There is something as suggestive or more than discovering an author who captivates you with each of his new proposals. I mean what happens now with John le Carré and his wonderful George Smiley.
Enjoying a new story of good old George, so many years later… it can be ecstatic, somewhat melancholic, but always evocative.
In a way John le Carré seems not to want to distance us or get away from that idea of melancholy. The years pass and a new current plot must adjust to the times. The leading voice seems to be led in this case by Peter Guillam, George Smiley's right-hand man in so many adventures on both sides of the Iron Curtain.
Peter enjoys a placid jubilant present, with the classic hammer of the cases and adventures that he had to live. Because when a person has lived as a tightrope walker, retirement can only be an apparent state of assumption of generational change.
When Peter receives a letter to return to London, to that nest of old spies in which he sucked his passion to live on the edge, he cannot refuse.
And that is where John le Carré will have most enjoyed this story. It's all about unfinished business from the past, where the figure of George Smiley revives among files, recordings, cases and more cases.
Any topic, out of context, can sound amoral, anachronistic. And there are those who are willing to publish from the rooftops how perverse the action of those spies of the cold war had. The new caretakers of the social good do not understand, they are unable to assess why things were done underground.
The past can then be a slab of ignominy, misunderstanding and repudiation. Only that Peter and many others like him will not be willing to tarnish names like George's or actions at the limit of international legality, so necessary then to maintain world order ...
You can now buy the novel The legacy of the spies, the new book by John le Carré, here: