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John le Carré

Silverview Paperback – Large Print, 9 November 2021

by John Le Carré (Author)

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In Silverview, John le Carré turns his focus to the world that occupied his writing for the past sixty years--the secret world itself.

Julian Lawndsley has renounced his high-flying job in the city for a simpler life running a bookshop in a small English seaside town. But only a couple of months into his new career, Julian's evening is disrupted by a visitor. Edward, a Polish émigré living in Silverview, the big house on the edge of town, seems to know a lot about Julian's family and is rather too interested in the inner workings of his modest new enterprise.

When a letter turns up at the door of a spy chief in London warning him of a dangerous leak, the investigations lead him to this quiet town by the sea . . .

Silverview is the mesmerizing story of an encounter between innocence and experience and between public duty and private morals. In his inimitable voice John le Carré, the greatest chronicler of our age, seeks to answer the question of what we truly owe to the people we love.

Print length

272 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Random House Large Print Publishing
Publication date

9 November 2021
Dimensions

15.52 x 1.83 x 23.27 cm
ISBN-10

0593554736
ISBN-13

978-0593554739
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Product description

About the Author

JOHN LE CARRÉ was born in 1931. For six decades he wrote novels that came to define our age. The son of a confidence trickster, he spent his childhood between boarding school and the London underworld. At sixteen he found refuge at the university of Bern, then later at Oxford. A spell of teaching at Eton led him to a short career in British Intelligence, in MI5 and MI6. He published his debut novel, Call for the Dead, in 1961 while still a secret servant. His third novel, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, secured him a worldwide reputation, which was consolidated by the acclaim for his trilogy Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Honourable Schoolboy, and Smiley's People. At the end of the Cold War, le Carré widened his scope to explore an international landscape including the arms trade and the War on Terror. His memoir, The Pigeon Tunnel, was published in 2016 and the last George Smiley novel, A Legacy of Spies, appeared in 2017. Silverview is his twenty-sixth novel. John le Carré died on December 12, 2020.

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Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Random House Large Print Publishing; Large type / Large print edition (9 November 2021)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 272 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0593554736
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0593554739
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 15.52 x 1.83 x 23.27 cm

Customer Reviews:
4,190 ratings

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John le Carré

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John le Carre was born in 1931. His third novel, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, secured him a worldwide reputation, which was consolidated by the acclaim for his trilogy: Tinke, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; The Honorable Schoolboy, and Smiley's People. His novels include The Little Drummer Girl, A Perfect Spy, The Russia House, Our Game, The Taileor of Panama, and Single & Single. John le Carre lives in Cornwall.

Customer reviews

5 star		38%
4 star		36%
3 star		17%
2 star		7%
1 star		2%

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Ross K Midgley

What a disappointment

Reviewed in Australia on 28 October 2021

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We have such a contrived plot. Julian leaves a finance job and starts a book shop with absolutely no evidence of any passion for books. Then clever Julian with the wave of a wand opens a coffee bar upstairs. Then solves the rising damp in the cellar. And leaves it all in the hands of his clever assistant while he takes extended walks around the town. And it gets much worse with uninteresting and again contrived characters.
This book is an insult to my memory of Le carre, and should never have been published. I will remember Le carre by rereading Smiley's People, little drummer girl, Constant Gardener.

One person found this helpful

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Phillip Kerrigan

le carre of course

Reviewed in Australia on 25 January 2022

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His last book but the style is still strong and he holds your interest all the way. Europe's cold war still pervades the life of those who took part in secret elements and this story shows that the past is always with you.

Reviewed in Australia on 6 November 2021

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I disliked the approach taken by this book. I prefer an approach which helps the reader understand the plot and the themes.

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Julle Bierling

Extract only, full version not delivered

Reviewed in Australia on 15 December 2021

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Unable to comment, did not get full version delivered to my I pad, cannot switch to new book without this dreary requirement to review

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Geoff Warrener

Bestseller on reputation only

Reviewed in Australia on 17 November 2021

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Had to force myself to finish this book - the style and presentation gave me the impression that I was reading a book couched at teenagers - somewhat absurd

Reviewed in Australia on 18 April 2022

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a convoluted tale about nothing. extremely disappointing compared to other Le Carre novels. I wouldn’t recommend to anyone. no suspense, too much focus on the mundane. I wouldn’t recommend to anyone.

Reviewed in Australia on 1 November 2021

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I found it hard to get into this story. I did not enjoy as much as previous Le Carre novels.

Reviewed in Australia on 13 December 2021

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Never got into it.
Seemed to be building toward something but never got there and just petered out without providing any clarity or purpose to the story.

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The Cookster

The last (and, sadly, somewhat disappointing) completed novel of a master craftsman.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 14 October 2021

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Rating: 2.4/5

Not far short of a year has elapsed since John Le Carré passed away in December 2020. "Silverview" is billed as the last novel that he completed during his lifetime and its publication has been eagerly anticipated by many people who admired the work of the master craftsman that Le Carré so often showed himself to be. Sadly, this is unlikely to go down as one of his best or most memorable novels, and is actually somewhat disappointing.

There are glimpses of Le Carré at his best with some tantalising wordsmithery and eloquent prose. "Silverview" also contains a number of wonderfully drawn characters with genuine depth and appeal. However, in spite of those elements and despite the fact that this is described as his final completed novel something feels amiss. It isn't simply that the book is unusually short, but there is also the sense that certain sections still feel as though they are "work in progress". The bones of the structure are there, but there is the impression that Le Carré still intended to revisit certain passages and flesh them out more fully.

We will probably never know for sure whether that was actually the case, so perhaps John Le Carré has left his readers with one final mystery and conspiracy theory to ponder over, after all.

38 people found this helpful

Martin Jones

The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 15 October 2021

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Silverview is John Le Carré’s posthumously published 2021 novel about a City trader who plots an escape to bookshop ownership in a quiet English seaside town. But once installed in his new shop, he inadvertently becomes involved in the affairs of a disenchanted former spy.

Obviously, reviewing a book like this involves not giving away plot details, keeping secrets, as any good agent gathering information is obliged to do. But a review is also designed to let people in on a few secrets so that a potential reader can decide if this is a book for them. Or you might have already read the book and are looking to see what someone else found in it. Tricky - the secrets you keep or give away in this intelligence report.

What I will say is that I enjoyed Silverview. To me it was a study in the contradictions of belief, the meaning that people find in being passionate about something - whether that’s related to religion, politics, nationality or fighting the good fight against extreme manifestations of whatever belief people latch onto. Agents who are passionate about the rightness of their mission are highly motivated. However, that passion remains an unpredictable energy, which can easily express itself in dangerous ways. Here we have the thoughts of a Secret Service staffer, who characterises life in the Service as the avoidance of passion:

“Absolute commitment of any sort constituted to his trained mind a grave security threat. The entire ethic of the Service was utterly – he would almost say absolutely – opposed to it, unless, that is, you were talking of manipulating the absolute commitment of an agent you were running.”

As a final note, with an admitted risk to security, I will share one thought with you, which might help provide a way into the central contradiction of Silverview. Perhaps Le Carré puts his main idea into the form of a little code. It would be a similar code to that found in the name of the lovely character, Liz Gold, in The Spy Who Came In From The Cold. In that book it is hard to work out where exactly constitutes the Cold, when one side uses the same ruthless tactics as the other. This confusion might be characterised by Liz Gold’s name - gold sounding so close to cold. Silverview has a character who reminded me of Liz.. She has a “nun like” devotion, representing a capacity for passionate commitment, which has ambivalent outcomes. Her name is only one letter away from ‘mania’. I will leave you to find her and come to your own conclusions.

This book brings the spy story into an age where those national struggles the Service was built to support, have themselves become a threat. It’s a fascinating and timely addition to Le Carré’s collection of work.

20 people found this helpful

Si

Poor

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 15 October 2021

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Have to say this is a poorly plotted story populated with a combination of thinly drawn characters (Julian and Lily) and the implausible and ridiculous Edward who is supposed to be some sort of super spy but has the most absurd line in dialogue and even more silly tradecraft. There's a kernel of a story about an incoherent British foreign policy, declining empire and illegal wars but it amounts to little more than a few observations. Better off re-reading some of his classic novels than waste time on this.

22 people found this helpful

P. McCLEAN

As always, a human look at the world of intelligence agencies

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 16 October 2021

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John Le Carré’s last novel, does not disappoint. It gives the same, practical insight into the British intelligence world his readers will be familiar with from his earlier books. He shows the life of an organisation, not only doing the job it was created to do, but also concerned about how things look and who is going to be the fall-guy if anything goes wrong, and worried about its position vis-à-vis inter-agency rivalry and blame culture.

There is also an appropriateness about the subject matter of the story given the stage in John Le Carré’s writing career it was written. His novels have always reflected the geo-political environment of their time, and his characters have been shown practising their craft, mostly in mid-career. In “A Legacy of Spies” we saw a retrospective of past exploits from the viewpoint of retired service officers. In “Silverview” we are shown what happens in the life of a former agent once retired. “Silvervew” gives us a glimpse at the reality of the-happy-ever-after for an agent once they are no longer of use to the agency.

As always, Le Carré brings human motivation to the surface, and demonstrates the wilful blindness of organisations that can sometimes let errors of judgement slip through to cause cracks in what appears to be a totally watertight operation. He describes a situation where an organisation’s failure to care for its members’ wellbeing, and to take cognizance of an agent’s mental state, can lead to aberrant behaviour, a trait common to many organisations in every sector.

Never one to shy away from highlighting his views on the political leadership of the countries concerned, he describes the internal questioning of an intelligence agency that is serving a country ruled by a government with no coherent foreign policy, a government that is focused on its own internal political power rather than its relationship with the rest of the world.
This is an excellent read.

8 people found this helpful

Eric Lee

Not his best work, but le Carré’ can still tell a great story

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 20 October 2021

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Silverview, John le Carré’s final book, has all the elements that made his earlier books such fantastic reads. It has former spies, current spies, hard-nosed cynics, naive innocents, betrayed husbands, faithless wives, several plot strands that come together (mostly) and – did I mention the spies? It includes the author’s trademark dislike of the Americans, especially their intelligence services, which places him in the long tradition of many British writers, most famously Graham Greene.

The book appears at the same as the launch of the new James Bond film and serves as a reminder of how very differently Ian Fleming and le Carré approached their subjects. Both men had served in the British intelligence services, and both participated to one degree or another in the Cold War. But while to Fleming, British spies like Bond were defending civilisation as we know it against a ruthless and immoral enemy, le Carré’s world is much greyer one, a world in which it is hard to tell the heroes from the villains (if indeed there heroes and villains at all).

No, it is not his finest work. But one is instantly immersed in a familiar world, and the author still knew — in his 90s — how to tell a great story.

7 people found this helpful

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