FOR the many fans of the spy writer John le Carré, Silverview, his last novel, posthumously published, will be a precious one. It glances back to the concision of those first successes in green Penguin paperback; and, in conscious valediction, surveys the world of secret work and its legacy while the darkening shadows of cancer and the grave hang over it all. A dutiful Secret Service stalwart’s funeral is a notable occasion.
Of the unreliable fathers who are a Le Carré motif, one of professional interest to Church Times readers features here in an off-stage role: the Revd H. K. Lawndsley, with his “dissipations”, a priest who renounced his belief in God from the pulpit. Lawndsley’s son, Julian, has abandoned a City career to open a bookshop on the Suffolk coast, where a man in a Homburg, Edward Avon, makes him a business offer.
In this Sebald setting, a physical and emotional landscape shaped by cold war, the City slicker is an innocent. Our eyes are opened with his.
Silverview
John Le Carré
Viking £20
(978-0-241-55006-9)
Church Times Bookshop £18
