Lakshmi, Juno, Plutus or any of the many Gods of Wealth, but for the Gods of Words and Literature, redolent with the scent of old paper.

That after a period of successfully trading in London’s rapacious financial centre, he would morph into a rural ingénue and fall under the spell of a bantering stranger is hard to take. However, the charm Edward Avon exudes works on Julian and on the reader. Regular readers of le Carré’s novels will recognise the type: plausible, persistent, warm, but close, with all the surface gleam of a lightweight, shimmering over the formidably dark depths of the con man.

An early alert as to who Avon is conning comes when the search for the leak by MI6 plumber-in-charge, Proctor, connects the woman who brought him a message in Chapter 1, with Avon’s moves in the quiet East Anglia seaside town. 

Avon is an emotional Polish émigré, retired from MI6. Proctor is suspicious of Avon the Butterfly, who flits passionately from one cause to another. Such a person is a serious security threat. The reader is unsure as to what is at stake in national or global terms. Perhaps it’s all about saving face, especially when you get found out. As in any boys’ club. 

There is an old spy, in a form of bat cave, not quite going batty, but ill to the point of death, while still active in her den of digital delights. There is an obscure trade in pricey Chinese porcelain as a cover for trading secrets. There is a US/NATO base nearby, illustrating the region’s role as a ground-based aircraft carrier. There is an inconspicuous Peugeot neatly brought in when Proctor tracks down the woman for whom he believes Avon is acting. It appears again in the novel’s denouement, as a bevy of spy-catchers let Avon slip through their nets.

Silverview is chummy, not cold. The characters and the world are tepidly pompous at times. They reek of an old-fashioned maleness. The intelligence establishment is a collection of (mainly) men with malleable convictions sheltered by a pliant bureaucracy, where all human behaviour is tallied as an asset or a vulnerability. Le Carré’s greatest character, George Smiley, had his agency rivals, with internal enemies more bitter and more harmful than the external. Immoral equivalences about the methods used are central to le Carré’s novels. 

There are women, active in the story. The old spy in her den is a pivot. Salma, who was driven out of Bosnia and is now involved in the struggles of the Palestinian people, is the focus of Avon’s patriotic zeal. Joan tells her story. Lily is Avon’s daughter and becomes close to Lawndsley. Her actions launch the novel. Her closing remark sums it up.

And that’s the last secret I’ll keep from you.

Le Carré’s great book, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, is the sort of book, in a pristine, hardback first edition, of course, that Lawndsley would have in the basement of his bookshop, known as Lawndsley’s Better Books. Where are the other, the less good books, sold? The collection is curated by Avon, as a cover for his treason.

I have a secondhand paperback edition of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold I bought in 1964 for stg£1.50. I’ve read it a number of times. I will re-read it again later this year, in homage to le Carré’s great body of work and to mark his passing. I will re-read Nadine Gordimer’s The House Gun in the same fashion. Also something by Elmore Leonard. Maybe Swag or Stick. I read and re-read all of Leonard’s work over a ten year period, until I wrote my crime novel, Oak and Stone.

Reading and re-reading the works of an author is evidence of being a fan. I am a fan of the work of John le Carré. Like Gordimer and Leonard, I mourn his passing.

I mourn Philip Roth too, who wrote on facebook

For all that the world is full of people who go around believing they've got you or your neighbour figured out, there really is no bottom to what is not known. The truth about us is endless. As are the lies.

If writing fiction is a form of ritualised lying, then Roth’s words may be an epitaph for le Carré, who created his espionage theatre in order to affirm a lived futility that will stand the test of the ages, though Silverview may not be re-read as much as his other books. 

What have I learned over the last 50 years? Come to think of it, not much. Just that the morals of the secret world are very like our own.

Silverview, book, John le Carré, Penguin Random House, London, 2021

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READING CONVERSATIONS WITH FRIENDS BY SALLY ROONEY

 

Sally Rooney is the most acclaimed Irish novelist working today. Her books receive extensive favourable reviews. They are translated into many languages and read by thousands of people. She features in leading international news and cultural outlets and her interviews are widely read, circulated and quoted from. 

Following a stellar academic and debating career at Trinity College Dublin, her practice as a novelist and screen writer has grown steadily. She has written three acclaimed novels, one of which, Normal People was successfully adapted for the screen, while another, Conversations with Friends, is set for a screen release in 2022. Her latest novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You? was written while she was a fellow at New York Public Library’s Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. Colson Whitehead was previously a fellow.

The publisher’s blurb on the inside the cover of Faber and Faber’s 2017 edition of Conversations with Friends advises that it can be read either as a romantic comedy or a feminist text. I finished it just before Christmas, as news came of the death of American writer, academic and feminist, bell hooks, who, as well as powerful work on race, gender, class and capitalism, produced a number of telling insights into the nature and practice of love, including

Do not expect to receive the love from someone else you do not give yourself. 

Putting Rooney’s novel down, I was struck by how apt bell hooks’ aphorism was for Frances, who narrates the novel. I didn’t find much love in the novel, though there is desire and sex, joyless most of the time. The word ‘hate’ features throughout, with Frances and her friends hating pretty much everything in their lives and, most particularly, themselves. 

The word ‘nice’ features throughout as well. But the word that has the most force in the book, perhaps even more than ‘hate’, is the word ‘rich’. Everyone is either rich or concerned about who is rich. One character is described as having ‘a moneyed British accent, too rich to be comical’. 

No one laughs.

On page 153, Frances says 

I hate that woman

about the rich British woman who owns the French beach house, where Frances is staying.

At the bottom of page 158, when Frances and Nick are in bed together and all the others are asleep, I read

I laughed and so did he. Although were were laughing about the impossibility of our relationship, it still felt nice. 

Frances lives in three pre-Covid bubbles; firstly, with other Trinity College students, all excelling in their courses, who spend their time competing rather than chatting when they are conversing; secondly, with her separated parents, based in Mayo, in the west of Ireland, comprising a hard-working mother and a drunken wastrel of a father who, though he loves Frances, sometimes neglects to forward the allowance which keeps her going in an uncle’s apartment, twenty minutes walk from college; thirdly, with Melissa and Nick, a married couple, ten years older than Frances, marked as rich, working professionally as an essayist-photographer (Melissa) and an actor (Nick), and Bobbi.

To a person, all of the characters are hard to stick. They exist at various points on an obnoxious scale, running from ‘complete pain’ to ‘tiresome’.

Frances is closest to her fellow-student, Bobbi, who is brilliant and rich, and with whom she shares an on-off relationship as friend and lover.

Once the world of the novel (middle-class Dublin, with a nod to an outlier-land in the West) is established, the action centres on who will develop a sexual relationship with whom. Bobbi with Melissa? Frances with either Melissa or Nick? The heterosexual option is taken with Frances and Nick embarking on an affair, which they strive to keep secret from Melissa and Bobbi, despite enjoying trysts and overnights together under the others’ noses.

There is some sex, but not much action otherwise. There are house-parties and dinner-parties. A trip to France, to a house owned by the woman with the moneyed British accent, Melissa’s patron, is a minor calamity, reminiscent of English mid-twentieth century social-comedies by Waugh and Powell, but without the laughs. 

The following dialogue appears in the Channel 4 tv adaptation of A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell.

Everybody seems to know everybody else.

Well, they do. That’s just the way it is. 

It could be applied to the world of Conversations with Friends, with a shift to 21^st Century Ireland where class divisions are less blatant, though nonetheless present.

The prose is praised as precise, which, at times, means ‘banal’. Chapter 31, the last, opens on page 311 with

The following week my phone rang.

Communication-at-a-distance devices are prominent throughout the book. The friends are best kept apart, except for sex, rows and huffing. Chapter 31 can be read as a précis of the entire novel. It is a dialogue between Frances and Nick, during a hiatus in their affair. The lovers are in different locations in Dublin city centre. Frances is outside a bookshop, beside Trinity College, where she had been browsing new fiction titles. There are a number of possible echoes from Rooney’s own life in the book.

Nick is in a supermarket. He means to contact Melissa, his wife, but mis-dials. Frances phones him back. The conversation is stilted and aching. It rocks back and forward on the see-saw of submission-dominance, which is the engine of all the relationships in the novel. This may be Rooney’s essential offering. 

The chapter ends with a submissive line from Frances

Come and get me, I said.

Or perhaps it’s a line showing dominance, by delivering an order?

Either way, I was left with a sense that the relationship will putter along for a round or two more, until Frances gets involved with lovers her own age, while Nick loses his good-looks and drifts into middle-age as a spent actor. Perhaps he will go on to enjoy a mid-life career on tv as a drink-fuelled police Lathario, continuing, as it were, ‘to have it both ways’.

I took a straw pole of other readers, as I was nearing the end of the book. I wasn’t sure if I was enjoying it. I felt I was the wrong age (I’m a working OAP) and perhaps the wrong gender, though I don’t usually depend on such categories when I read a book. Anyone can read a Sara Paretsky or a Nadine Gordimer.

My sister, an avid reader of fiction and self-described as a middle-aged mother, said that the friends reminded her of people she knew in college, who were so self-absorbed and out of touch with reality that she just couldn’t like them. A mid-fifties doctor, also an avid reader, said she couldn’t stick the book, but her teenage son read it and enjoyed it. The doctor was happy if it was the sex scenes that held him, as his reading habit had lapsed since he finished the Harry Potter series. A twenty-eight year old male podiatrist (I see a number of medics) loved the book and can’t wait for the tv adaptation.

It may be an age thing.

I still couldn’t decide if I enjoyed the book, though I read it to the end. I struggled with the pained dependencies and the strained interactions. The truculence and petulance on all sides annoyed me. No one took pleasure in the bounty they enjoyed. 

The self-hate burns from page 181, as Frances takes one of her periodic reviews of her naked body in a mirror.

For a while I just stood there just looking at myself and feeling my repulsion get deeper and deeper as if I was experimenting to see how much I could feel. Eventually I heard a ringing noise in my bag and went to try and find it.

Frances is distracted (saved?) by a distant friend, this time a missed call from her father. The famous words of Philip Larkin underpin the scenes with Frances’ parents - 

They fuck you up, your mum and dad. 

Her reactions to them produce more truculence and petulance. A telling comparison between the state of Frances’ room in Dublin and her father’s house in Mayo – disarray, uneaten meals, rubbish and unwashed dishes – underlines the continuing generational line.

Frances’ behaviour is tolerated by others because she is described as either ‘talented’ or ‘brilliant’. These words serve the same purpose as the word ‘rich’. They are shields behind which obnoxious behaviours hide. 

Frances is diagnosed for endometriosis, an often debilitating condition of the tissue of the womb. She collapses and is hospitalised. She hates the medics and is convinced they hate her.

By the end of the book I realised I had been reading a coming-of-age dirge. A series of low notes, not even a scale, are struck in the opening chapter, when Frances and Bobbi meet Melissa at a literary event and go back to her house, where Nick serves drinks. The same notes play throughout, without much variation or development. 

Or love. 

I return to the late bel hooks.

Self-love is the foundation of our loving practice. Without it our other efforts to love fail. Giving ourselves love we provide our inner being with the opportunity to have the unconditional love we may have always longed to receive from someone else.

Sally Rooney is illustrating bel hooks’ point, perhaps.

Coda: Sally Rooney is a member of the Irish Writers’ Union, consistent with her stance on solidarity. I am a long-standing member of www.irishwritersunion.org, a community for writers to gain support, advice and encouragement. Writers of any practice and status can be part of a union. If you are a writer, consider joining the writers’ union where you live. 

Conversations with Friends; Sally Rooney, Faber and Faber, London, 2017

A Dance to the Music of Time; Anthony Powell, TV miniseries, 1997

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118297/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0

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