A LEGACY OF SPIES by John le Carré Viking, £20
James Bond is violent and sexy, inhabiting a world of intrigue and glamour, while George Smiley is more meditative, quiet and inscrutable, trying to uphold British values in a seedy and untrustworthy world.
Together they have built up a view of the world of spies which we are constantly assured is completely different from the dreary lives of real spies but we are happy to ignore that because Bond and Smiley give us compulsively exciting tales.
Now, 27 years after his last outing in The Secret Pilgrim, Smiley is back, albeit only in a very brief cameo right at the end of the tale but we are immediately transported back to the world of The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and Smiley’s People with a new, characteristically gripping tale from the master.
Le Carré is now 85 but his writing is as crisp as ever. The central character is Peter Guillam, who appeared as Smiley’s protégé and righthand man in previous books. Dragged out of retirement to answer questions about the past, Guillam finds the Circus has changed.
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Instead of the spymasters of old, motivated solely by loyalty and British values, the new bunch are bureaucrats and pen-pushers, panicking at a lawsuit which the son of a former agent is bringing against them. The intrigue concerns a Cold War operation called Windfall that was so top secret Smiley and Guillam were practically the only people who knew of its existence.
Guillam has been summoned to London to spill the beans about the death of the agent whose son is now threatening to take the Circus to court in a manner that would expose all their secrecy to public scrutiny. How much should Guillam tell them? Who can he trust?
Which of the women he encountered in the course of his clandestine activities did he sleep with and should he admit to it? These factors play their part in another tale of intrigue which will slip effortlessly into its place in the Smiley canon.
The plot is even more convoluted as it jumps between three or more subtly different versions of the Windfall story: the tale Guillam is prepared to reveal to his interrogators, the tale that can be reconstructed from secret documents and the real story, some of which even Guillam does not know.
When I first encountered le Carré’s world I felt it did not matter if I could not fathom what was going on because I was totally confi dent Alec Guinness, playing Smiley, had it all under control.
The same was true of Gary Oldman in the 2011 remake of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Now, with even Guillam sometimes a little mystifi ed by it all, that reassurance is absent. Even when Guillam tracks down Smiley at the end of the book, I had some doubts.
When Smiley fi rst appeared, le Carré dated his recruitment to the secret service as 1928. Later he reconsidered this and moved the date to 1937 but that still places his age at over 100.
Can he really be relied on to sort out problems as he promises? Despite its convolutions, this is a jolly good Cold War tome.