Silverview: A Novel

Viking Press/October 2021

By John Le Carré

Review by Robin V. Sears

November 26, 2021

For many of us, John Le Carré has been a source of inspiration and delight throughout our adult lives. From his first book, Call for the Dead, in 1961, 60 years ago until now, every couple of years we could expect the delivery of a new Le Carré gem to be read, re-read and debated with fellow devotees.

Now, with the help of his son Nick Cornwell, David Cornwell, as he was in his real life, has delivered us a final gift. Silverview will not be as impressive to those not steeped in the Le Carré canon as those who have followed his journey with a fan’s attention. It is full of veiled references to his earlier characters, settings, and even snatches of dialogue. It reads as a final tying up the loose threads in the universe he created.

Nick Cornwell, in an elegant epilogue, reveals that it is a text that his father had finished and rewritten many times before his death a year ago. He believes that it was his final gift to his former colleagues in the British intelligence community, especially MI6, the original Secret Service, whom he served until the mid-60s. The short novel, just 200 pages, is a set of reflections on the values, failures, excesses and factions within the world’s most mythologized — thanks mostly to Le Carré and Ian Fleming — intelligence agency.

Silverview is written with love for spy culture and its eccentricities, but with sharp critiques of its treatment of its own loyal servants by some in the senior leadership, whom Le Carré once labelled “the espiocrats.” Nick Cornwell speculates that his father wanted this sharp depiction of some of his former colleagues to be public only when he was gone. That seems right.

The story is a simple one, especially for the Le Carré of deliciously complex plots with character sets in the dozens, in many volumes over decades. But it is the atmosphere and deft sketches of a certain type of British Secret Service family, of the impact of class and culture, family histories and the joy and straightjackets of life in small town England that are so beguiling.

The central character, Edward Florian, is the fulcrum on which Le Carré hangs this tale of the collision between conviction and corporate loyalty. It is an acute portrait of the corrupting impact that brutal unearned violence and treachery can do to the values even of people of honour. The bad deeds mostly happen offstage, with Le Carré’s usual discretion, but they are made somehow more appalling by their veiled renditions.

The arc of Le Carré’s career narrative feels complete with Silverview. From the 1963 novel that propelled him to fame, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold,  to Silverview, it completes his life’s written work where it began: the tortured field agent betrayed by his superiors. The difference this time is the moral ambiguity of his central character’s choices.

It was his often-searing critique of political leaders and their intelligence chiefs, including their execution of corrupt policy agendas that consumed Le Carré post-Cold War. The twisted values of those who were charged with serving those agendas, often requiring the betrayal of their ‘joes’ — the low-level local sources and agents — became the centre of Le Carré’s novels in the past 30 years.

From the 1963 novel that propelled him to fame, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, to Silverview, it completes his life’s written work where it began: the tortured field agent betrayed by his superiors.

It placed him in a very different place in the eyes of the “espiocrats” than the Smiley Trilogy, his magnum opus. That was a mostly sympathetic treatment of the Western intelligence agencies’ struggle to counter Soviet efforts to undermine democracies on hidden battlefields in every corner of the world. In the decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, though, Le Carré focused on the corrupt behaviour of big pharma, intelligence agencies’ incompetence, their deadly impact on innocent lives, and on the supine behaviour of senior espiocrats to the demands of their political leaders in the Middle East, in Central America, in the Caucasus and on and on.

In The Tailor in Panama, he even mocked his former colleagues’ susceptibility to entirely fictitious accounts of intrigue and insurrection, by a cheerfully creative agent in the field. That novel must have provoked deep rage at Vauxhall Cross, the massive headquarters of MI6 in downtown London. It was one thing to be accused of throwing your field agents to the wolves, quite another to be laughed at as simple buffoons, able to be gamed by any corrupt spook.

Le Carré as Cornwell publicly opposed the 2003 Iraq invasion, bringing harsh condemnation from Bush/Blair apologists. He was attacked by right-wing pundits as being soft on terrorism. He became a passionate anti-Brexit critic and marcher in the years before his death in 2020. And before that end, following a fall at his beloved Corwall home, Le Carré signaled his understanding of the immutable ambiguity of the intelligence world. His last three novels explored grey as the inevitable colour of its ethical choices, and the tension between the defence of policy goals and the defence of agents in the field.

In Silverview, Le Carré brings all these threads together. In the end, he concludes that loyalties to trusted colleagues, to family, friendships and personal values must always trump those demanded by institutions and agencies. Yet, he nonetheless paints a sympathetic portrait of those leaders who attempt to defend their agencies’ integrity, legitimacy and survival. It is a compelling final glimpse into the moral ambiguity that Le Carré helped us understand and that will always infuse the work of spies.

If you are new to Le Carré, read the Smiley trilogy first, save Silverview for a look back at the astonishing legacy of the world’s greatest spy novelist —or, as some argue, simply one of the greatest novelists of his time.

Contributing Writer Robin V. Sears is an inveterate fan of John Le Carré.