A Legacy of Spies (George Smiley Series)

by John le Carré

Overview

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

The undisputed master returns with his first Smiley novel in more than twenty-five years—a #1 New York Times bestseller and ideal holiday gift.

Peter Guillam, staunch colleague and disciple of George Smiley of the British Secret Service, otherwise known as the Circus, is living out his old age on the family farmstead on the south coast of Brittany when a letter from his old Service summons him to London. The reason? His Cold War past has come back to claim him. Intelligence operations that were once the toast of secret London, and involved such characters as Alec Leamas, Jim Prideaux, George Smiley and Peter Guillam himself, are to be scrutinized by a generation with no memory of the Cold War and no patience with its justifications.
 
Interweaving past with present so that each may tell its own intense story, John le Carré has spun a single plot as ingenious and thrilling as the two predecessors on which it looks back: The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. In a story resonating with tension, humor and moral ambivalence, le Carré and his narrator Peter Guillam present the reader with a legacy of unforgettable characters old and new.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780525505488
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	09/04/2018
Series:	George Smiley Series
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	384
Sales rank:	1,165,706
Product dimensions:	4.10(w) x 6.20(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

John le Carré was born in 1931 and attended the universities of Bern and Oxford. He taught at Eton and served briefly in British intelligence during the Cold War. For the last fifty years he has lived by his pen. He divides his time between London and Cornwall.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One
(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "A Legacy of Spies"
by .
Copyright © 2018 John le Carré.
Excerpted by permission of Penguin Publishing Group.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Editorial Reviews

[Le Carré's] novels are so brilliant because they’re emotionally and psychologically absolutely true, but of course they’re novels.” —New York Times Book Review

“Le Carré’s prose remains brisk and lapidary. His wit is intact and rolls as if on casters... I might as well say it: to read this simmering novel is to come in from the cold.” —New York Times

“Le Carré is such a gifted storyteller that he interlaces the cards in his deck so they fit not simply with this book, but with the earlier ones as well.” —The Atlantic

"A kind of eulogy for the present as well as the past, A Legacy of Spies is haunting." —Chicago Tribune

"Swift and satisfying." —USA Today

“We wish for more complexity and logic in our politics, so we look to make political art that is logical and complex: a genre defined by John le Carré.” —New Republic

“The spy master’s latest Smiley novel entwines today’s world with a lost one... Ingenious."
—Washington Post

"Intricately plotted and richly satisfying." —Star Tribune

"Gripping."—The Christian Science Monitor

"[Le Carré] can convey a character in a sentence, land an emotional insight in [a] phrase & demolish an ideology in a paragraph." —Publishers Weekly (starred)

“Any reader who knows le Carré's earlier work, and quite a few who don't, will assume that any attempt to second-guess the mandarins of the Service will backfire. The miracle is that the author can revisit his best-known story and discover layer upon layer of fresh deception beneath it.”
—Kirkus

Praise for John le Carré

“One of our great writers of moral ambiguity, a tireless explorer of that darkly contradictory no-man’s land.”
—Los Angeles Times
 
“No other writer has charted—pitilessly for politicians but thrillingly for readers—the public and secret histories of his times.”
—The Guardian (UK)
 
“I would suggest immortality for John le Carré, who I believe one of the most intelligent and entertaining writers working today.”
—Alan Cheuse, Chicago Tribune
 
“The constant flow of emotion lifts le Carré not only above all modern suspense novelists, but above most novelists now practicing.”
—Financial Times
 
“A writer of towering gifts.”
—The Independent (UK)

From the Publisher

Almost sixty years have passed since George Smiley first appeared in John le Carré's novel Call for the Dead. And even then the diffident spy felt "pedestrian and old-fashioned," as though " . . . he had entered middle age without ever being young." Just two years later came his apparent defeat in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, which ended with Smiley desperately waiting for British agent Alec Leamas to to escape over the Berlin Wall: " 'Jump, Alec! Jump, man!' . . . [Leamas] heard Smiley's voice from quite close: 'The girl, where's the girl?' Shielding his eyes he looked down at the foot of the wall and at last managed to see her, lying still." (Both Leamas and the unknowing Liz Gold have been betrayed by Leamas's spymasters, sacrificed to protect an East German double agent.

Graham Greene called le Carré's 1963 novel "the best spy story I have ever read," and its bleak force remains undiminished while Smiley has, of course, endured. Guilt-ridden yet relentless, English literature's most complex espionage agent soon became both the sage and conscience of his trade. And of his country. For if the two novels mentioned above — along with The Looking Glass War — constitute the early distillation of le Carré's themes of secrecy and betrayal, loyalty and courage, and the subsequent Karla trilogy (Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; The Honourable Schoolboy; Smiley's People) their fleshier incarnation, all are indictments of post-Empire Britain. And of class, always class, which le Carré skewers with lethal accuracy. "His suit was just too light for respectability," Smiley notes in Call for the Dead of a bureaucrat who is "a barmaid's idea of a real gentleman."

And now in A Legacy of Spies, "A fresh-faced, bespectacled English public schoolboy of indefinable age in shirt and braces bounces out from behind a table. "I'm Bunny, by the by," he announces. "Bloody silly name, but it's followed me around since infancy and I can't get rid of it." Bunny, a lawyer for the Service, is about to interrogate (chummily, at first) Smiley's old protégé Peter Guillam, who has been summoned to London from retirement in Brittany — "to clear up a bit of unpleasantness from the past, dear boy." The unpleasantness in question is, in fact, the story of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold — for Alec Leamas, it turns out, had a son, and Liz Gold had a daughter. "They have convinced themselves, not without reason, that their respective parents died as a consequence of what appears to have been a five-star-cock-up by this Service, and by you and George Smiley personally," Bunny explains. "They are seeking full disclosure, punitive damages and a public apology that will name names."

Guillam, his passport confiscated, must revisit the files on Operation Windfall (conveniently if improbably stored in the original safe house) and reveal all. Because, as Bunny's colleague puts it, "Once we have the truth, we'll know how to doctor it." Le Carré has lost none of his sardonic wit. And his taut descriptions still exude menace and dread, particularly in the flashbacks that bring this novel to life. "Inside Berlin city limits," Alec Leamas reports in his 1960 debriefing, "but it's forest, flat roads and flying snow. We pass the old Nazi radio station which is our first marker. The Citroen's a hundred yards behind us, not enjoying the icy roads. We go into the dip, gathering speed." Leamas is extracting an agent, code-named Tulip, from East Germany, in a subplot that forms a critical link with The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and is expertly interwoven. "In one chair sits George Smiley," Leamas recalls of the session, soon after Tulip's escape, in which an enemy agent is turned, "looking the way only George looks when he's conducting an interrogation: a bit put out, a bit pained, as if life is one long discomfort for him and no one can make it tolerable except just possibly you. And across from George in the other chair sits a powerful blond man of my own age with fresh bruises round his eyes." Leamas is looking at the man who will soon have him killed.

Peter Guillam is our guide through this maze of interlocking plots, which does indeed lead to Smiley, but not before a child of the past runs Guillam himself to ground. "The face [is] Alec's, but with pouchy discontent where pain lines should have been. The same pugnacious jaw. In the brown eyes, when they bothered with you, the same flashes of buccaneering charm." This is Christoph, Alec Leamas's son and another of le Carré's masterful character sketches. "You know what? Patriotism is dead, man," he lectures Guillam. "Patriotism is for babies. If this case goes international, patriotism as a justification will not fly. Patriotism in mitigation is officially fucked. Same as elites. Same as you guys." Coked up and scruffily menacing, he demands a million euros: "No lawyers, no human rights, no bullshit." A gun does come into it, in a brilliantly pathetic scene that shows how death might arrive clumsily, with no more purpose than a tantrum. Where his father had courage, Christoph has merely appetite.

But le Carré, clear-eyed as ever, is not casting back to a nobler age. If the narrator of an earlier novel, The Secret Pilgrim, says of Smiley, "He hates nostalgia, even if he's part of other people's," then the same can be said of his creator. In A Legacy of Spies, the glib technocrats of the shiny new Service are wonderfully and contemptuously drawn, but their old-school predecessors are the ones called to account. And, fittingly, by children. For children, in one form or another, have always been central in le Carré's novels. From Billy Roach, the watchful schoolboy in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, to the vengeful orphans here and, indeed, to Guillam himself, the golden boy molded by Smiley. "Well, now for the reckoning at last," he concludes, " . . . did you, George, consciously set out to suppress the humanity in me, or was I just collateral damage too?" And was Guillam's Cold War a noble cause? "Or were we simply suffering from the incurable English disease of needing to play the world's game when we weren't world players any more." (The question haunts le Carré's fiction. The enduring appeal of his novels, however, lies not in their philosophy but in their exquisite density of character and place, the result of le Carré's unrivaled ability to see: winter light after rain, snow on cobblestones, a traitor's smile. And if A Legacy of Spies is thinner in this sense, the reader, unlike the spy, can always return to the past for pleasure.

Anna Mundow, a longtime contributor to The Irish Times and The Boston Globe, has written for The Guardian, The Washington Post, and The New York Times, among other publications.

Reviewer: Anna Mundow

The Barnes & Noble Review

The good news about A Legacy of Spies is that it delivers a writer in full. Le Carré's prose remains brisk and lapidary. His wit is intact and rolls as if on casters. He is as profitably interested as ever in values, especially the places where loyalty, patriotism and affection rub together and fray. He wears his gravitas lightly…Le Carré is not of my generation but I have read him for long enough to understand how, for many readers, his characters are old friends—part of their mental furniture. There's something moving about seeing him revive them so effortlessly, to see that the old magic still holds. He thinks internationally but feels domestically. In an upside-down time, he appeals to comprehension rather than instinct. I might as well say it: to read this simmering novel is to come in from the cold.

The New York Times - Dwight Garner

★ 07/17/2017
Last seen in 1991’s The Secret Pilgrim, George Smiley returns in this stunning spy novel from MWA Grand Master le Carré, though it’s Peter Guillam, Smiley’s devoted assistant from MI6, who takes center stage. Guillam, who’s retired to Brittany, is summoned to London to answer questions about allegations of malfeasance in Windfall, an old operation involving a particularly enthusiastic East German source who needed exfiltration to England. The case has reared up because a couple of descendants of Cold War casualties are threatening an expensive and public legal action against the British government. The story of Windfall comes out through interrogations, old files, and Guillam’s memories. The result is both a riveting reprise of the Smiley novels and a new articulation of le Carré’s theme: spying is as morally bankrupt as the ideologies it serves. Readers familiar with le Carré will recognize allusions everywhere; those who aren’t won’t be left out, given the power of the storytelling and le Carré’s inimitable prose. He can convey a character in a sentence, land an emotional insight in the smallest phrase—and demolish an ideology in a paragraph. Agent: Jonny Geller, Curtis Brown. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

★ 06/15/2017
In le Carré's 24th novel, agents from the British Secret Service, with little memory of the Cold War, summon John Guillam to London to justify past misdemeanors he and his intelligence colleagues committed during the time period of The Spy Who Came In from the Cold and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, including the cover-up of covert activities, the death of innocent people, and the endless trail of unaccounted expenditures. Believing that this particular era was marked by an ethos of a surveillance society run amok, the agents pursue a blame game: history speaks—heads roll, regardless of the consequences. Guillam recalls, in great detail, many past operations with his fellow agents, specifically his mentor, George Smiley (last seen in 1991's The Secret Pilgrim). However, revisiting old times under these circumstances conjures feelings of not only nostalgia but also frustration, humiliation, and outrage as a new generation throws back the past in Guillam's face. VERDICT Le Carré incorporates many layers of meaning and numerous memorable characters into this intense story that pulses with tension, humor, and moral ambivalence. Smiley fans will be lining up for this one. [See Prepub Alert, 3/8/17.]—Jerry P. Miller. Cambridge, MA

Library Journal

The combined performances of author John le Carré and narrator Tom Hollander in this new George Smiley espionage novel are a tour de force to be savored and cherished. Our protagonist is Peter Guillam, who, 40 years on and under interrogation, must revisit the disastrous events of THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD. We’re back in the morally ambiguous world of Cold War spy craft as Guillam guards the old secrets while fending off doubt. Where is Smiley in this? You’ll see. Hollander expertly channels the tense coiled spring of the Smiley novels, coloring with accent when necessary, using pacing and pauses to keep you from pressing “stop,” and in a warm, even-toned narrative voice, audibly savors every beautiful word. A.C.S. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine

SEPTEMBER 2017 - AudioFile

2017-06-20
After having turned from his peerless chronicles of George Smiley and his fellow spies to the tale of his own life (The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life, 2016), le Carré returns to put yet another spin on the events of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963).Looking back from half a century later, Peter (ne Pierre) Guillam resolves to tell the truth of how his senior colleague Alec Leamas met his death along with his lover, Elizabeth Gold, that fatal day at the Berlin Wall. More than an old man's memories prompt this valediction. When Peter, long retired from the British Intelligence Service to a Brittany farm, is summoned back to London, the Service's chief lawyer, a man who introduces himself only as Bunny, informs him that Christoph Leamas, Alec's bastard son, has discovered Liz's daughter, Karen, and made common cause with her, threatening a lawsuit against the Service and correspondingly ruinous publicity for leading their parents to their deaths through misdirection, falsehood, and professional betrayal. Many of the documents that might help explain the circumstances, Bunny notes with asperity, have gone suspiciously missing; what troubles Peter even more is the documents that survive, which root Alec's and Liz's fatal shootings not only in Alec's long-known battle of wits against Stasi Deputy Head Hans Dieter Mundt, but also Alec's well-concealed and institutionally unauthorized attempt to smuggle out of East Germany his most recent supplier of information, Doris Gamp (codenamed Tulip), the put-upon assistant to senior Stasi official Dr. Emmanuel Rapp who's been passing on photographs of classified documents her husband, ambitious Stasi functionary Lothar Quinz, has brought home. Any reader who knows le Carré's earlier work, and quite a few who don't, will assume that any attempt to second-guess the mandarins of the Service will backfire. The miracle is that the author can revisit his best-known story and discover layer upon layer of fresh deception beneath it.

Kirkus Reviews