Silverview
By John le Carre
Fiction/Viking/Paperback/208 pages/$34.24/Main bookstores
4 out of 5
A younger man provides up his buying and selling profession to promote books in a sleepy seaside city. Little does he know that his bookshop is embroiled in an espionage breach.
Such a premise can be pleasant in itself. That it belongs to the final full novel left behind by spy fiction grandmaster John le Carre, who died final yr aged 89, is nothing wanting a marvel.
Julian Lawndsley, 33, has escaped London’s rat race to run a bookshop in a small East Anglian city. Sadly, he’s neither well-read nor possessed of any book-selling expertise. “How’s customized, darling,” a neighbour asks mordantly, “or ought to I not converse sick of the lifeless?”
Enter Edward Avon, a charismatic, eccentric retiree who appears eager to impart literary knowledge to Julian. “Rings of Saturn is a literary sleight of hand of the primary water,” he enthuses of the 1995 novel, additionally set in East Anglia, by the German author W. G. Sebald, “a depressive like the most effective of us, now, alas, lifeless. Weep for Sebald”.
Edward lives along with his sickly spouse, Deborah, and prickly daughter, Lily, throughout city in a home referred to as Silverview. He claims an outdated friendship with Julian’s late father and, earlier than lengthy, has charmed his method into the bookshop’s operations.
On the similar time, one other strand of the story is unfolding in London, the place Stewart Proctor, the key service’s “bloodhound”, is investigating what has been euphemistically dubbed a “technical failure”.
The world of the bookshop and its provincial neighbourhood is sketched in marvellous element; so, too, is the world of the Proctors, an upper-class household of spies in whose family domesticity and tradecraft nestle comfortably.
They preserve their safe line, “the inexperienced cellphone”, within the scullery beneath a tea cosy. “So are all of us to be blown up?” Mrs Proctor inquires casually of her husband earlier than mattress. “Is it a kind of once more?”
If one have been on the lookout for the proper novel with which to ship off le Carre, Silverview is just not it. It’s weighted in favour of its entrance half and comes up mild on the finish.
But, it incorporates moments of such brilliance, such shows of le Carre’s signature wit and nuance, that you simply need to put it down with a wry chuckle and say: “There he’s.”
In contrast with the final two novels he revealed earlier than his dying – the grim closure of A Legacy Of Spies (2017) and the bitter fury of Agent Operating In The Subject (2019) – Silverview is, to borrow a line from its ending, “content material, if not radiant”.
Right here, too, are the ageing, embittered spies of outdated wars, asking themselves what a lifetime of subterfuge and amorality was all in assist of. However that is no raging in opposition to the dying of the sunshine.
Le Carre could also be off the highest of his recreation right here, however one continues to be reminded how splendid a participant he was. His novels have been simply as a lot about important studying as they have been about espionage. What Edward says of Sebald additionally applies to him: His literary sleight of hand was of the primary water. Weep for le Carre.
In case you like this, learn: Transcription by Kate Atkinson (Transworld, 2018, $17.12, Books Kinokuniya). In 1940, orphan Juliet Armstrong, 18, is employed to do transcription for MI5 and later recruited to spy on Nazi sympathisers.
