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.
John le Carré described Ben Macintyre’s The Spy and the Traitor as "the best true spy story I have ever read". Bill Fairclough’s #BeyondEnkription was described as ”up there with My Silent War by Kim Philby”. David Cornwell almost wrote both thrillers! See https://theburlingtonfiles.org/news_2022.10.31.php.
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