A standard distinction between the English and the American novel from Defoe to E. M. Foster and from James Fennimore Cooper to F. Scott Fitzgerald, before the categories got changed by Modernism, is the subject matter. English novels are about family life while American novels are about social problems: the frontier for Cooper, organizations purposeful and purposeless in Melville, slavery and inequality for Twain, Howells about labor and Wharon is about the status of women and Fitzgerald is concerned with Jazz Age ambitions. Another way to deal with those novelists writing in English is their ideology or point of view. Dickens is a Christian conservative, George Eliot is a Christian liberal, and Wilkie Collins is a liberal secularist, while Twain is also a liberal secularist but Hawthorne was concerned with sin and salvation and Melville was bitter about the failure or death of God. Here is a third way to sort out the English language novelists and it has to do with the characters of people as open or closed. The major strand is that people are open in that people are what they seem to be. The reader is able to get enough cues to figure out what a person is all about and, presumably, can read real people in that way too. Defoe thought everyone was rational and so understandable. Elizabeth Bennet thought she was outspoken and so some people found her difficult while everybody, including himself, thought Darcey to be arrogant. We know who Fagin is and not to trust his scheming and we know Pip is pliable but carries a torch for a very long time. No secrets are unrevealed in that strand of the English-writing novel. Ahab has mysteries the reader can’t penetrate but we know that itself to be the problem, his secrecy a concern for everyone around him. Wharton’s Lily Bart in “The House of Mirth” knows what her problem is, that she is getting old without having secured a position. On the other hand, there is a minor strand of writers who are difficult to phantom. Twain makes mysterious all the people in Hadleyville without using much of a gimmick, which makes that story a very striking work of art, while the idea that people are not visible is so strange a perception in art as well as in life that their authors have to often adopt a deliberate role by which people act to make themselves cloaked. Melville adopts a confidence man so as to see the mysterious and labyrinthian ways through which people can avoid and attract themselves to Christianity, and so do Conrad’s anarchists and those who follow into the world of espionage: Graham Green also to find his way to Christianity, and most recently, and the subject of this present occasion, John Le Carre. Let’s elaborate on how he does that.
His last completed book, “Silverview”, retains the polish of Carre previous works but is organized so as to highlight the ironies of leading a normal life and a secret one of espionage. This detracts from the emotional depth and sweep of his Smiley trilogy or of, let us say. “The Little Drummer Girl”, but it accomplishes something else, which is to separate the various ironies, each one in a separate short chapter, some using old devices and some new ones. In the brief first chapter, there is a play between making life ordinary as opposed to faking life so as to cover up what should be hidden. So a person is advised to go to visit a school so you will think you have done it truly rather than as a pretext for what is to be covered up, the idea that being like truth is more truthful than it otherwise might seem, and so we all know that acting truthfully is close to being truthful, which is the case in all everyday behaviors, as when one goes to the day in bed without being truly sick so as to have an excuse to be home from work. Every person lives the life of the spy.
The second short chapter posits a different intrigue. A stranger approaches a new bookseller, one Julian Lawndsley, and charms him into helping him with his bookstore on the pretext that he was a schoolchum of Julian’s father. Why would he have done this? Was it an innocent gesture because of an old acquaintanceship that both people had time to pass? Coincidences and surprises can happen; in both real and fictional life. Or is there something else afoot, which is that, in fact, the older man is engaged in an elaborately planned counter-espionage operation that can allow any reader of spy fiction can imagine at any time to pop up to ravel up a grand and secret design. So are plots about to be understood as contrived or as “natural”, and how to tell the difference lest a person go md with suspicion or remain just naive about all the stratagems that are used to allow a life to proceed, as when a man plans to find an excuse to meet with a girl or has an ambition that undergirds everyday encounters. Is life a spy novel or is a spy novel a sinister joke on real life?
A third short chapter does something very different. It abandons the ironies of real and fake and presents a weather comical portrait of Stewart Proctor and his well to do family, with the home and the appurtenances of the politics and religion appropriate to his well satisfied clan, except that his occupation is that he is a master in the security services who is ought to catch those who engage in betraying secrets. He has a green telephone that is his main clue of his covert contact, even if everyone he knows suspects he is high up in the security services. So both things are real: that he is an ordinary as well as well off bloke and also a member in that very old profession, Does that mean there is no irony, which is what the reader will infer from his reading of the chapter, or a master irony in that ordinary life includes its secrets? Ironies of different levels abound, some a bit humorous but also deeply serious. And so on with some more chapters until getting on with the plot already telegraphed and moved along by the author.
Le Carre’s plot in “Silverview”, as it does in many of his novels, particularly in “A Perfect Spy”, where a spy is someone who is always a con man, born and bred in that nature and so almost inevitable, also shows how the security forces track down the prey, which is a traitor within their midst, the relentless counterspies using guile, charm, and penetrating insights to allow themselves to figure out what is going on. How is ordinary life slightly askew so as to infer that something dastardly is taking place? Why should a character be driven to convert from one’s prior allegiances? How have people been incidental to the betrayal or central to it? To penetrate these depths requires more than spycraft; it means understanding the human condition.
The story proceeds from some initial inkling that there has been a breech, to a supplementary figure (this time, Julian) who has become implicated, to surveillance through multiple technical devices, to interview and surveillance, and finally to the prey itself, shifting back and forth between the hunted and the hunters, making the reader anticipate how the various strands of the story are connected to one another until the mystery is resolved, rushing forward to its inevitable conclusion where much if not all is revealed and the people impinged by the security breach impacted, both friends and antagonists, family and bystanders, in that to the security service such a breech is the fatal and original and essential sin that can lead a nation to chaos and national disillusion. It matters whether counterspies are to be caught so as to restore the integrity of the social fabric.
Le Carre has never done a better portrait of Great Britain, not even the provincial town where the heroine is first found as an aspiring actress in “The Little Drummer Girl”. In “Silverview”, there is the seaside resort where it always rains and the houses are damp. There are big houses with big ugly rooms and small houses and shops with small ugly rooms. There are old boy networks and new recruits inveigled into them. There is a religion bereft of passion and belief but only its ceremonials left, the same like the politics and espionage, except that the Service is a real religion in that it has beliefs, though what they are is not clear, and also martyrs, which abound and who Le Carre can unravel. There are old wars that cannot be laid to rest even as they are succeeded by new ones. That is England, today.
It is easy and even essential in long novels, such as in Dickens, to shift emotional tones as well as content and characters. The same is true with Le Carre. There are interludes and strategic changes in the Smiley novels where the reader suspends the intrigue just to get the pleasure of engaging in linguistic fireworks whereby someone being interrogated is convinced to change his mind for both good self interest and emotional rhetoric. Not so in a novella and a short story where there is, famously, a single tone that pervades the work of art, as is the case with Katherine Porter. “Silverview” is a short novel that manages to include subplots and a number of major and minor figures, and so to be admired for its novelistic terseness, but it also maintains a single tone, which is a combination of sadness and defeat for just about every character and for the general situation in Great Britain and in its security agency. The dominant figure, Edward Avon, is a disillusioned secret agent looking for a purpose. Proctor, the main spy who unravels the case, is soon to be retired and is uncertain about his long time wife’s fidelity. The young man who Avon manipulates, Julian , is never clear as to why he gave up making money in the city to start a seaside independent bookshop. Ambitions are thwarted’ purposes disappointed. That is not just the state of Great Britain; it is the human condition that Le Carre just brings to higher relief by making it about people in espionage betraying one another, and that is why Le Carre is so reminiscent of Conrad in the very sad view of humanity offered by suspicious people. Avon’s daughter will survive partly because of her moxie and also because she has the support of a good man, but most life is as dreary as the seacoast, even including up to and worst of all, that Avon betrays his dying wife by pilfering her secrets. That strikes me as particularly striking, as a very bad and shocking revelation even as the rest of the people also intrigue about their own private interests and their own sometimes sincere protestations of friendship and love. Spies are just people but spying is a good image for what people ordinarily do when they penetrate into one another’s lives, each person exclusive within his or her own self and a danger if they let a person into your psychological or physical sanctum. Beware is the watchword.
Le Carre’s son, in an afterword to the novel, suggested why LeCarre letting the novel go into publication was delayed until after his death. That explanation is that the state of England’s espionage service had so deteriorated because of internal bickering and no longer clear national aims that Le Carre, who was fiercely loyal to that service, did not want to disparage it, which is what the novel shows. I think the explanation is otherwise. Le Carre had in his own most major works also shown the service to be conflicted. The Smiley Trilogy shows a rift between the agents who accepted the colonization of England by the Americans and those who resented it, enough so as to betray the English to the Soviets. And there were plenty of personal grievances and intrigues throughout, the play of national and personal interests one of Le Carre’s signal perceptions.
The real reason, I think, that this book was delayed until after his death was that it was an old man’s book, one where he ruminates about death in that he wonders what has been left after a life is over. A major scene in the novel is a funeral scene where all the people the reader have come to know show upland parade themselves as people will in the light of a funeral. Edward Avon is an already elderly man who has had many adventures but still up to one more, the reader not knowing how recently he started on his secret endeavors. Julian, the young man, had not found satisfactory the deaths and funerals of his parents. How does it end? In a hope and a dream, as with Edward, or with the perfunctory but doubtlessly sincere services at which the espionage service prides itself? When it is over, it is over, and whether Avon has died in attempting his final escape is left unresolved. Never mind being so sad to be a spy or, worse, a betrayed spy. So sad to see an end.