Who didn't love John Le Carre (1931-2020), especially during his Cold War heyday?

I add the restricting phrase, because, yes, I do think his George Smiley series constituted his absolute best work. Written (and, in my case at least, also read) during the very Cold War they were portraying, they exuded chilliness and fear and a sense of high stakes. Nothing he wrote subsequently, while there was plenty to enjoy, ever quite matched the sheer elegance of that spy series.

Well, in this one, published in 2017, Smiley's back. A bit, anyway, right at the end in a brief but powerful cameo. And, of course, he must be a fantastic age, which does stretch credulity somewhat.

A Legacy of Spies revisits the story of The Spy Who Came In From the Cold (which I read many years ago, enjoyed immensely, and can't remember in any detail, but that doesn't really matter). It's a clever idea, allowing us from the perspective of our post-Cold War, post-Brexit present to take a penetrating look back at the machinations my generation grew up with.

Peter Guillam, now retired from spydom, and settled on a farmstead in Brittany, is recalled to London (the obligation to respond to such summonses is written into his contract), and required to answer questions about an operation in which Alec Leamas (agent) and Elizabeth Gold (dupe) are killed trying to cross the Berlin Wall. It turns out that these two each had children (independently of each other), and it is these offspring who are bringing an action against the Service corporately and Guillam personally. They're not the only ones who are sniffing around. "A bunch of attention-hungry MPs" are also all too eager to put the operation up in lights as an example of how not to do things.


Graves seem somehow appropriate to this story... These are all from Kirk Braddan Old Church, Isle of Man

So, Guillam dutifully turns up at "Spyland Beside the Thames". He is uncomfortable both with the new locale and with the attitudes of its personnel. One of his polite but insistent questioners is Bunny. He describes Guillam's situation like this: "An impression could be created around you by skilful counsel down the line -- if ever Parliament were to step aside and leave the field open to the courts, secret or other, which heaven forfend -- that, in the course of your career, you were associated with a quite exorbitant number of deaths, and were callous about them. That you were assigned -- let us say by the impeccable George Smiley -- to covert operations where the death of innocent people was considered an acceptable, even necessary outcome."

It's not that Bunny is necessarily sympathetic to the enquiry. He sees it as part of "the historic blame game that is the current rage" and "our new national sport", and explains the motivation like this: "Today's blameless generation versus your guilty one. Who will atone for our fathers' sins, even if they weren't sins at the time?". But Bunny does want the whole thing off his back.

Realizing that he can only get so far by denying and sidestepping, Guillam buckles down to revisit the files related to the Leamas/Gold case.

And these take us back in time. Back to a period before the Wall even existed. Back to a source called Mayflower, and his sub-source, Tulip. (This woman, incidentally, is determined that her secrets should go to the British intelligence service: "I ask why not American, and she is shocked. She is a Communist, she says. Imperialist America is her enemy.")

Tulip and Guillam have a brief liaison, while she is waiting for exfiltration. You fear this unwise move is going to immediately trigger some disaster, but she is successfully brought to Britain -- where she is murdered. Her East German killer subsequently becomes an important source of information for Smiley and his crew, but I won't say more because that would be too big a spoiler.



This is also a time when suspicions are growing within Smiley's circle that someone important is working for the other side... "The Berlin Wall has gone up. Every agent and sub-agent of the Mayflower network has gone missing, been arrested, executed or all three." To Tabitha, who is appointed as Guillam's lawyer, these are just historical facts. But, as Guillam says, "For those of us who endured them, they are a time of despair, bewilderment and frustration."

By its nature, then, this book has an elegiac quality. At its forefront are dead people (the worthwhileness of whose deaths we are taught to question), and old people (living in a changed world that is heading in an uncertain direction). Inevitably, these old people have to ask themselves -- we all have to ask ourselves in our various capacities -- whether the trade-offs we thought were worth it then still seem worth it now. After the Berlin Wall comes down, Guillam reports: "Germany is ecstatic, our village in Brittany a little less so. And I seem to be hovering somewhere between the two, one minute rejoicing that peace of a sort has broken out, then lapsing into introspection as I think of the stuff we did and the sacrifices we made, not least of other people's lives, in the long years when we thought the Wall was going to be there for ever."

Everything looks different in retrospect. At the time, people put one foot in front of the other in the pursuit of what they had been told to do. As Guillam says: "Alec was a FIELDMAN. You don't think round corners if you're a fieldman. There's a Cold War on. You've got a job to do. You get on with it!" But with that Cold War over, there's time for introspection: "How much of our human feeling can we dispense with in the name of freedom, would you say, before we cease to feel either human or free? Or were we simply suffering from the incurable English disease of needing to play the world's game when we weren't world players any more?"



Guillam finally runs George Smiley to ground. Undeniably ancient, and more reclusive than ever, his red pullover and bright yellow corduroys signal retirement. But he is determined to go and face this lawsuit down. He feels he has been left out of the loop because his appearance would draw too much attention. And his musings on this topic underline the themes -- the dubiousness of the core purpose, and the human inability to see ahead -- that Guillam has been skirting around from the beginning: "A former Head of Covert in the dock? Admitting he sacrificed a fine agent and an innocent woman in a cause the world barely remembers?... That wouldn't sit at all well with our modern masters. Nothing must sully the hallowed image of the Service... We were not pitiless, Peter. We were NEVER pitiless. We had the larger pity. Arguably, it was misplaced. Certainly it was futile. We know that now. We did not know it then."

It's not only the changed character of international politics they have to contend with, but also the changed character of the polity they serve. Smiley continues: "I believe you came to accuse me of something, Peter. Am I right... Was it for the things we did, would you say? Or why we did them at all?... Was it all for ENGLAND, then... But WHOSE England? WHICH England? England all alone, a citizen of nowhere? I'm a European, Peter. If I had a mission -- if I was ever aware of one beyond our business with the enemy, it was to Europe. If I was heartless, I was heartless for Europe. If I had an unattainable ideal, it was of leading Europe out of her darkness towards a new age of reason. I have it still."

But England turned her back on that aspiration...



The ending is muted. Smiley (over whom even more question marks hang than we previously realized) will confront the "cowards" who have organized this investigation. Guillam (despite being threatened at gunpoint by Christoph Leamas, who can't bring himself to go through with his threat) is back in Brittany, ostensibly comfortable, but always on the lookout for letters from England... Some critics find the ending a bit of a fizzer. But I have no problem with muted endings. Not with a bang but a whimper...

Nor do I agree with this assessment that A Legacy of Spies draws too sharp a distinction between black and white, and presents Guillam and his companions as "righteous titans of a morally clearer era".

On the contrary, I think there's plenty of moral self-searching here, and no-one comes away feeling good. We're told Smiley initially recruited Guillam with the following words: "We don't pay a lot, and careers tend to be interrupted. But we do feel it's an important job, as long as one cares about the end, and not too much about the means." Now everyone is very much wondering about the end, as well as the means...

Omar El Akkad is nearer the mark, I think: "Even readers wholly unfamiliar with Smiley and his Circus act are likely to find something quietly compelling in this tale of an old spymaster questioning whether any of it, in the end, really ever meant a damn. It's a daunting question, and carries within it the possibility of whole lives wasted. But le Carré has never been one for low stakes."

Marina Vaizey, similarly: "Underlying this delicately bitter book is the uneasy feeling that all was for naught -- the pain and sacrifice, the grey areas between whatever might be right and wrong, the ends justifying the means, or not (when the means on both sides of the great divide were all too similar)."

And Le Carre himself, in an interview with Cullen Murphy, spoke about the need to reconsider Smiley's enterprise without the driving force of anti-Communism as a backdrop: "What I was saying to myself is: This is a story now that will be viewed solely in humanistic terms, not in political terms. This is the cost of behaving like this. The cost of living like this... The Cold War is over, but this is where we are left as people: still directionless, still faithless..."



This soul-searching the book does very well, I think.

There are oddities, however. The age of the protagonists, as I've mentioned, is a tad hard to swallow. And the fact that the Windfall safe flat still exists, operational but resting, and never, apparently, subject to any auditors' axes -- well, I don't know, but it seems a bit unlikely in the cheerless times that have been with us since the 1980s.

I also find the sexual references a bit strange. There's that highly peculiar scene with Laura (the investigator with the history credentials). She takes a prurient interest in Guillam's sexual conquests, and generally seems to be acting in a bizarrely flirtatious manner. It all feels just a tad misogynistic... Then there's the author's repeated insistence on Guillam's sexual relationship with Catherine, the much younger woman who is a tenant/lover back on the farm in Brittany. It starts to feel as though he is trying to prove something about old men... In light of recent revelations, maybe that's exactly it.

These quibbles aside, however, it's a great read.

Murphy is absolutely right: "'Jackknife was Joint’s operation. Under Bill Haydon’s command. Haydon, then Alleline, Bland, Esterhase. Bill’s boys, we called ’em. George was nowhere near it.' The words are spoken by Peter Guillam... Just the names of those characters are enough to conjure a Cold War world back into gritty gray life."



*_*_*

I have to add here that there's just something about spy stuff that keeps drawing us back in...

A Legacy of Spies reminded me of a movie we saw a while back. The Courier (Dominic Cooke, 2021) told the mostly true story of Greville Wynne (Benedict Cumberbatch), a 41-year-old British businessman. He was recruited by MI6 in 1960 to serve as a go-between for Oleg Penkovsky (Merab Ninidze), an officer in the USSR's foreign intelligence agency, who had decided he wanted to leak information to the West. Penkovsky ends up dead, and Wynne in a Soviet prison for a while. But their joint efforts probably made a difference for good.

Wynne subsequently struggled with the boundaries between fiction and reality (which of us wouldn't after the life he had led?) There are good accounts of what's what and what's not here and here.

Over the years we've also watched a few series of The Americans, which have been pretty enjoyable. On the "how true is it?" question, answers range from not bad through a little exaggerated to way OTT. But a real case provided the inspiration, and one of those real spies also says the show "looks pretty much like reality but of course without the murders and the wigs".

Then you read about the elite Russian spies posing as Argentinians in Ljubljana -- operating as "illegals", ie without any obvious ties to Moscow, but "trained for years to impersonate foreigners and then sent abroad to gather intelligence" -- who were rumbled just a few months ago.

And here is a plot that Le Carre might well have found too far-fetched... Lai Tek, born in Viet Nam somewhere around the turn of the 20th century, worked for the colonial authorities in French Indochina, then for the British in Singapore and Malaya, and finally for the Japanese during World War II. His anti-communist activities were breathtakingly daring and utterly ruthless. He even managed to position himself at the head of the Malayan Communist Party (MCP). But he eventually came unstuck:

"The once-infallible party leader’s fall from grace was rapid and dramatic. Supporters first found evidence of embezzlement. Lai Tek, it appeared, had several wives, mistresses and secret businesses in Singapore, all paid for by party funds. Then, serious accusations of his treacherous dealings with the Japanese began to emerge, and a visiting Vietnamese communist delegation began asking questions about his earlier work in French Indochina... Lai Tek was called to a Party meeting in February 1947, but he never showed up. Instead, the spy escaped with the vast majority of the party’s funds... Chin [Peng], then only 23 years old, was voted in as the new secretary-general of the MCP, and Lai Tek was sentenced to death."

Lai Tek was indeed subsequently reported dead in Thailand. It is said he was strangled by Thai communists, and his body dumped in a river. But rumours of his survival continued to circulate long after his ostensible assassination, as is only fitting for such an enigmatic character.

How people can live lives like these I can't imagine...

But I think a few more spy stories should be figuring on my reading list soon...