It is such a pleasure to be in the hands of a master craftsman, and John Le Carré is one indeed. Sure, a few of his novels from the past decade or two have been less exciting, perhaps even pedestrian, polemical and contrived. But his Cold War spy novels featuring the Circus (British Intelligence) and George Smiley are unrivaled.
Other writers can write gripping, fast-paced thrillers. Le Carré, though, can make the subtlety of a quiet conversation into something just as riveting as any of those thrillers.
Silverview is his last, posthumously published novel.
The novel starts off in classic Le Carré style, with two parallel storylines (and of course, the reader assumes they will converge into a single story at some point).
Julian Lawndsley is a financial whiz from ‘The City’. Burned out on his work, he has abruptly and impetuously bought a bookstore in a small seaside town ‘on the outer shores of East Anglia’.
The shop is empty. It has been empty for most of the day. Julian is standing at the till, totting up the day’s meagre takings. For some minutes he has been aware of a solitary figure in a Homburg hat and fawn raincoat, armed with a furled umbrella, standing on the opposite pavement. 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.
Meanwhile, in London, an irritable young woman dragging a child in a pram has turned up at a house to deliver a letter from her dying mother.
Arriving at a pretentious doorway with its number painted with unusual clarity on one pillar, she climbed the steps backwards, hauling the pushchair after her, scowled at a list of names beside the owners’ bell buttons, and jabbed the lowest.
[…] ‘I need Proctor. She said Proctor or no one,’ Lily said.
‘Homburg’, ‘fawn raincoat’, ‘furled umbrella’, ‘pushchair’, ‘bell buttons’… as always, Le Carre’s writing has a wonderful sense of place.
The tension in Silverview builds up jerkily. In the span of an evening and a following morning, Edward Avon (the aforementioned solitary figure in the Homburg hat) visits the bookstore, insinuates himself into Julian’s life and the bookstore operations, and announces that he had been a close friend of Julian’s late father. (Coincidence? Or perhaps a reflection of the tightly interconnected British upper class? I was never quite sure) The book then slows down while the backstories are examined and explained. As in the more famous Smiley books, there is an almost languid pace at times (a birthday party at Proctor’s house, Julian’s breakfast at a cafe) while simultaneously there are hints of events hurtling onwards in the background (Proctor taking phone calls on his special green phone during the party, Edward Avon joining Julian during that breakfast).
The title of the book refers to the house in which Edward lives, along with his dying wife Deborah and their daughter Lily (the irritable young woman with the pram). The house is connected to the Secret Service via a somewhat unlikely computer network connection, a huge breach in security that is at the core of this book.
Julian, the only non-spy character, is level-headed and far from naive. He is perceptive and a good observer — he notices the beaten-up van with the canoodling couple who just happened to be parked outside Silverview, and remembers when he sees it again. He meets a mysterious woman to deliver a package for Edward, and quickly notes down her license plate for reasons he cannot quite explain. He is, in short, a born spy, a natural, even though his talents are never utilized in the book. Julian’s personality almost suggests that the author might have sent the book in a different direction, had he completed it himself.
As always in the Le Carré books, spies become spies for one of two reasons: Eton/Oxford family ties, or because of abandonment by an errant father. The family ties are rather amusing: whole families who have worked for the Secret Service (the ‘Circus’, MI-6) in one capacity or another, and who fully expect that some of their children will also join the company.
The Proctor family would never have described itself as upper class. Even the word ‘Establishment’ raised hackles. [..] The family was liberal, southern English, progressive, devoted to endeavour, and white. […] For its education, it sent its brightest to Winchester, its second brightest to Marlborough, and a few here and there, where need or principle dictated, to state school. [..]
On present count the Proctors could point to two learned judges, two Queen’s Counsellors, three physicians and one broadsheet editor, no politicians, thank God, and a healthy crop of spies.
In contrast, Edward’s father:
was a Pole, wasn’t he? And a shit. […] That was the only thing [he] ever lied about in his whole life, to my knowledge. Couldn’t handle his bloody awful father so he romanced about him. Pitched all sorts of different stories to different women.
Le Carré himself had one of these unreliable fathers, and the spy with the complicated father is a recurring theme in his books. These fathers are scamps, surviving by their wits, living luxuriously when they have money, and absconding just before the law when they don’t. In Silverview, there is not just one problematic father but two. Edward’s Polish father had abandoned him, but Julian’s father, the supposed old friend of Edward, is also a complicated memory. At Oxford (prolific supplier of Circus spies in the Le Carré books):
‘my father fell into the hands of a bunch of American-financed born-again evangelical mind-benders with short hair and smart ties who carted him off to a Swiss mountaintop and turned him into a fire-breathing Christian.’
Was Edward Avon proposing they now dwell on his father’s prolific sex life and other dissipations, widely aired in the gutter press of the day? [Or] the gory details of how the once-proud Lawndsley family was turfed out of his vicarage into the street without a penny?
The best Le Carré novels focus on an event that leads to a major fallout (the hunt for the Russian mole in Tinker Tailor, the tightening of the web around Karla in Smiley’s People) or follow the tortuous trail of a spy (Magnus Pym in A Perfect Spy). The spies are male, and the few female characters are either appendages to the central male, involved in their love life, sometimes the reason for their actions. (Ann, for example, the wife of George Smiley, is a central but shadowy figure). The one strong female character is Connie Sachs, head of research, who is lesbian and childless. The novels featuring women (The Little Drummer Girl, for example) were less successful, in my opinion.
But times have changed since the Cold War days; MI-5 now has a lot more women in positions of power, and working women are married and have families. In Silverview, male-female relationships are central and in the forefront. Proctor’s wife Ellen has also been a Circus employee through her career, and they have two children. Edward’s relationship with his wife Deborah is fraught, and critical to the story. Their daughter Lily falls (rather unconvincingly and perplexingly) for Julian, the bookstore owner. To get the whole backstory (always, always, the Circus files never seem to tell the whole tale) Proctor visits yet another married Circus couple, the bluff Philip and the horsy Joan. Suddenly the Circus looks like quite the family enterprise.
The author’s son found the unpublished Silverview manuscript and completed it for publication. This shows, I think. The end of the novel seems rather hurried, not quite as elegantly written, and is tied up in just too neat of a happy bow for a Le Carré novel.
One of the best scenes occurs when Julian has dinner with Edward, Deborah and Lily at Silverview. The fierce intelligence of the dying woman, her contempt for and suspicion of her husband, and the hopeless efforts of Lily to maintain peace are wonderfully done.
Silverview isn’t the right book for someone who is just starting to read Le Carre. It’s no Tinker Tailor, but for the many readers who already know and love his writing, it’s a pleasant enough addition to the library.
And it inspired me to re-watch the wonderful, definitive, completely satisfying BBC series with Alec Guinness as the quintessential George Smiley.
Very much enjoyed your comments which discussed Le Carre’s oeuvre, giving great context to this one, and your noting of the pacing of the novel.