 [Vanity Fair] A Legacy of Spies has two settings. The first is a very recognizable present. Guillam, quietly in retirement, is abruptly called to London and drawn into what British intelligence‐the Circus, as le Carré characters call it‐has lately become: a world of coiffed apparatchiks and ruthless spinners in a gleaming fortress on the Thames. Behind the summons: lawsuits that threaten to expose the dark innards of an operation from long ago‐specifically, the operation recounted in The Spy Who Came In from the Cold (1963), the book that brought le Carré to prominence. That operation provides the second setting: Berlin and London in the early 1960s. The principals are mainly gone (dead, inaccessible), but le Carré brings them to the page by an epistolary device: he sets Guillam to sifting through old paperwork‐inter-office memos, eyes-only communiqués, interrogation transcripts‐allowing familiar voices to speak. Le Carré builds an intricate tale ("watchmaking," he calls it) as Guillam attempts to reconstruct the backstory of Spy‐a book that itself set the stage for the Circus books to come. |