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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