Thursday, September 19, 2019

A Legacy of Spies

Written in 2017, this is an interesting sequel to The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, Le Carré's breakout novel published in 1963, at the height of the Cold War.  The Spy Who Came in from the Cold was a masterpiece,  a dark portrayal of the cynical ends-justify-the-means view of the espionage services on both sides of the Cold War.  A Legacy of Spies revisits the events of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold from the perspective of 50 years afterwards: the children of Alec Leamus and Liz Gold (the protagonists of Spy), now grown and deeply embittered, attempt to sue and/or extort the British Secret Service (and especially the very likable Peter Guillam, right-hand junior to George Smiley) for the wrongs done to their parents. 
This backward look is an interesting idea (see Le Carré's piece in The Guardian on how he came to write Spy), and it does effectively highlight some cultural changes in attitudes toward secret services, but the issues at stake are not as powerful as those in almost all of Le Carré's other books and, accordingly,  I did not find it as satisfying. 

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