A Legacy of Spies (George Smiley Series)
John le Carre, 2017
Penguin Publishing
272 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780735225114
Summary
The undisputed master returns with a riveting new book—his first Smiley novel in more than twenty-five years
Peter Guillam, staunch colleague and disciple of George Smiley of the British Secret Service, otherwise known as the Circus, is living out his old age on the family farmstead on the south coast of Brittany when a letter from his old Service summons him to London.
The reason? His Cold War past has come back to claim him.
Intelligence operations that were once the toast of secret London, and involved such characters as Alec Leamas, Jim Prideaux, George Smiley and Peter Guillam himself, are to be scrutinized by a generation with no memory of the Cold War and no patience with its justifications.
Interweaving past with present so that each may tell its own intense story, John le Carre has spun a single plot as ingenious and thrilling as the two predecessors on which it looks back: The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.
In a story resonating with tension, humor and moral ambivalence, le Carre and his narrator Peter Guillam present the reader with a legacy of unforgettable characters old and new. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—October 19, 1931
• Where—Dorset, England, UK
• Education—B.A., Oxford University
• Awards—Somerset Maugham Award
• Currently—lives in St Buryan, Cornwall. England
David John Moore Cornwell was born to Richard Thomas Archibald (Ronnie) Cornwell (1906–75) and Olive (Glassy) Cornwell, in Poole, Dorset, England. He was the second son to the marriage, the first his brother Tony, two years his elder, now a retired advertising executive; his younger half-sister is the actress Charlotte Cornwell; and Rupert Cornwell, a former Independent newspaper Washington bureau chief, is a younger half-brother.
John le Carre said he did not know his mother, who abandoned him when he was five years old, until their re-acquaintance when he was 21 years old. His relationship with his father was difficult, given that the man had been jailed for insurance fraud, was an associate of the Kray twins (among the foremost criminals in London) and was continually in debt. A 2009 UK Guardian-Observer profile recounts:
The family swung between great affluence and bankruptcy. The boys were often called upon to help their father evade creditors during an upbringing that le Carre has referred to as "clandestine survival." He and his brother, he has said, "were conspirators from quite an early age...."
His troubled relationships with each of his parents proved instrumental in shaping his fiction. Duplicitous father figures crop up regularly in his work and, more obviously, the question of trust is at the centre of le Carre's fictional world.
The character Rick Pym, the scheming con-man father of protagonist Magnus Pym in his later novel A Perfect Spy (1986), was based on Ronnie. When Ronnie died in 1975, le Carre paid for a memorial funeral service but did not attend.
Education
Cornwell's formal schooling began at St Andrew's Preparatory School, near Pangbourne, Berkshire, then continued at Sherborne School; he proved unhappy with the typically harsh English public school regime of the time and disliked his disciplinarian housemaster so withdrew.
From 1948 to 1949, he studied foreign languages at the University of Bern in Switzerland. In 1950 he joined the Intelligence Corps of the British Army garrisoned in Austria, working as a German language interrogator of people who crossed the Iron Curtain to the West. In 1952, he returned to England to study at Lincoln College, Oxford, where he worked covertly for the British Security Service, MI5, spying upon far-left groups for information about possible Soviet agents.
When Ronnie declared bankruptcy in 1954, Cornwell quit Oxford to teach at a boys' preparatory school; however, a year later, he returned to Oxford and graduated, in 1956, with a First Class Honours Bachelor of Arts degree.
Intelligence work
He then taught French and German at Eton College for two years, afterwards becoming an MI5 officer in 1958; he ran agents, conducted interrogations, tapped telephone lines, and effected break-ins. Encouraged by Lord Clanmorris (who wrote crime novels as"John Bingham"), and while an active MI5 officer, Cornwell began writing Call for the Dead (1961), his first novel. Lord Clanmorris was the inspiration behind spymaster George Smiley.
In 1960, Cornwell transferred to MI6, the foreign-intelligence service, and worked as a Second Secretary cover in the British Embassy at Bonn; he later was transferred to Hamburg as a political consul. There, he wrote the detective story A Murder of Quality (1962) and The Spy Who Came In from the Cold (1963), as "John le Carre" (i,e., John the Square, in French), a pseudonym required because Foreign Office officers were forbidden to publish in their own names.
Cornwell left the service in 1964 to work full-time as a novelist, as his intelligence officer career was ended by the betrayal to the KGB of numberous British agents and their covers by Kim Philby, a British double agent (of the Cambridge Five). Le Carre depicts and analyses Philby as the upper-class traitor, code-named Gerald by the KGB, the mole George Smiley hunts in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974). Credited by his pen name, Cornwell appears as an extra in the 2011 film version of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, among the guests at the Christmas party seen in several flashback scenes.
In 1964 le Carre won the Somerset Maugham Award, established to enable British writers younger than thirty-five to enrich their writing by spending time abroad.
Personal life and recognition
In 1954, Cornwell married Alison Ann Veronica Sharp; they had three sons—Simon, Stephen and Timothy. The couple was divorced in 1971. The following year, Cornwell married Valerie Jane Eustace, a book editor with Hodder & Stoughton. They have one son, Nicholas, who writes as Nick Harkaway. Le Carre has resided in St Buryan, Cornwall, UK, for more than forty years where he owns a mile of cliff close to Land's End.
In 1998, he was awarded an Honorary Degree (Doctor of Letters) from the University of Bath. In 2012, he was awarded the Degree of Doctor of Letters, honoris causa by the University of Oxford.
Writing style
Stylistically, the first two novels—Call for the Dead (1961) and A Murder of Quality (1962)—are mystery fiction in which the hero George Smiley (of the SIS, the "Circus") resolves the riddles of the deaths investigated; the motives are more personal than political.
The spy novel œuvre of John le Carre stands in contrast to the physical action and moral certainty of the James Bond thriller established by Ian Fleming in the mid- nineteen-fifties; the le Carre Cold War features unheroic political functionaries aware of the moral ambiguity of their work, and engaged in psychological more than physical drama. They experience little of the violence typically encountered in action thrillers, and have very little recourse to gadgets. Much of the conflict they are involved in is internal, rather than external and visible.
Unlike the moral certainty of Fleming's British Secret Service adventures, le Carre's Circus spy stories are morally complex, and inform the reader of the fallibility of Western democracy and of the secret services protecting it, often implying the possibility of East-West moral equivalence.
A Perfect Spy (1986), chronicling the boyhood moral education of Magnus Pym, as it leads to his becoming a spy, is the author's most autobiographic espionage novel—especially the boy's very close relationship with his con man father. Biographer Lynndianne Beene describes the novelist's own father, Richard Cornwell, as "an epic con man of little education, immense charm, extravagant tastes, but no social values"; le Carre reflected that "writing A Perfect Spy is probably what a very wise shrink would have advised."
Most of le Carre's novels are spy stories set amidst the Cold War (1945–91); a notable exception is The Naïve and Sentimental Lover (1971), an autobiographical, stylistically uneven, mainstream novel of a man's post-marital existential crisis. Another exception from the East-West conflict is The Little Drummer Girl that uses the Israel-Palestinian conflict.
With the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989, le Carre's œuvre shifted to portrayal of the new multilateral world. For example The Night Manager, his first completely post-Cold-War novel, deals with drug and arms smuggling in the murky world of Latin America drug lords, shady Caribbean banking entities, and look-the-other-way western officials.
As a journalist, he wrote The Unbearable Peace (1991), a non-fiction account of Brigadier Jean-Louis Jeanmaire (1911–92), the Swiss Army officer who spied for the USSR from 1962 until 1975. In 2009, he donated the short story "The King Who Never Spoke" to the Oxfam Ox-Tales project.
Political views
In January 2003 The Times (London) published le Carre's article "The United States Has Gone Mad," which condemned the approaching Iraq War. He observed in this essay, "How Bush and his junta succeeded in deflecting America's anger, from Bin Laden to Saddam Hussein, is one of the great public relations conjuring tricks of history." He contributed the same article to a volume of political essays entitled Not One More Death. The book is highly critical of the war in Iraq. Le Carre's contribution was entitled "Art, truth and politics." Other contributors include Harold Pinter, Richard Dawkins, Michel Faber, Brian Eno, and Haifa Zangana. (Adapted from Wikipedia, retrieved 5/8/2012.)
Book Reviews
If not a capstone to John le Carre’s remarkable career (like Philip Roth, le Carre keeps soldiering on), A Legacy of Spies surely puts a finishing touch to his Soviet era spy vs. spy oeuvre. His new book has the feel of an elegy for that earlier time: rather than triumphal — the West, after all, won the Cold War — Legacy is melancholic. It mourns not the glory days but the ugly choices, the betrayals on all fronts, that resulted in the sacrifice of colleagues. And it asks the imponderable: were those sacrifices worth the price? Does patriotism trump personal loyalty and affection? READ MORE…
Molly Lundquist - LitLovers
The good news about A Legacy of Spies is that it delivers a writer in full. Le Carre's prose remains brisk and lapidary. His wit is intact and rolls as if on casters. He is as profitably interested as ever in values, especially the places where loyalty, patriotism and affection rub together and fray. He wears his gravitas lightly…Le Carre is not of my generation but I have read him for long enough to understand how, for many readers, his characters are old friends — part of their mental furniture. There's something moving about seeing him revive them so effortlessly, to see that the old magic still holds. He thinks internationally but feels domestically. In an upside-down time, he appeals to comprehension rather than instinct. I might as well say it: to read this simmering novel is to come in from the cold.
Dwight Garner - New York Times
Le Carre is such a gifted storyteller that he interlaces the cards in his deck so they fit not simply with this book, but with the earlier ones as well.
Atlantic
We wish for more complexity and logic in our politics, so we look to make political art that is logical and complex: a genre defined by John le Carre.
New Republic
(Starred review.) George Smiley returns in this stunning spy novel from MWA Grand Master le Carre.… He can convey a character in a sentence, land an emotional insight in the smallest phrase—and demolish an ideology in a paragraph.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) Le Carre incorporates many layers of meaning and numerous memorable characters into this intense story that pulses with tension, humor, and moral ambivalence. Smiley fans will be lining up for this one. —Jerry P. Miller. Cambridge, MA
Library Journal
Le Carre returns to put yet another spin on the events of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963).… The miracle is that the author can revisit his best-known story and discover layer upon layer of fresh deception beneath it.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, please use our LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for A Legacy of Spies … then take off on your own:
1. At the novel's end, George Smiley, the spymaster observes that "an old spy in his dotage seeks the truth of ages." Leaving the import (or meaning of that statement) for the time being, let's turn to Peter Guillam. How much "in his dotage" is Guillam? Is his memory dulled by age, or is he still as sharp as a knife? How much does he pretend to be struggling to keep up?
2. Guillam, at one point expresses his "outrage at having my past dug up and thrown in my face." What is the past that is being brought to light? (This might be a tougher question than it seems on the surface.) What was Windfall — what happened and what was supposed to happen? Who was responsible for it?
3. In the letter which summons Guillam back to England, A. Butterfield (who later is humorously known as "Bunny"), refers to "a matter in which you appear to have played a significant role some years back." What was Guillam's role in all that transpired, and how "significant" was his involvement?
4. The book's narrative technique includes Guillam's own memories interspersed with the content of old files — documents, memos, and letters, even audio tapes. Did the back and forth between memory and files make it difficult to follow the story?
5. Alec Leamas is the hero of le Carre's famed 1963 book, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. How would you describe Alec? Does it help to have read the earlier book to understand his character, or is there enough detail in Legacy to give a full portrait of Alec? What was the relationship between the two men, Alec Leamas and Peter Guillam, both professionally and personally?
6. Smiley says at the end of the novel that his ideal had always been that of "leading Europe out of her darkness toward a new age of reason." Hadn't Europe been led into the age of reason following World War II and the defeat of Nazism? What does Smiley mean and did he succeed?
7. Reverting back to Smiley's statement in Question 1, regarding old spies seeing "the truth of ages," what does Smiley mean? What is the truth of the ages?
8. Follow-up to Question 7: Perhaps the most important question of the book is this one, which Guillam poses to himself after meeting with Smiley: “How much of our human feeling can we dispense with in the name of freedom … before we cease to feel either human or free?” Did the ends justify the means in Windfall?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)