He doesn’t quite know why he is or was a spy, he just is: Supposedly retired, his instincts remain as hard-wired as ever, like the ex-Marine who can never get out of bed without snapping the sheets into hard-angled hospital corners. The storyteller here is Peter Guillam, Smiley’s old protege. “Tubby, bespectacled, permanently worried” Smiley will loom in the background for most of this briskly knotted novel, le Carré preferring to keep 1979’s elegant maze of a book, Smiley’s People, as the master’s true swan song. But it’s not quite the return of George Smiley that the advance publicity will claim. Yes, the old master has brought some of the old gang out of retirement into the modern era. The excitement felt by le Carré fans for A Legacy of Spies should be tempered a bit. Together they serve as an imperfect but often masterful survey of a world always falling to pieces and the wearied, outnumbered figures trying to beat back the darkness just for a bit. Set in the grey borderlands of failed states and hollowed-out formerly great ones, they tend not to feature dueling ranks of spies but instead a batch of cold-eyed and amoral actors, arms smugglers and bankers and influence peddlers, who thrive amidst the collapse of old authorities and assumptions.
Le Carré’s non-Smiley novels, like The Constant Gardener (2001) and The Night Manager (1993) have chronicled the post-Cold War chaos. Since then, the arc of world history has certainly bent sinister, and that wouldn’t have surprised Smiley. It also felt like a warning, with the cynical old spies explaining just how morally compromised the West became during the just-concluded Cold War and not so subtly reminding them that the collapse of the Berlin Wall would hardly end the desire of nation-states to demand intelligence from spies and to not worry too much about how it was collected. The Secret Pilgrim (1990) in which the semi-retired Smiley waxed wise about the entanglements of espionage to spellbound recruits while their trainer reminisced to himself about dark deeds from the past, was a ripping good read but felt like an excuse for le Carré to clean out some unfinished drafts from the bottom of his drawer. It’s been about a quarter century since John le Carré appeared to wrap up his cycle of stories about the tantalizingly inscrutable spymaster George Smiley and his cabal of British spooks locked in mortal struggle with Moscow Centre.
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