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John le Carré's last novel »Silverview«: When spies get melancholy

2021-10-24T18:08:09.334Z


With »Silverview«, John le Carré, who died in December 2020, left a novel that is particularly suitable for novices as an introduction to his world of espionage. But connoisseurs also have reason to be happy.


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Author le Carré (2017): Pleasant reliability

Photo: Christian Charisius / picture alliance / dpa

Strictly speaking, John le Carré's "Silverview" is not a new novel. Le Carré had written it about ten years ago and has revised it again and again since then. And yet he could not make up his mind to publish it - a task he left to his son, who, after le Carré's death in December 2020, completed the finished manuscript with "a subtle brushstroke". At least that is what Nicholas Cornwell writes, who - like his father before - publishes his novels under a pseudonym and calls himself either Nick Harkaway or Aidan Truhen as a writer, in an illuminating epilogue, which is contained in a limited edition of the English original.

This genesis may explain why »Silverview« seems so gentle, especially in comparison to »Badminton«, the last novel published during the author's lifetime, an angry reckoning with Brexit and Trump and much else that is going wrong in the world. Towards the end of his life, Le Carré himself was anything but mild with age. He raged and demonstrated against Brexit, and at a performance in Hamburg's Elbphilharmonie in 2017 he gave a moving lecture in which he said, among other things: "Thanks to Brexit, I've never felt so strange in my country." Le Carré pulled the Consequences: He took Irish citizenship - the most important and British of Great Britain's thriller writers died as an Irishman. A final "Fuck you very much," to quote one of the titles of his son's novel.

Many motifs known from the 25 novels published within six decades also reappear in "Silverview"; Reading le Carré brings with it a pleasant reliability, without simply repeating familiar patterns - le Carré was also a master of variation.

We meet a more or less naive hero who does not really know what is happening to him and who becomes involved in something that he cannot penetrate.

In the present novel, an intrigue between aging agents who are actually aware that their time has long since run out.

There is also a weird father figure in “Silverview”, another revenant of le Carré's own father, a con man who he immortalized in one of his best, but definitely his most personal novel, “A Blinding Spy”.

Also there are the typical Le Carréian guiding principles: When does betrayal become an act of loyalty, when does a lie become truth and where do we get confidence from in a world that is inherently hopeless?

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[le Carré, John]

Silverview

Publisher: Ullstein Hardcover

translated by: Peter Torberg

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translated by: Peter Torberg

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The naive hero is Julian Lawndsley in "Silverview".

The 33-year-old has, as a fictional character puts it, "achieved something in the city," which means he has made a fortune on the London Stock Exchange.

He recently started a new life as a bookseller in East Anglia on the east coast of England.

And that, although he has no literary education worth mentioning, has never heard of the writer WG Sebald and considers the American linguistic pope Noam Chomsky to be "yet another unknown Pole." Why this Julian wants to run a bookstore is one of the secrets that le Carré does not reveal.

Julian's life changes again when Edward "Teddy" Avon walks into his shop and offers him a partnership; he would like to open a kind of reading circle in the cellar under the grandiose name "Literary Republic". It soon turns out, however, that Avon is not a strange country nobleman who desperately needs a hobby in view of the imminent death of his wife Deborah, who is seriously ill with cancer, but a former top agent of the British secret service who was born in Poland and who may have become a traitor.

That is what Deborah suspects of all people, who for her part was not only the wealthy heiress and benefactress she is known to be, but a top analyst in a department of the secret service specializing in the Middle East.

She sounds the alarm - and it starts all over again, this wonderfully ambiguous game of spies, which Le Carré has mastered more masterfully than any other.

Pure joy about the dialogues

One can understand a little le Carré's hesitation to publish this novel, it is anything but perfect, seems unfinished in parts, almost sketchy, some characters lack motivation, others background, some storylines lead nowhere. On the other hand, it is of course lucky that there is »Silverview«. Long-time le Carré readers will have fun seeing the well-known patterns knitted together in a completely new way, and for novices the novel offers a smooth and, with only 250 airy pages, well below average entry into the world of espionage, such as John le Carré saw them.

Above all, it is of course the sheer pleasure to read - actually almost heard - these decidedly British dialogues one more time, which only le Carré could write and which Peter Torberg has a keen ear for all the nuances, ambiguities and occasional threats that are hidden behind the politeness and seeming harmlessness, translated into German.

"Silverview" is one of those books, not uncommon in the genre of the espionage thriller, in which the reader cannot shake the feeling that something is missing him. As if the true meaning of what is described eludes him, which leads to an excess of interpretation, but in turn can make the reading particularly attractive: the reader who, like a spy or a detective, only creates meaning through the evaluation and contextualization of the facts, which in fact may not even be there.

Everything is just a »spy game«, as Tony Scott called his movie thriller, strongly influenced by le Carré, in 2001, a game about boundaries and transgressions, about loyalty and overreaching and, like every game, ultimately without much effect - what does George Smiley, le Carré's greatest literary creation, really about the fact that he finally captured his nemesis Karla, the Russian master spy, at the end of "Agent on his own behalf"?

Maybe not even sustainable personal satisfaction.

Or, as an aging agent put it in a melancholy moment in “Silverview”: “We haven't achieved much to change the course of history, have we?

From one spy to another, I'd guess I'd have been more useful as a youth club leader. "

The weaknesses and mistakes and misconduct of the - not only - British intelligence services have always been the fuel of le Carré's novels.

The fact that he so clearly denies these institutions their usefulness is a late development in the author's work and makes »Silverview« almost a solitaire.

Source: spiegel

All life articles on 2021-10-24

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