Silverview
JOHN LE CARRÉ
(VIKING, 224 PP, £20)
Tablet bookshop price £18 • tel 020 7799 4064
John le Carré died last Christmas, a year or so after the publication of what we thought was his final novel, Agent Running in the Field. Yet earlier this month, as he would have turned 90, another novel was published. We must assume this is his last. Le Carré, the publisher’s press release informs us, had been working on it at the same time that he’d been writing Agent Running and its predecessor, A Legacy of Spies. I’m afraid that busy schedule seems to have overstretched le Carré. At over 208 pages of generously leaded text, Silverview is far and away his thinnest novel.
We are in Suffolk, to where Julian Lawndsley has decamped after a miserable but money-making few years in the City, there to set up a high-end bookstore. Enter Edward Avon, a homburg-sporting gent whose rococo turns of phrase recall those of Zero Mostel in The Producers. I live in Silverview, he breathlessly informs Julian, that big house over there where my wife is dying. Have you thought about an antiquarian department in your unused basement? We’ll need a computer and the internet of course.
