Le Carré had worked in British intelligences services for more than a decade when his first novel, Call for the Dead (which introduced Circus spymaster George Smiley), was published in 1961. Sands, whose friendship later extended to reading drafts of Le Carré’s post-Iraq War novels, remarked poignantly:

Looking back, I wonder if this was David’s way of actually speaking for himself. He too knew of the swamps, and they informed his view of the world and his writings. The swamps appear even deeper in 2020 than they were in the extraordinary postwar years that formed him. This may be what makes him so current, and our loss so acute.

Silverview, Le Carré’s posthumously published novel, conjures a very deep swamp, recognisably of our time. (Le Carré’s timing has always been a strength: when his 1995 novel Our Game came out, with its background of strife in the Caucasus, few readers could have located Chechnya on a map, let alone fathomed the complex ethnic and religious history of the region. Le Carré did both.)

Silverview is an angry, witty novel, suffused with rueful disillusionment. But the loyalties and moral derelictions are, as ever with Le Carré, embodied in his characters. In newspaper articles he was vehement – about the second Iraq War and its compounding human and political cost, about the folly of Brexit (he took Irish citizenship late in his life). But his novels are not tracts. This one (which, in its plot complexity and occasional opaqueness, rewards rereading) is a fictional exploration of affectless ruthlessness, occasional decency, passionate commitment, and the queasiness of moral ambivalence. No dying fall about it.

Silverview is the name of a ‘big Edwardian pile in East Anglia’ inherited from her military father and inhabited by Deborah Avon, a Boudicca of British intelligence, now dying. Living (in separate rooms) is her husband, Edward (or Edvard) Avon, son of a Polish fascist, one-time communist, recruited as a British spy, scarred by Warsaw and Bosnia, now a self-described ‘British mongrel, retired, a former academic of no merit and one of life’s odd-job men’.

At Edward’s insistence, the house of Deborah’s soldier father was renamed Silverview after Friedrich Nietzsche’s Weimar home, Silberblick. Deborah, in a fine display of English social savagery, sketches the symbolism and marital battle lines implicit in the name-change in one of the novel’s icier scenes: ‘Even if Nietzsche was our most fearless advocate of individual freedom, then what? Individual freedom to me always came with built-in obligations. Whereas for Nietzsche and Edward there are none … A most dangerous dictum, would you not say, Julian?’

Julian is a press-ganged dinner guest, bystander to the conflict between Deborah’s adamantine adherence to duty and Edward’s romantic attachment to a cause. We first meet Julian in his newly acquired bookshop in a small seaside town in East Anglia, after an ‘impulsive escape’ from his financially successful ‘City life’. He is fast becoming aware that ‘his lack of the basic literary education required of your upmarket bookseller was not to be repaired in a couple of months’.

Into Julian’s bookshop walks Edward Avon, importunate, eccentric, persuasive. He proffers a boyhood friendship with Julian’s disgraced father as bond, and proceeds to tell Julian how he should stock his shelves and create, in the basement, a ‘Republic of Literature’. Emblematic of what Julian must acquire is W.G. Sebald’s Rings of Saturn. Le Carré does not labour the point, but Sebald’s unusual walking-talking fiction hybrid, with its allusions to entropy, shadows the whole of Silverview. Out of his depth, but decently wary, Julian is annexed – to literary ambition, and a demanding friendship.

The novel is dense and episodic. Its locales, including not Oxford but the ominous Orford military installation, are vivid, uncongenial. We meet Stewart Proctor, intelligence service stalwart, in a West End safe house, questioning Lily, the Avons’ spiky daughter. Next, Proctor is in the midst of family, juggling imperatives – sitting at the Bechstein to render the Flanders and Swann Hippopotamus song for his twins’ twenty-first birthday celebration, then ducking to the old scullery to answer the dedicated (and deniable) green service phone.

In the novel’s best scene – a protracted dissection of Edward Avon’s history as a ‘Joe’– Proctor interrogates two old service hands, husband and wife, once the ‘golden couple’ of Eastern European and Levantine operations, now stroke-smitten (Philip) and horsy (Joan). In parting, Philip confides to Proctor, ‘The thing is, old boy – between ourselves, don’t tell the trainees or you’ll lose your pension – we didn’t do much to alter the course of history, did we? As one old spy to another, I reckon I’d have been more use running a boys’ club. Don’t know what you feel.’

But the course of history has been altered, not benignly, and Proctor knows much of the how and why. He can say what he feels – about ‘poor toothless, leaderless Britain tagging along behind because it still dreams of greatness’ but he can’t prevail in the face of his lethally bland once-colleague, soon-to-be head of service, Quentin Battenby (‘Parliamentary oversight people eat out of his hands’).

Swamp it is, banal and poisonous. The novel has its flaws, but Le Carré’s oversight of historical and twenty-first-century iniquities stands as a salutary and provoking challenge.