Review: A Legacy of Spies

A Legacy of Spies by John le Carré
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Review of John Le Carre’s A Legacy of Spies

In some ways this is two books, one of which is vital and timely and the other of which adds another wrinkle to one of the great extended literary corpora (corpuses?) of the last half century.

In order to appreciate the second of those, you have to have a sense of John Le Carre’s work from his magnificent The Spy Who Came in From the Cold forward. If you don’t know it, let me just say that it’s to the spy genre as The Maltese Falcon is to the detective genre. It’s the book that showed it’s possible to make literature out of a set of clichés.

Le Carre was an actual spy (just as Hammett was an actual detective) but what distinguishes him is his moral imagination. He wrote in implicit contrast to Ian Fleming who gave us a contemporary amoral portrait in his James Bond. Where Bond is a kind of Superman, someone impervious both to physical danger and to the moral implications of what he does, Le Carre’s Alec Leamas, George Smiley and, here (in full for what I think is the first time) Peter Guillam, are deeply vulnerable as they go about the dirty work of defending the West.

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold really is a magnificent novel, one I’ve read half a dozen times and have taught to college students as an example of how a thrilling story can be about more than simply whether its hero survives. It built on some of Le Carre’s earlier novels (or so I understand since I haven’t read those), and then Le Carre built on it with a series of mid-career novels exploring extensions of its premises and characters. The “Karla Trilogy” of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy; The Honourable Schoolboy; and Smiley’s People is also terrific, and I think I have also read and enjoyed another in the period after.

In that light, this book goes back to the same Cold War skirmishes, really to the plan to deal with the terrifying Stasi agent Hans-Dieter Mundt. Where that conflict set the stage for Smiley’s showdown with Karla, in this case we get to see much of the detail leading up to it as an aging Peter Guillam reviews old files and his own memories of what took place before Leamas’s daring operation.

If all that’s confusing, it should be. That element of this novel works only for people who have taken the worthwhile time to read all or most of Le Carre to this point. It’s a kind of after-dinner aperitif, one that takes us back to the very beginnings of the dense and thoughtful world Le Carre established.

And, to be blunt, that part of it seems to me a slightly diminished work. Much of what’s retrospective in this comes in clunky transcripts that Guillam reads, and all of it requires an intricate knowledge of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. It retains the moral inquiries of the original, but it doesn’t extend them. It simply asks us to be struck afresh by what took place.

This is, in effect, two novels, though, and the other half of it is very much worth celebrating. The frame narrative of Guillam’s re-examination of the past is that a new generation is challenging the decisions he and his contemporaries made in those dark days of the Cold War. Leamas’s son is suing for damages, but more troubling is that current British intelligence officers are sympathetic. There is, in other words, an urge to judge the actions of our protagonists by the standards and implicit moral purity of today.

In doing so, Le Carre is crystalizing a much broader debate about how we judge the actions and mores of the recent past. The #MeToo movement has accomplished wonderful things, but there are complexities to it that we’re only just confronting. What are to make of a Joe Biden who, notable mistreatment of Anita Hill aside, has generally been a supporter of women’s rights but who, like a too-much-aftershave uncle-in-law, hugs a little too long and touches in the face of please-don’t?

Some of the recent Bond movies have sought to soften Bond’s fundamental misogyny by showing him working with strong women. It never quite works, though, because Bond is reprehensible. And Bond’s sense of women as objects is only one aspect of his thinking that we should utterly reject.

Le Carre’s characters have always stood in contrast to Bond, though. They too mistreated women, used them as pawns in their games, but Le Carre always questioned that premise. His characters used everyone, even one another, and they did so in the belief that they had to make moral compromises in order to accomplish the greater good. And then, because Le Carre holds himself ever accountable to the highest standards, they realized their greater good was still well short of perfection. The sum power of the novels is that these men have to continue living with themselves even as they see how compromised they are.

The animating point of the parts of this novel that really matter, then, is the sense that today’s “children” don’t have the full range of perspective to judge these characters. It’s easy to condemn James Bond, and it ought to be easy to condemn, say, an anti-feminist like Donald Trump or Phyllis Schlafley. It ought to be more difficult – though still perhaps necessary – to condemn a Joe Biden or a Peter Guillams. And that challenge is what Le Carre sets up for himself in this part of the novel. He defends his spies not because he sees them as fundamentally good, but because he has spent a powerful career already condemning them. He has done so with a studied complexity, though, and not with the easy good/bad designations he sees other inclined to apply. He is, in other words, defending nuance in an age when it’s in short supply.

As a bottom line, then, this novel is vintage Le Carre – “vintage” in the sense of its being animated by questions of history that resonate with our moment. I’d say read it for that element, but recognize that it’s probably too tied to his earlier novels to stand entirely on its own.


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