Audiobooks
A Legacy of Spies

by John le Carré
Penguin Audio, September 2017, $40

In 1963, John le Carré leaped into literary stardom with his alternative to Ian Fleming’s popular fantasy adventures of superspy James Bond. Under his birth name, David Cornwell, he worked in Intelligence during the 1950s and a portion of the ’60s, giving him an even more jaundiced view of the clandestine profession than Graham Greene’s. His grim and gritty, ultra-realistic The Spy Who Came in From the Cold may have focused on hapless British agent Alec Leamas and his desperate attempt to complete an impossible assignment, but it also featured spymaster George Smiley, a character who’d previously solved crimes in the author’s first novels, both mystery fiction, Call for the Dead (1961) and A Murder of Quality (1962). After The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, Smiley, the top investigator in England’s intelligence service, held sway over several superb novels, including Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974) and The Honorable Schoolboy (1977). Though The Secret Pilgrim (1990) includes stories from the master’s past, the character was retired by the author after Smiley’s People (1979). Until now. Still, Smiley isn’t the protagonist of A Legacy of Spies. That would be his right hand man, Peter Guillam, once described as “Young Peter,” but these days feeling his age and a strange mixture of annoyance and fear at being plucked from retirement by a new generation of intelligence operatives who pressure him for the whereabouts of his mentor. They want to “interrogate” Smiley about the more controversial activities of The Circus (le Carré’s name for the agency) during the Cold War years. They’re particularly interested in those involving the fate of Leamas and a woman he recruited, whose offspring are suing the British government. This is a very clever way for the author to bring us up to date on his famous Smiley, who eventually puts in a notable appearance, to answer some of the questions left at the end of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (and The Honorable Schoolboy), and to close the file on The Circus’ Cold War years. Le Carré was the reader of most if not all of his previous audio novels, but this time he has left that task to actor Hollander, who appeared in the recent miniseries made from the author’s The Night Manager. Either purposely or by chance, he sounds very much like le Carré, properly British, with a smooth, perfectly paced, compelling delivery. He does a splendid job of vocally interpreting the many moods of the book’s narrator, Guillam, who’s insulted, threatened, stalked, and battered. He’s also particularly adept at catching the smarmy, insinuating tones of Guillam’s interrogators, the loathsome, insinuating Bunny and the feral Laura. Unlike le Carré, Hollander does not imitate Alec Guinness in giving voice to Smiley. He could, of course, be imitating the more recent Smiley, Gary Oldman, but who would know?

Dick Lochte
Teri Duerr
5875
le Carré
September 2017
a-legacy-of-spies
40
Penguin Audio