Book Report: Silverview

17. John Le Carré, Silverview (2022) (8/14/22)

I haven't read all that much John le Carré: I may be too impatient for his suggestiveness, his sleight-of-hand. I tried A Perfect Spy not too long ago, which seems unanimously deemed to be his best book, but . . . well, let's just say I wasn't in the mood for the inimitable le Carré style. 

Now, having successfully finished this rather short book of his (and his last published, though it was written ca. 2013), I might be primed for more. He is an awfully damn good writer.

The story here involves "the Service," and former spies, dying spies, janitorial spies, outraged spies, reluctant spies, vigilant spies. It centers (obliquely) on young Julian, who has fled London and a high-stakes life in finance and now, having made his fortune, has opened a bookshop in a quiet East Anglian town. Into his shop comes Edward Avon, and a friendship ensues. Though it's possible Avon has more on his mind than mere friendship. Another key character is Stewart Proctor, who in the first chapter is presented with a letter, the contents of which we are not privy to, but we know it arouses concern. Proctor proceeds to track down Avon's former handlers from their days during the Bosnian War. Stories are told.

Indeed, stories are told: that, surely, is le Carré's greatest gift—as a storyteller, a weaver of tales. The framing story is just a good excuse for the many, interlinked or merely tangential, stories of so many characters. 

In one scene, Julian and Avon meet at a now-deserted former experimental military site, Orford Ness (and now a nature preserve).

[Julian] knew what to expect of the godforsaken loneliness of that outpost in the middle of nowhere. He knew that even fishermen supposedly found it unbearable. They followed a pedestrian walk past rubbish bins, climbed a rickety wooden stairway, and waded through a mess of mud and ships' junk to emerge on a littered quayside.
     Edward struck out left. The river wall forced them into single file. Pebbles of rain whipped off the sea. Edward swung round in his tracks.
     'We are famous for our bird life here, actually, Julian,' he announced, with proprietorial pride. 'We have lapwing, curlew, bittern, meadow pipit, avocets, not to mention duck,' he declared, like a headwaiter reciting the day's specials. 'Look now, please. You hear that curlew calling to her mate? Follow my arm.'
     Julian made a show of doing so, but for some minutes he had been able to follow only the horizon: the remains of our own civilisation after its destruction in some future catastrophe. And there they stood: distant forests of abandoned aerials rising out of the mist, abandoned hangars, barracks, accommodation blocks and control rooms, pagodas on elephantine legs for stress-testing atom bombs, with curved roofs but no walls in case the worst happens. And, at his feet, a warning to him to stick to marked paths or reckon with unexploded ordnance.
     'You are moved by this hellish place, Julian?' Edward enquired, observing his distraction. 'I too.'
     'Is that why you come here?'
     'Yes, it is,' he replied with unusual candour. And, taking Julian's arm, a thing he had never done before: 'Listen hard. Do you listen? Now tell me what you hear about the screaming of the birds.' And when Julian heard nothing but more screams and the skirmishing of the wind: 'How about the rumble of the guns of our glorious British past? No? No guns?'
     'What do you hear?' Julian asked awkwardly, with a laugh to dispel the severity of Edward's stare.
     'I?'—as ever, surprised to be asked. 'Why, the guns of our glorious future. What else?'

In an afterword, Le Carré's son, Nick Cornwell, muses about why the manuscript for this book, which was basically finished and perfect, languished in a desk drawer for so many years.

Silverview does something that no other le Carré novel ever has. It shows a[n intelligence] service fragmented: filled with its own political factions, not always kind to those it should cherish, not always very effective or alert, and ultimately not sure, any more, that it can justify itself. In Silverview, the spies of Britain have, like many of us, lost their certainty about what the country means, and who we are to ourselves. As with Karla in Smiley's People, so here with our own side: it is the humanity of the service that isn't up to the task—and that begins to ask whether the task is worth the cost.
     I think he couldn't quite bring himself to say that out loud. I think, knowling or not, he choked on being the bearer of these truths to—of—from—the institution that gave him a home when he was a lost dog without a collar in the middle of the twentieth century. I think he wrote a wonderful book, but, when he looked at it, he found it cut too close to the bone, and the more he worked on it, the more he refined it, the plainer that became—and here we are.
     You can form your own opinion, and it will be as good as mine, but that's what I believe.
     My father is in these pages, striving as he always did to tell the truth, spin the yarn, and show you the world.

This book, too, was on Barack Obama's summer reading list. Which is probably why I bought it. Glad I did. Thanks, Mr. President.