Silverview by John Le Carré review – some things are better left unpublished

Silverview by John le Carré (Penguin), £20.

John le Carré is a British hero. Obituaries following his death lauded his success in raising “the spy novel to a new level of seriousness and respect” and his ability to reach beyond the glamour of Bond-like espionage to the “seedy” realities.

The breadth of the love for him and his writing – and the fact that you would be hard-pressed to find a middle-class man who does not list le Carré as one of his favourite authors – makes writing this review quite daunting.

This is because Silverview (published posthumously this week) is not a good novel. Not only is it not good, at points, it is actively awful.

It follows the classic le Carré gambit of an unknown and odd figure who turns out to be a spy. But beyond that, the plot manages to be both remarkably slim – 207 pages spent revealing that the man who acts oddly in Chapter 1 is, indeed, a spy – and impossible to follow. I became convinced that there must have been more lurking under the surface of the text and tied myself in knots trying to decipher what that is.

Part of the charm of le Carré is his ironic elitist thrill – his poking fun at the people who exist in the hotels managed by The Night Manager, or the George Lacons of this world (“Charlotte got her scholarship to Roedean, which was nice”).

In Silverview, this ironic charm falls flat: le Carré spends an expanse of pages describing the Proctor family – “who would never have described itself as upper class”. The description is meticulous: “Its money was held in trusts and not discussed. For its education, it sent its brightest to Winchester, its second brightest to Marlborough, and a few here and there, where need or principle dictated, to state school”.

The type of family le Carré describes – “on present count the Proctors could point to two learned judges, two Queen’s Counsellors, three physicians, one broadsheet editor, no politicians, thank God, and a healthy crop of spies” – undoubtedly does exist. 

But le Carré’s description of croquet lawns and garden parties feels false not because of its improbability, but its language. The scene he describes may well be dwindling, but its vocabulary is positively extinct: you would be hard-pressed to find someone who unironically refers to a “rugger blue” in 2021.

And it is not just the Proctors who feel like remnants of a different age. Le Carré’s descriptions of women seem particularly lacklustre in the twenty-first century. 

There is the continued presence of the cheating wife – a favourite even from the George Smiley days – and an omnipresent failure to realise most female characters beyond the most two-dimensional form. 

Women are beautiful and have auburn hair which they style in the way “beautiful women know how”. For le Carré, their beauty makes any other description unnecessary.

These are difficult issues to find fault with: le Carré has always written about the establishment, upper classes, and his women have always been beauties – and at least they are more realised than Bond girls. But, the problem with Silverview is that there is not enough plot, intrigue, or suspense – surely the key components of a spy novel – to rescue these flaws.

And it is here that the real issue of the novel becomes apparent. It is less a spy novel than a novel about a spy past; most of the true interest of the text comes from past stories, past descriptions, and old flashbacks. In many ways, it is the natural end to a career of twenty-six novels: a novel about the dying dregs of the world the other books inhabited.

But nostalgia and dwindling glamour do not make for brilliant reading. The language of Silverview is stilted – it is hard to believe that this is the same author who wrote that Smiley is one of the “meek who do not inherit the earth” – and, without being crass, its plot is dull.

Silverview was evidently published to capitalise on the last of the late le Carré’s success, but surely the more dignified decision would have been to pulp it. Both le Carré fans and first-time readers: stay well, well clear.