John Le Carre’s A Legacy of Spies shows us what happens when history’s unappeasable ghosts force their way into your life and demand the reckoning. Not just a ‘late’ work but a world in which justice is so long delayed that vengeance uncovers every secret thing, and the codes of law are no guarantee of good order but come-ons in a rigged casino. It is as if Orestes has slept through the alarm-clock one time too many and wakes to find that his Furies are all the more vile for being unexamined.
The title is – I assume deliberately – a very distant echo
of The Discovery of Witchcraft, the Elizabethan guide to the deceptions
of the witch-hunt. (No coincidence that
the tainted intelligence at the centre of Le Carre’s Tinker, Tailor
spy-hunt was code-named ‘Witchcraft’ (there’s no defence for it . .
.)). The historical detective as
witch-hunter, besides being a plausible predecessor of spy-master fiction, is a
seriously under-explored sub-genre that awaits exploitation. There’s another genre at work here too: all adventures into the other world begin
with the absence of the father, and in Legacy Peter Guillam’s road to
resolution leads him on a hunt for his enigmatically missing old master George
Smiley. Fun fact: Rupert Davies, the very first celluloid
incarnation of Smiley (in The Spy Who Came In From The Cold) also
appears in the cult Vince Price vehicle Witchfinder General – not as a
hunter but as collateral damage of the obsessions of others. Peter Guillam would have sympathised.
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