12 S UNDAY, NOVEMBER 21, 2021
SIXTY YEARS AGO, David John Moore Corn-
well, a young officer in the British secret
services, published his first novel. Because
his employers wouldn’t let him publish un-
der his own name, he chose the French-
sounding surname le Carré, for “a bit of
swank.”
Two books later, his career took flight
with the best-selling “The Spy Who Came
In From the Cold,” a draft of which he wrote
in only five weeks. It remade the spy novel.
A John le Carré novel invariably features a
tone of knowingness, a labyrinthine plot
that demands close attention and is paid
out meticulously, and an intricate gambit
of ultimate futility. There’s typically a dis-
graced father (his own father was a con
man), frequently an unfaithful wife. It is
written with elegance and often pungency,
the pitch-perfect dialogue ranging from
the waggishly epigrammatic to the bluntly
outraged. Le Carré, who died last year, also
developed his own colorful glossary of spy
terms — pavement artists, babysitters,
lamplighters and, most famously, moles.
Had he retired 40 years ago, after his
Karla trilogy (“Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy,”
“The Honourable Schoolboy” and “Smi-
ley’s People”) was completed in 1979, he
would have been regarded as one of our
greatest spy novelists. After “A Perfect
Spy” (1986), he was often considered one
of the finest novelists, period, since World
War II. It’s not that he “transcended the
genre,” as the tired saying goes; it’s that he
elevated the level of play. The great Gra-
ham Greene didn’t quite take his own spy
novels seriously, labeling them “entertain-
ments,” but le Carré revamped the genre to
fit his considerable ambitions. “Out of the
secret world I once knew,” he wrote, “I
have tried to make a theater for the larger
worlds we inhabit.”
In “Silverview,” his 26th and apparently
last completed novel, we meet Julian
Lawndsley, who at 33 has dropped out of
the financial rat race in London to open a
bookstore in a small seaside town in East
Anglia. “I have forsaken the glitter of gold
for the scent of old paper,” he declares —
and his Porsche for a Land Cruiser.
Soon after Julian opens his shop, a
stranger comes in, not to buy books but to
banter. He’s a peculiar man in a Homburg
hat, carrying a furled umbrella. “I am a
British mongrel,” he announces in his
posh-sounding voice, “retired, a former ac-
ademic of no merit and one of life’s odd-job
men.” He urges Julian to open a section of
the store to be called “the Republic of Liter-
ature,” which would offer only the classics,
the thoughts of all the great thinkers and
authors. W.G. Sebald’s “The Rings of Sat-
urn” is especially close to his heart. (Per-
haps le Carré was himself captivated by
Sebald’s gift for connecting ordinary East
Anglian households to matters of immense
consequence.)
This stranger is Edward Avon, a Polish
émigré who is soon revealed to be a retired
agent for MI6, the British foreign intelli-
gence service. Edward claims to haveknown at school Julian’s father, who had a
prolific sex life, ran up debts and offered
accounts of himself that “did not always
stand the test of accuracy.” Would Ed-
ward’s?
At home, Edward wears a maroon smok-
ing jacket and matching evening slippers
with gold braid. “Julian, my dear fellow!”
he exclaims. “How perfectly delightful.”
Like any good agent, he’s adept at shape-
shifting. Edward is “a lot of people,” Julian
reflects. Julian is fascinated by Edward’s
different identities and “couldn’t help won-
dering how much was performance, how
much the real man.” Le Carré favors the
close third person, but every point of view
has just enough opacity that readers can
never be sure they’ve seen everything.
Meanwhile, Edward is being investi-
gated by the service’s head of domestic se-curity, Stewart Proctor, “our chief sniffer-
dog,” who suspects his own wife of being
unfaithful. The Proctors are an upper-class
family (which would “never have de-
scribed itself as upper class”), who “knew
from birth that the spiritual sanctum of
Britain’s ruling classes was its secret serv-
ices.” Stewart is suspicious of anyone like
Edward who harbors a “consuming pas-
sion”; anyone who demonstrates an abso-
lute commitment to anything is a grave se-
curity threat. Soon Proctor is on a collision
course with Edward, with Julian caught up
in the machinations of two clever spymas-
ters.
In le Carré’s world of cunning strata-
gems, the question is not only whether
they will work but whether they will be
worth it. At one point, Proctor pays a visit
to Edward’s former handlers, Joan and
Philip, now retired and enfeebled but once
the golden couple of MI6. The old spies are
portrayed as decent people who, at the end
of their lives, realize their life’s work has
accomplished nothing. “We didn’t do much
to alter the course of human history, did
we?” Philip tells Stewart ruefully. “As one
old spy to another, I reckon I’d have been
more use running a boys’ club.” This notion
that a small step separates a futile life from
an effectual one is another le Carré pre-
occupation.
Typically, le Carré’s narrative warheads
are lodged in his endings. The novels pa-
tiently build up to a final explosion, leaving
readers with a greater sense of dismay
than of triumph. Endings, for le Carré,
were reckonings. This slender volume
( just over 200 pages) does conclude,
rather abruptly, but it lacks what le Carré
has taught us to expect of an ending. You
can wonder, indeed, whether he had quitegot around to finishing the book. He
started writing it about a decade ago, then
put it aside to write his memoir, “The Pi-
geon Tunnel.” And although “Silverview”
is said to be his last completed novel, it’s
evidently not the last one he was working
on. In an afterword, the author’s son Nick
Cornwell (who usually writes as Nick
Harkaway) speculates that his father
balked at publishing “Silverview” because
it “does something that no other le Carré
novel ever has. It shows a service frag-
mented: filled with its own political fac-
tions, not always kind to those it should
cherish... and ultimately not sure, any
more, that it can justify itself.”
In fact, le Carré’s greatest character,
George Smiley, had his agency rivals —
factionalism is nothing new — and the
moral equivalence not of causes but of
methods was a central theme in le Carré’s
oeuvre. The protagonist of “The Spy Who
Came In From the Cold,” Alec Leamas, is a
burnout case who sees spies, whether al-
lies or adversaries, as just “a squalid pro-
cession of vain fools, traitors too.” Give a
con man convictions and a bureaucracy, le
Carré seemed to suggest, and you’d get the
intelligence establishment, with every hu-
man relationship gauged as either an asset
or a vulnerability.
That’s why le Carré’s greatest interroga-
tion scenes are always of self-interroga-
tion. And if “Silverview” feels less than
fully executed, its sense of moral ambiva-
lence remains exquisitely calibrated. Be-
sides, novelists of le Carré’s stature are not
diminished by their lesser efforts; Henry
James closed his career not with his mas-
terly “The Golden Bowl” but the wanly
schematic “The Outcry.” The Republic of
Literature has room for both. 0To Catch a Spy
A retired agent is under investigation in John le Carré’s last completed novel.
By JOSEPH FINDER
SILVERVIEW
By John le Carré
215 pp. Viking. $28.
BRIAN STAUFFER
Give a con man convictions, le
Carré seemed to suggest, and
you’d get the intelligence
establishment.JOSEPH FINDERis the author of 16 suspense
novels, most recently “House on Fire.”