Silverview by John Le Carré

Silverview
By John Le Carré
Viking, 2021

It’s been two years since Agent Running in the Field, the last novel produced by the great John Le Carré in his lifetime, so a new Le Carré book appearing in bookstores is an arresting thing, feeling almost unseemly, like when Patrick O’Brian’s publishers put out 21, a wretched fragment of an Aubrey/Maturin novel, four years after O’Brian’s death. The natural sad questions swarm. Why didn’t Le Carré finish and publish this novel himself? How fragmentary was it, at the time of his death in 2020? Is this new book, Silverview, really a John Le Carré novel at all, or just a cynical cash-grab by a publisher and a literary estate?

Surely the person best positioned to answer such questions is Le Carré’s son Nick, who writes excellent novels under the name Nick Harkaway. Son Nick has an Afterword at the end of Silverview’s slim 200 pages, and it’s a fair bet 90% of the book’s reading audience will start there instead of on Page 1. Harkaway paints a direct and quite lovely portrait of the relationship he had with his father:

When my father died, there was no outstanding business between us; no ill-chosen words or unresolved rows; no doubts and no misgivings. I loved him. He loved me. We knew each other, we were proud of one another. We made space for one another’s flaws and we had fun. You can’t ask for more.

And he tells the story of the book we’re now calling Silverview. He says his father was working on the book intermittently since 2013 - a damningly long time for a prolific author - and that he’d encourage his son to finish the book if he couldn’t some day finish it himself. About the book itself Harkaway writes “It was fearsomely good … a kind of perfect reflection on his previous work - a song of experience - and yet fully its own narrative, with its own emotional power and its own concerns.” 

But what about the ultimate question? “What held him back?” Harkaway asks. “What kept it in his desk drawer, to be taken out and redrafted again, and again put away, unsatisfying, until this moment?” Long-time fans of Le Carré’s work, long-time admirers of its astringent humor and often flawless economy, will know already the only possible answer to these rhetorical questions: Le Carré was never satisfied with the book because it was never good enough.

And yet, here it is anyway. Silverview has a couple of half-hearted plot-threads, one involving a big-city bond trader named Julian Lawndsley who retires from his old life to start a new one as a bookshop owner in a godforsaken East Anglia seaside town, another involving a walking security risk named Florian who’s involved in murky schemes that eventually reach out to ensnare even poor hapless Julian, even though the two men are essentially in two different novels. It’s quickly apparent that Florian is many people, none of them particularly trustworthy, as his beleaguered former boss Philip loudly admits:

“I told Head Office, over and again. You can’t expect Florian to fill and empty every bloody dead letter box from Gdansk to Warsaw. You can’t expect him to service every sub-agent and walk-in on our books. The Poles are queuing up to spy for us, I said. We’re spoiled for choice. But if you drive him this hard, the whole card house will come down.” 

Obviously, what’s really being distrusted here is spywork itself, and this existential second-guessing seeps through the whole book like the seaside damp that threatens Julian’s bookshop. It’s heartbreaking to imagine a big, thrilling, polished John Le Carré novel with the same subversion as its central preoccupation, like a funhouse mirror version of A Perfect Spy. It’s heartbreaking to think of the various wispy, vampy character sketches in the pages of this book, only fleshed out by Le Carré at the peak of his late-style perception. And it doesn’t feel at all right to finish a Le Carré novel with a feeling of heartbreak. 

Silverview is more of an Irish wake than it is a novel. The truly faithful will put in an appearance, say a quiet word to the widow (“He was taken too soon, Mary, taken too soon”), and then go off to remember happier times. If John Le Carré had intended you to read this book, he’d have written it.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor. He’s the Books editor of Big Canoe News in Georgia, and his website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.