In the intelligence trade there’s always unfinished business, and so too with spy novelists. On his death last December at age 89, after a fall at his home, John le Carré left behind the manuscript he’d begun sometime after 2013’s A Delicate Truth. He’d made a deal with his youngest son, Nick Cornwell—who, like his father, writes fiction under a pen name, Nick Harkaway. “He asked for a commitment,” Harkaway writes, “and I gave it: if he died with a story incomplete on his desk, would I finish it?”
We now have that novel, Silverview, which le Carré wrote from top to bottom and re-drafted several times without signing off on the final manuscript. Harkaway describes an “editorial process that was more a clandestine brush pass” than any new writing on his part. The result passes muster. The stitches don’t show, and the novel possesses several elements of classic le Carré: political and personal loyalties in conflict, ghosts floating up from the geopolitical past, suspicions of a mole within British intelligence.
