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osprey_archer) wrote2025-06-05 08:16 am
osprey_archer) wrote2025-06-05 08:16 am
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Book Review: A Legacy of Spies
I went into John Le Carre’s A Legacy of Spies with a certain trepidation, as the book is a late-career novel that retreads the events of Le Carre’s first break-out hit, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. Years after the events in the earlier book, Smiley’s right-hand man Peter Guillam finds himself the focus of a legal investigation into what exactly went down during that mission.
Frankly, the premise struck me as a tired rehash of an earlier success. But this is not a fair assessment of A Legacy of Spies, in which Le Carre cheerfully twists a few knives that he had hitherto left untwisted in the general Smiley saga. As such, this review will feature
First of all, Le Carre wants you to know that all the spying rigmarole that led to the death of Alec Leamas and Liz Gold at the end of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold was useless. Smiley et al planned the whole mission to protect their source Mundt, but soon after the mission was complete, Mundt was summoned to Moscow and never seen again.
So NOT ONLY did Leamas die on a mission that was actually, secretly supposed to achieve the opposite of what he wanted to achieve (he wanted to kill Mundt; the mission is meant to save Mundt), but then Mundt didn’t even stay saved! Thanks, Le Carre. Glad to know that! Thanks for explaining why the oh-so-important Mundt never showed up in your later books. Bill Haydon did for him, God rest of both their traitorous souls.
Also, (shades of Bill Haydon knowingly sending his friend/lover Jim Prideaux on a probably fatal mission in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy), Peter Guillam was Alec Leamas’s friend before his fatal mission. If Peter had cared to put the pieces together, he could easily have known that Leamas’s understanding of the mission objective (kill Mundt) was not, in fact, what the higher-ups intended the mission to accomplish.
But he just… refused to put the pieces together. And I cannot emphasize enough how easy these pieces would have been to put together; not just easy for a Le Carre novel, but easy as in “he knew Leamas thought his mission was to get Mundt killed, and knew that Mundt’s death was not the actual objective of Leamas’s mission,” and just never quite managed to hold these up to the light and say, “Gosh, there’s a bit of a discrepancy here, now isn’t there.”
And now, decades later, subject to an investigation about this mission, he still refuses to put the pieces together, or rather see that the pieces don’t fit. He didn’t knowingly betray Alec, and he can never look directly at just how hard he tried to make sure that betrayal remained unknowing. It might burn his eyeballs out like looking directly in the sun.
Peter Guillam is enjoying the closest thing to a happy ending I believe I’ve ever seen a Le Carre character obtain, by the way. He’s living on the family farm in Brittany with a woman who is basically his common law wife, and they aren’t in love but they’ve got a good working partnership (frankly preferable to being in love in a Le Carre book), and he’s more or less adopted her daughter. He’s settled. He’s not hankering for further spy adventures. He’s glad when the case goes away and he gets to go home.
It’s not that Peter Guillam deserves this less than anyone else (there are in fact a long list of Le Carre characters even less deserving), but he also certainly doesn’t deserve it more. Why did he luck out? Because luck is like that, says Le Carre. Life is like that. No one gets what they deserve.
Updates on our other Le Carre friends: Smiley is researching German poetry at a small German archive, apparently still married to Anne even though they haven’t lived together for approximately fifty years. (This book was published over fifty years after The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, but it should not be assumed that fifty whole years have actually passed for the characters. At some point you just need to nod and smile and accept the smudging of dates.)
Jim Prideaux is still living in that ratty little caravan and teaching at a second rate boarding school. His life evidently stopped when he was tortured in Czechoslovakia and never really got going again. We do get textual confirmation that he and Bill Haydon were lovers.
Karla shot himself a year after he defected to the West.
Despite my doubts, a perfect end to the series, really. Brings the story full circle, updates us on all the most interesting characters, continues the exploration of Le Carre’s favorite themes. Were we the bad guys? - by “we” meaning not England, or Europe, or the West, but the international brotherhood of spies.
Frankly, the premise struck me as a tired rehash of an earlier success. But this is not a fair assessment of A Legacy of Spies, in which Le Carre cheerfully twists a few knives that he had hitherto left untwisted in the general Smiley saga. As such, this review will feature
First of all, Le Carre wants you to know that all the spying rigmarole that led to the death of Alec Leamas and Liz Gold at the end of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold was useless. Smiley et al planned the whole mission to protect their source Mundt, but soon after the mission was complete, Mundt was summoned to Moscow and never seen again.
So NOT ONLY did Leamas die on a mission that was actually, secretly supposed to achieve the opposite of what he wanted to achieve (he wanted to kill Mundt; the mission is meant to save Mundt), but then Mundt didn’t even stay saved! Thanks, Le Carre. Glad to know that! Thanks for explaining why the oh-so-important Mundt never showed up in your later books. Bill Haydon did for him, God rest of both their traitorous souls.
Also, (shades of Bill Haydon knowingly sending his friend/lover Jim Prideaux on a probably fatal mission in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy), Peter Guillam was Alec Leamas’s friend before his fatal mission. If Peter had cared to put the pieces together, he could easily have known that Leamas’s understanding of the mission objective (kill Mundt) was not, in fact, what the higher-ups intended the mission to accomplish.
But he just… refused to put the pieces together. And I cannot emphasize enough how easy these pieces would have been to put together; not just easy for a Le Carre novel, but easy as in “he knew Leamas thought his mission was to get Mundt killed, and knew that Mundt’s death was not the actual objective of Leamas’s mission,” and just never quite managed to hold these up to the light and say, “Gosh, there’s a bit of a discrepancy here, now isn’t there.”
And now, decades later, subject to an investigation about this mission, he still refuses to put the pieces together, or rather see that the pieces don’t fit. He didn’t knowingly betray Alec, and he can never look directly at just how hard he tried to make sure that betrayal remained unknowing. It might burn his eyeballs out like looking directly in the sun.
Peter Guillam is enjoying the closest thing to a happy ending I believe I’ve ever seen a Le Carre character obtain, by the way. He’s living on the family farm in Brittany with a woman who is basically his common law wife, and they aren’t in love but they’ve got a good working partnership (frankly preferable to being in love in a Le Carre book), and he’s more or less adopted her daughter. He’s settled. He’s not hankering for further spy adventures. He’s glad when the case goes away and he gets to go home.
It’s not that Peter Guillam deserves this less than anyone else (there are in fact a long list of Le Carre characters even less deserving), but he also certainly doesn’t deserve it more. Why did he luck out? Because luck is like that, says Le Carre. Life is like that. No one gets what they deserve.
Updates on our other Le Carre friends: Smiley is researching German poetry at a small German archive, apparently still married to Anne even though they haven’t lived together for approximately fifty years. (This book was published over fifty years after The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, but it should not be assumed that fifty whole years have actually passed for the characters. At some point you just need to nod and smile and accept the smudging of dates.)
Jim Prideaux is still living in that ratty little caravan and teaching at a second rate boarding school. His life evidently stopped when he was tortured in Czechoslovakia and never really got going again. We do get textual confirmation that he and Bill Haydon were lovers.
Karla shot himself a year after he defected to the West.
Despite my doubts, a perfect end to the series, really. Brings the story full circle, updates us on all the most interesting characters, continues the exploration of Le Carre’s favorite themes. Were we the bad guys? - by “we” meaning not England, or Europe, or the West, but the international brotherhood of spies.
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That's our guy!
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I also found Karla's suicide a gut punch. Not sure why exactly, since he wasn't in any way a good person, and yet... And it's just a casual aside... And of course Smiley took it hard. Smiley, you are so close to being in a Kate Beaton "Nemesis" comic with this man.
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ME TOO. He hangs on for so long and fights to survive in the USSR, and then he's "free"....and it's like he was too adapted to that environment, idk. But ofc there's no such thing as getting "free" in le Carre.
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So, first I'm laughing ("there are in fact a long list of Le Carre characters even less deserving"), but then by the end I'm reeling from the philosophical truths. "Life is not just" is a hard reality. WHAT DO WE DO WITH THIS? Le Carre shrugs. He's just the messenger.
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