A Legacy of Spies-John le Carre

                                                                                                                                                        Novel

A Legacy of Spies

John le Carre

John le Carre has been writing for more than five decades now. In 1960s he wrote his first espionage novel The Spy Who Came in from Cold. This book put him in the front row of authors writing espionage stories, in the severely polarised world of Cold War amidst West’s paranoiac fear of communism. Book attained a cult status. Except for tragically comic spy of Graham Greene in his thrillers-a feast for literary minded readers-and the earlier invention of Ashenden, Somerset Maugham’s alter ego in his memorable short stories, the Spy of espionage novels in 1960s was the quintessential super male, over flowing with androgen, handling revolvers, machine guns, cars, speed boats, aeroplanes and blondes with equal verve. Alec Lemas, George Smiley and their ilk breathed the much-needed whiff of realism in spy story with the publication of ‘Spy who came in from cold’. George Smiley the perpetually dour master spy, short and stout, a sympathetic listener and a reticent talker, lost in the cigarette-smoke filled, musty labyrinths of drab MI5 buildings, deceived by his wife, features in many later novels of John le Carre. Like Graham Greene, he too wrote about the mental struggles of a spy albeit in a less subtle, less sophisticated manner.

Now at eighty-four, John le Carre revisits the scene of his first espionage novel and comes out with an absorbing book. Peter Guillam and ex-MI5 employee, who had worked with George Smiley in running agents in East Germany in 1960s and was one of the core MI5 team in the plot narrated in The Spy Who Came in from Cold, has retired to a village in Brittany. One day he is summoned to London by new bosses of his old service. Ghosts of MI5’s earlier intrigues-again specifically connected to the plot of ‘Spy who came in from cold’-have come to haunt the service in the new global world where USSR is dead and communism survives only in its dalliance with capitalism. In the light of new reasoning, MI5’s past deeds will undergo a post-mortem analysis and Peter Guillam’s neck is on the altar. John le Carre once again takes the reader on a roller coaster ride along the secrete corridors of MI5, their safe houses in London and Berlin bursting at seams with the shenanigans of Cold War era intelligence skulduggeries, intra departmental rivalries, and personal tragedies of the lead players. He skilfully weaves past with the present and presents a believable, enjoyable and also satisfactorily nuanced prequel to ‘Spy who came in from cold’. I have not read John le Carre’s other books for more than a decade now, but I feel he is a little more maudlin in this book. Is it the age? His characters are a little more rounded, they almost fit a cliched mould, although a cliché created by John le Carre himself. I am also overawed by the creative power of an octogenarian author who retains complete hold on his craft.

The book should not be missed by a John le Carre fan.