A Legacy of Spies

John le Carre

Viking, £20

Review by Alan Taylor

WE were first introduced to Mr George Smiley in 1961. Back then, Ian Fleming was still churning out his Bond pot boilers. Smiley could hardly have been more different from double-oh-seven. He did not drink martinis or have nubile women launch themselves at him. In Call for the Dead, in which Smiley made his debut, he is presented in much the same unprepossessing manner as Agatha Christie did with Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple.

He is short of stature, somewhat overweight, bespectacled and behatted, and decidedly middle-aged. An everyman with his best days seemingly in the past, he is the kind of person who in a city such as London merges with the crowd. He does not want to be noticed and nor does he expect to be. He could walk into a bar and no heads would turn. His tipple of choice is whisky, he reads Goethe in the original German, and is cuckolded by his wife, Ann. By and large, he is a loner and doubtless lonely, though that is not something to which he would ever admit.

In the hedonistic 1960s, the old days of “inspired amateurism” among spies were long gone. Le Carre – who had himself been a spy – took as his inspiration for Smiley Somerset Maugham’s Ashenden, who first appeared in 1928. Maugham, said le Carre, “was the first person to write about espionage in a mood of disenchantment and [with an] almost prosaic reality.” Ashenden, like his creator, is a celebrated writer who, when war breaks out in 1914, has the perfect cover for living in Switzerland. Multilingual and at home in various European countries, he is sent by the Secret Service to Lucerne, supposedly to finish writing a play.

“There’s just one thing I think you need to know before you take on this job. And don’t forget it,” says “the colonel”, Ashenden’s recruiter. “If you do well you’ll get no thanks and if you get into trouble you’ll get no help. Does that suit you?” “Perfectly,” replies Ashenden,

It is on this basis that all subsequent spies in fiction operate. Theirs is a job that they cannot, dare not, bring home. They must trust in no one and suspect everyone. They live on the edge, always wary of exposure, of their carefully-cultivated cover being blown. For a spy lives or dies by his ability to assimilate and integrate.

Smiley is thus an elusive, unassuming character whom his adversaries, including the equally furtive and cunning Karla, underestimate at their peril. His silences are as potent as Bond’s karate chops. Smiley doesn’t need the latest gadgets to practise his craft. He is all brain and no brawn. In the Circus, as the Secret Intelligence Service is known, he is a legend. “George Smiley. The best operator we ever had,” as one of his successors remarks in A Legacy of Spies. “The conscience of the Circus. Its Hamlet, as some called him, perhaps not fairly. What a man.”

In le Carre’s new novel, his 22nd, which is set pretty much in the present time, Smiley is in retirement, as he so often has been in previous novels. By my estimation this would put him at near or over a 100 years old though I may be a decade or two out. Also putting his feet up is Peter Guillam who, in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, helped Smiley reveal the treachery of Bill Haydon, Ann’s cynical seducer.

Here, Guillam is the tale teller. In his anecdotage, he is living on a farmstead in France, home of his forebears. “In Les Deux Eglises,” he says, “as in all of Brittany, we are Catholic or we are nothing. I am nothing.” He has a tenant, a much younger woman, Catherine, who has a nine-year-old daughter, Isabelle, who ignores him. “Eye contact bothers her.” Out of the blue, Guillam receives a letter from a “business affairs manager at your old firm” calling him to London where he is to be quizzed about a “matter” in which he had played “a significant role some years back”. Attendance, it is politely but firmly pointed out, is not optional. If he doesn’t turn up he can say cheerio to his pension.

Scene setting has always been one of le Carre’s great fortes. He has a relish of detail and rejoices in describing the seemingly unremarkable: the janitor wishing you a good morning, the cranky lifts, the labyrinth of corridors, the “worm-eaten wooden staircases, chipped fire extinguishers, fish-eye mirrors and the stinks of stale fag smoke, Nescafe and deodorant”. Spying, it is clear, is the most unglamorous of professions.

Soon, however, le Carre returns us to the world and the argot he invented in The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, his third novel, which deservedly became an international bestseller. Set shortly after the completion of the Berlin Wall, when tension between East and West was at its most febrile, it featured Alec Leamas, a hard-drinking British spy who is persuaded to come “in from the cold” and pose as a defector. His target is Hans-Dieter Mundt, aka “Blondie”, an assassin working for the East German Secret Service.

As readers of that novel and the movie of the same name – in which Richard Burton starred as Leamas – know, all did not go according to plan. Not only was Leamas killed as he attempted to scale the Wall but so too was his lover, Liz Gold. It is their deaths that the Circus is retrospectively investigating. Documents have been destroyed or doctored or disappeared, apparently at Smiley’s instigation. Whereas in the past the ends justified the means this is now longer the case. Actions have consequences, protocols must be adhered to, ‘i’s must be dotted and ‘t’s crossed.

Guillam is in the dock and interrogated over the course of several days over the failure of Operation Windfall. How did it all go wrong? Whose responsibility was it? Was it cock-up or conspiracy? Leamas’s son, Christoph, is not alone in seeking answers, in lieu of which he is happy to accept a handsome pay-off. Semi-automatic pistol in hand, he rages at Guillam: “You’re all sick. All you spies. You’re not the cure, you’re the f***ing disease. Jerk-off artists, playing jerk-off games, thinking you’re the biggest f***ing wise guys in the universe. You’re nothings, hear me! You live in the f***ing dark because you can’t handle the f***ing daylight.”

Le Carre may be on familiar territory but his writing has lost none of its pith or potency. At the age of 85, he is able to look back with a jaundiced eye on an era when espionage was in its unsophisticated infancy. When the Berlin Wall fell and the Cold War melted it was assumed that he would want for a subject. That did not happen. His oeuvre has its turkeys but overall he has shown that his powers of invention have kept up with the pace of an ever-changing and complex world. I am not alone in thinking that A Perfect Spy is one of the great, postwar English novels.

There is no such thing, of course, as a perfect spy. All spies are flawed, as are all human beings. Reading A Legacy of Spies is like attending a reunion party at which ghosts – benign and malign – from your past come back to haunt you. We are reminded that Karla, having “come over to the West”, shot himself and that Jim Prideaux, who got a bullet in the back in Czechoslovakia became a school teacher and a good one at that. And there, always there, is noble Smiley, rarely smiling, inhabiting his spartan flat atop a hillside overlooking the city and listening, as Guillam observes, “like nobody I ever knew”. We may have seen the last of him; if so may he go on his way rejoicing.