Silverview
by John le Carré
Penguin Viking, £20.00, 208 pages
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Posthumous novels are rarely a good idea. A great writer’s literary executors find a discarded, unfinished manuscript in the bottom drawer, polish it up a bit and send it out into the world hoping to make some money before anybody notices that the book isn’t any good. Hemingway’s Islands in the Stream springs to mind. Many of us are still recovering from Robert Ludlum’s The Janson Directive.
John le Carré, the pre-eminent spy novelist of the last century, died in December. For five decades he had dominated the bestseller lists, leaving behind at least half a dozen novels which will be read 100 years from now. In his pomp – a period spanning more than 25 years from The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963) to The Russia House (1989) – le Carré was one of the finest writers in the English language: a stylist of lavish gifts; a chronicler of social realism to set alongside Dickens and Conrad; and a suspense novelist without peer.
