The great spy novelist’s final full-length book is a precision-tooled cat and mouse chase from a bookshop in East Anglia to the old eastern bloc
While it’s perhaps true that the posthumous publications of the recently deceased have a tendency to be more or less reviewer-proof, the good news is that Silverview, the 26th novel from John le Carré, who died last December, aged 89, offers plenty to enjoy and admire. Crisp prose, a precision-tooled plot, the heady sense of an inside track on a shadowy world… all his usual pleasures are here, although it can’t be ignored that they’re aren’t always quite in sync.
A standalone spy story, it unfolds in an East Anglian seaside town, seemingly in the late 00s (it’s not specified), where Julian, 33, tired of life working in the City, has pitched up, capital-rich, to open a bookshop. He’s barely up and running when he’s buttonholed by a regular customer, or at least browser, by the name of Edward, a mysterious, homburg-clad retiree who calls himself “one of life’s odd-job men” and says he once knew Julian’s father, a disgraced vicar who left his family mired in debt.
When Julian lays hands on an old letter postmarked in Belgrade and received by his father, who despite his rackety lifestyle seems to have kept a good archive, Edward’s surprising story seems to check out. “But what on earth were you doing in Belgrade?” Julian asks: “You must have been sitting there in the middle of the Bosnian war…” Intrigue grows and before long we have more than one reason to question why Edward should be asking Julian to ferry a sealed envelope to a woman in London.
Only by turning Julian into a self-diagnosing bundle of backstory does le Carré manage – just about – to suspend our disbelief on his readiness to go along with this request; not having been able to afford university, Julian suffers a low-lying impostor syndrome (he’s grateful for Edward’s suggestion that he ought to stock WG Sebald, whom he’s never heard of) and recognises, too, his subconscious desire for a father figure.
But this is a novel of two halves. The narration alternates between Julian and Proctor, a middle-aged British spook tasked, à la Smiley, with sniffing out the source of a leak. If the book’s emotional clout rests largely on Julian’s thread, its most gripping moments emerge from Proctor’s, not least a long central scene during which, tracing a lead, he interviews a husband and wife spy duo in Somerset.
If that doesn’t sound especially exciting, it’s testimony to le Carré’s undimmed gifts that the scene, essentially a hefty info-dumping session designed to fill in the blanks, unfolds with pace and maximal tension. Some of the enjoyment, to be sure, lies in the evergreen frisson of the lingo – all those “treffs” and “joes”, not to mention le Carré’s handle on 20th-century geopolitical history. But there’s also fun to be had from his peculiarly mordant brand of workplace comedy, with a resigned drollery to his portrait of ageing empty nesters for ever chained to the job.
All the same, you can’t help notice that the story’s more persuasive parts involve the cold war machinations of le Carré’s salad days; as the plot charts a mazy constellation between communist Poland, the breakup of Yugoslavia and the struggle in Palestine, the story grows foggier, even as its ambivalence about the motives and consequences of British foreign policy emerges loud and clear.
Ultimately, Silverview unspools as a cat-and-mouse chase narrative, with the novel’s dual perspective putting us in the control room, one step ahead of the characters, able to see the bigger picture, albeit heavily pixellated until the final pages. Such are the layers of irony that it’s easy to forget that the sting in the tale was already delivered upfront, in an enigmatic opening shorn of vital context. Suffice to say that, in the typically male world of le Carré’s fiction, the defining act this time turns on the vexed filial loyalty between a mother and daughter.
If we’re left dangling by the end, there’s an added tease of sorts in the novel’s billing as le Carré’s “last complete masterwork” – on the strong side, no doubt, but a tag that nonetheless holds out the prospect of rougher treasures still awaiting the light.