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"In Silverview, John le Carré turns his focus to the world that occupied his writing for the past sixty years-the secret world itself. Julian Lawndsley has renounced his high-flying job in the city for a simpler life running a bookshop in a small English seaside town. But only a couple of months into his new career, Julian's evening is disrupted by a visitor. Edward, a Polish émigré living in Silverview, the big house on the edge of town, seems to know a lot about Julian's family and is rather too interested in the inner workings of his modest new enterprise. When a letter turns up at the door of a spy chief in London warning him of a dangerous leak, the investigations lead him to this quiet town by the sea . . . Silverview is the mesmerizing story of an encounter between innocence and experience and between public duty and private morals. In his inimitable voice John le Carré, the greatest chronicler of our age, seeks to answer the question of what we truly owe to the people we love"--… (more)
Media reviews
Ultimately, Silverview unspools as a cat-and-mouse chase narrative, with the novel's dual perspective putting us in the control room, one step ahead of the characters, able to see the bigger picture, albeit heavily pixellated until the final pages. Such are the layers of irony that it's easy to forget that the sting in the tale was already delivered upfront, in an enigmatic opening shorn of vital context. Suffice to say that, in the typically male world of le Carré's fiction, the defining act this time turns on the vexed filial loyalty between a mother and daughter.
If we're left dangling by the end, there’s an added tease of sorts in the novel’s billing as le Carré's "last complete masterwork" – on the strong side, no doubt, but a tag that nonetheless holds out the prospect of rougher treasures still awaiting the light.
User reviews
There is also an appropriateness about the subject matter of the story given the stage in John Le Carré’s writing career it was written. His novels have always reflected the geo-political environment of their time, and his characters have been shown practising their craft, mostly in mid-career. In “A Legacy of Spies” we saw a retrospective of past exploits from the viewpoint of retired service officers. In “Silverview” we are shown what happens in the life of a former agent once retired. “Silvervew” gives us a glimpse at the reality of the-happy-ever-after for an agent once they are no longer of use to the agency.
As always, Le Carré brings human motivation to the surface, and demonstrates the wilful blindness of organisations that can sometimes let errors of judgement slip through to cause cracks in what appears to be a totally watertight operation. He describes a situation where an organisation’s failure to care for its members’ wellbeing, and to take cognizance of an agent’s mental state, can lead to aberrant behaviour, a trait common to many organisations in every sector.
Never one to shy away from highlighting his views on the political leadership of the countries concerned, he describes the internal questioning of an intelligence agency that is serving a country ruled by a government with no coherent foreign policy, a government that is focused on its own internal political power rather than its relationship with the rest of the world.
This is an excellent read.
The book appears at the same as the launch of the new James Bond film and serves as a reminder of how very differently Ian Fleming and le Carré approached their subjects. Both men had served in the British intelligence services, and both participated to one degree or another in the Cold War. But while to Fleming, British spies like Bond were defending civilisation as we know it against a ruthless and immoral enemy, le Carré’s world is much greyer one, a world in which it is hard to tell the heroes from the villains (if indeed there heroes and villains at all).
No, it is not his finest work. But one is instantly immersed in a familiar world, and the author still knew — in his 90s — how to tell a great story.
To be honest, the first few pages had me leaning towards the latter. The encounter described in the first chapter lacked the flair that one has come to expect (even demand) from le Carré, and I did fleetingly wonder whether I should carry on. Fortunately, I did, and any fears that the book might be below the master’s normal standard were soon dispelled.
It is a small book, but it covers a lot of territory, with a lot of familiar characters. Julian Lawndsley has fled his successful career in the city, and has sought some sort of spiritual sanctuary in a fading seaside resort, where he opens a bookshop. Into his shop comes a quiet elderly man, who strikes up an acquaintance with Julian, and encourages him to assign the shop’s basement as a ‘republic of literature’ where people can access the finest works of literature from around the world. Reading my simple description makes this seem a very dry and unmemorable encounters … but then I am not le Carré, who infuses it with wonder and promise.
Meanwhile, Proctor, latest in a long family line of members of the intelligence world, finds himself investigating a possible breach from what had been thought to be one of the most secure air force establishment. In an episode of vintage le Carré, proctor interviews a couple of former colleagues, piercing their narrative without ever seeming to break interrogative sweat.
It is fair to say that this is not le Carré’s finest novel, but it if far from his worst, and I couldn’t tell which buts had been finished after his death.
We are told that his character, Julian Lawndsley, had been a very successful trader in London before he became a bookseller in a small English town on the coast. As he said, “I have forsaken the glitter of gold for the scent of old paper.” Shortly after his change of location and lifestyle, a man named Edward Avon walks into Lawndsley’s bookshop, and after browsing, casually offered him some advice and a possible investment. He’s a Polish émigré, a retired academic, an old colleague of Julian’s father. In time, he supplies plenty of curious banter, a computer, and some assistance in developing a certain section, to be called the Republic of Literature, which would feature the classics of the great thinkers and authors. Along the way, he asks for a few small favors of Julian, delivering a package to Edward’s mother, and to use the computer he supplied the shop.
Things began to change, and soon Julian learns that his new friend and investor was a former member of M16, Britain’s foreign intelligence service. He also learns that Edward loves two women, one a longtime mistress, and his wife Deborah, who is nearing death from cancer.
After watching my own wife suffer and succumb to cancer, John le Carré impressed me with the following line. “Edward has, as might any man whose wife is dying: the gaze is more inward, the jaw is crisper and the more determined for it, the flowing white hair more disciplined.” When Deborah’s time seems to be running out, le Carré wrote something that again was sadly very familiar to me. “But it could be any day. She knows that, and she doesn’t like pity. She speaks what she thinks and she thinks a lot, so anything can happen, okay?” Soon she is in a morphine-assisted coma and, “Around midnight her doctor certified life extinct.”
How the reader connects with a book can be very personal, and Silverview reached out to me in several ways that were non-crucial to the plot, but drew this particular reader close. Having owned a bookshop that moved and reestablished itself in four new locations, the following line about Julian struck home. “After six weeks of running a stagnant business, he has become quite the connoisseur of people who stare at the shop and don’t come in, and they are beginning to get on his nerves.” While I’m talking about observations that felt so right, the following line brought a smile and sadness to me, a man who was lucky enough to be married to a beautiful woman with a fabulous mane of hair. “Ellen unpins her incomparable auburn hair and lets it cascade over her shoulders, as practiced by beautiful women since the beginning of time.”
“Meanwhile, Edward is being investigated by the service’s head of domestic security, Stewart Proctor.” And with that le Carré adds another major layer to the story, which is what I always loved about his books. It doesn’t take long before Proctor seems to be on a collision course with Edward, and our shopkeeper Julian is caught in the middle of it all.
When things suddenly don’t go as planned, and Edward isn’t where he was expected to be, Proctor sends out his entire team of watchers to scour the area for him. The most important of their instructions is that if they find Edward, “they should restrain him, employing minimal force, but in no circumstances hand him over to the police or anyone else until Proctor has had an opportunity to talk to him.” The old spies are portrayed as decent people who, at the end of their lives, realize their life’s work has accomplished nothing. The book’s last surprise is from Julian’s daughter Lily, who has had a larger role than either the reader or her father knew of.
In a number of reviews people have wondered aloud if because of the brevity of the book, and its sudden ending, if the author had actually finished the manuscript. The New York Times was more generous than I when they said: “And if ‘Silverview’ feels less than fully executed, its sense of moral ambivalence remains exquisitely calibrated. Besides, novelists of le Carré’s stature are not diminished by their lesser efforts.” The Guardian said it like this, “If we’re left dangling by the end, there’s an added tease of sorts in the novel’s billing as le Carré’s “last complete masterwork” – on the strong side, no doubt, but a tag that nonetheless holds out the prospect of rougher treasures still awaiting the light.” I wasn’t feeling satisfied by the way the book wrapped up, and I was also feeling like I was missing something all along. Had my long absence from his writing created an expectation for more than had ever really been there before, or was I not remembering things accurately. Just maybe I need to reach back to a favorite le Carré.
But the story continues in a way in the book’s afterword, which is written by the author’s youngest son, Nick Cornwell. Nick is also a writer, one who writes under the name Nick Harkway. He tells of a promise that he made to his dad about taking this completed manuscript through to publication. “I read it, and my bewilderment deepened. It was fearsomely good.” It was with great relief that he found his father’s book only in need of some minor editing, prompting him to ask, “What, exactly, was I supposed to fix? Should I put eyebrows on this Mona Lisa?”
Nick writes about how his dad was, as always, striving to tell a good story and to tell the truth. Nick continues about his father’s legacy. “But Silverview does something that no other le Carré novel ever has. It shows a service fragmented: filled with its own political factions.” And he adds: “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.”
I have purposely not given many details of the book’s plot, (go on, buy a book), but overall, it’s a simpler book than many of his previous. As with any spy novel, we are always left with judging how much are we to believe? What do we know for sure?
Le Carre applies
Julian becomes an innocent pawn in one of those historic leaks in British Intelligence. Once the leak has been discovered, the chase is on, with Stewart Proctor, a typical restrained upper class spymaster burrowing backwards into the life of one his first and most valuable Joes, the very Edward Avon (aka Florian) of the classic collection of Ming vases and recently of literary treasures. The backstory touches upon Florian’s Polish Nazi father, his strong anti-fascist and anti-Imperialist idealism, which is turned on its head once he spends a year in Gdansk, when he perceives communism to be a form of advanced connery and starts spying for the British. After the fall of the wall his spy career seems over, until his past stint as a teacher in Croatia and his knowledge of languages, proves useful during the Bosnian war. Here he finds a new cause, which leads him astray from the British, though he is married to an English lady spy, head of the Middle East desk, and settles for a sedate life in a manor (Silverview) at the edge of the village of our new bookseller. And there we go.
The only pity is the briefness of this last Le Carre – in fact the story is quite thin, with no real tradecraft in action.
Indeed, the author's son tells us, in his Afterword, that the novel was very much a finished product, and feels his father was only hesitant to publish it because of its implications that Le Carre's beloved Secret Service had lost its way in recent years. This can be seen in the musings of Proctor, a central character, as he wonders about Edward, a valuable agent who had turned and was on the run.
"Did Edward still love the Service despite its many blemishes? ... Did Edward see the Service as the problem rather than the solution? ... Did Edward fear that, in the absence of any coherent British foreign policy, the Service was getting too big for its boots?"
The characters here are all fascinating, if at times unfathomable. And, as the book is barely two hundred pages, they are perhaps not quite as fully developed as some of his more famous ones - Smiley's people. However, they all seem to work, because I kept on feverishly turning pages, wanting desperately to know what would happen next. Perhaps the author had more he wanted to add to the story, but his time ran out. And what is here is, in the end, sufficient - one hell of a good spy story in fact. There are a few "old hands," as well as a young city trader turned bookseller in a small town. A couple love stories, one old, one new. Some possible infidelity. It's all in here. Le Carre was still very much at the top of his game when he left us. RIP, Sir, and thank you for all of it. My highest recommendation.
- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER
It’s quite a short book, though it offers the usual cast of eccentric characters, elliptical plotting that involves plenty of double-crosses and moral morasses, and a jaundiced view of the role espionage plays in contemporary geopolitical power struggles. It even includes wives who, like Smiley’s enigmatic Ann, are both unfaithful and cold-hearted. Perhaps marriage was a metaphor for him of betrayal in the face of an incurable romantic streak. It’s not very fair on the women characters, though.
The story focuses on Julian Lawndsley, a burned-out financier who has retired to the countryside to open a bookshop though he knows very little about books, and Edward Avon, a Polish émigré who sweeps in and befriends him in an extravagant way. We know that Edward is married to a wealthy former spy who is now dying of cancer in her mansion, Silverview. We also know they have a prickly daughter who, in the opening scene, crossly delivers a letter from her mother to an official in London. To a large extent her irritation is with having to live a hidden life among spies.
Edward Avon previously worked through a local bric-a-brac shop to sell off a valuable collection of Chinese porcelain. Now he proposes to launch a “Republic of Books” at Julian’s shop, providing lists of classic works and boundless energy. Though he wonders if he’s being conned, Julian becomes enthusiastic. Then Edward asks Julian to take a letter to a mysterious woman in London, all while intelligence officials maneuver in the background, delving into Edward’s past. Clearly there are things afoot that Julian cannot see.
SILVERVIEW is not top-notch LeCarré; compared to immediate predecessors it’s a minor work, but it fits in the trajectory of his late career dissection of the unheroic role British intelligence services play in post-cold war politics. As one career spook thinks to himself, “the very idea of a consuming passion bewildered him – let alone allowing one’s life to be conducted by it. Absolute commitment of any sort constituted to his trained mind a grave security threat.” Despite the author’s son’s belief this slight novel was too cynical for his father to publish he does, in the end, allow one character a chance to act purely on principle.