A Legacy of Spies by John le Carré

"The undisputed master returns with a riveting new book--his first Smiley novel in more than twenty-five years 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 Carre 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 ColdandTinker Tailor Soldier Spy. In a story resonating with tension, humor and moral ambivalence, le Carre and his narrator Peter Guillam present the reader with a legacy of unforgettable characters old and new"--

If you enjoyed The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, and the other Smiley stories, this is a must read. I'd recommend re-reading The Spy Who Came in From the Cold first.

A Legacy Of Spies is ostensibly set in the present, but le Carré is necessarily vague about exactly when the events of the novel take place, otherwise Peter Guillam is preternaturally young, and George Smiley's continued lucid existence almost entirely improbable. The book closes with Guillam noting that the events described took place a long time ago.

I've mixed feelings about this book. There are numerous little inconsistencies that trip up the continuity between this and The Spy Who Came In From The Cold. Considering how much of the background to the earlier novel Legacy fills in, such anomalies are irritating. Legacy essentially cannot exist apart from its famed predecessor, and continuity errors aside there is no evidence of le Carré's powers declining in his old age, so I'm at a loss as to why he allowed them through. They were always going to be noticed by the target audience, i.e. fans of Spy.

But plot details have possibly taken a back seat to le Carré's major theme here as I see it: that spies are flawed human beings, and their very human emotions and selfish motives can fatally blind their judgement, leading to tragedy and lifelong repercussions for all involved.

A satisfying book? Somewhat. But in once more cracking open a window upon the Circus le Carré shattered the completeness and self-containedness of Spy, retrospectively creating loose ends and reawakening a dormant curiosity that by the end of Legacy was nowhere near satisfied.