A Legacy of Spies

Starred review from July 17, 2017
Last seen in 1991’s The Secret Pilgrim, George Smiley returns in this stunning spy novel from MWA Grand Master le Carré, though it’s Peter Guillam, Smiley’s devoted assistant from MI6, who takes center stage. Guillam, who’s retired to Brittany, is summoned to London to answer questions about allegations of malfeasance in Windfall, an old operation involving a particularly enthusiastic East German source who needed exfiltration to England. The case has reared up because a couple of descendants of Cold War casualties are threatening an expensive and public legal action against the British government. The story of Windfall comes out through interrogations, old files, and Guillam’s memories. The result is both a riveting reprise of the Smiley novels and a new articulation of le Carré’s theme: spying is as morally bankrupt as the ideologies it serves. Readers familiar with le Carré will recognize allusions everywhere; those who aren’t won’t be left out, given the power of the storytelling and le Carré’s inimitable prose. He can convey a character in a sentence, land an emotional insight in the smallest phrase—and demolish an ideology in a paragraph. Agent: Jonny Geller, Curtis Brown.

July 1, 2017
After having turned from his peerless chronicles of George Smiley and his fellow spies to the tale of his own life (The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life, 2016), le Carre returns to put yet another spin on the events of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963).Looking back from half a century later, Peter (ne Pierre) Guillam resolves to tell the truth of how his senior colleague Alec Leamas met his death along with his lover, Elizabeth Gold, that fatal day at the Berlin Wall. More than an old man's memories prompt this valediction. When Peter, long retired from the British Intelligence Service to a Brittany farm, is summoned back to London, the Service's chief lawyer, a man who introduces himself only as Bunny, informs him that Christoph Leamas, Alec's bastard son, has discovered Liz's daughter, Karen, and made common cause with her, threatening a lawsuit against the Service and correspondingly ruinous publicity for leading their parents to their deaths through misdirection, falsehood, and professional betrayal. Many of the documents that might help explain the circumstances, Bunny notes with asperity, have gone suspiciously missing; what troubles Peter even more is the documents that survive, which root Alec's and Liz's fatal shootings not only in Alec's long-known battle of wits against Stasi Deputy Head Hans Dieter Mundt, but also Alec's well-concealed and institutionally unauthorized attempt to smuggle out of East Germany his most recent supplier of information, Doris Gamp (codenamed Tulip), the put-upon assistant to senior Stasi official Dr. Emmanuel Rapp who's been passing on photographs of classified documents her husband, ambitious Stasi functionary Lothar Quinz, has brought home. Any reader who knows le Carre's earlier work, and quite a few who don't, will assume that any attempt to second-guess the mandarins of the Service will backfire. The miracle is that the author can revisit his best-known story and discover layer upon layer of fresh deception beneath it.

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April 1, 2017

Spymaster le Carre returns with his greatest creation, George Smiley, though we don't yet know whether Smiley will appear in the present (he'd be an old guy) or only in memory. Here, Smiley's loyal ally Peter Guillam is yanked out of retirement, with the current government asking pointed questions about the Cold War activities of Smiley, Guillam, and their circle. Smiley last appeared in 1991's The Secret Pilgrim.

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