A Legacy of Spies

A Novel

By: John le Carré

Narrated by: Tom Hollander

Length: 8 hrs and 29 mins

Publisher's summary

Number-one New York Times best-seller.

The undisputed master returns with his first Smiley novel in more than 25 years - a number-one New York Times best-seller and ideal holiday gift.

Peter Guillam, staunch colleague and disciple of George Smiley of the British Secret Service, otherwise known as the Circus, is living out his old age on the family farmstead on the south coast of Brittany when a letter from his old Service summons him to London. The reason? His Cold War past has come back to claim him. Intelligence operations that were once the toast of secret London, and involved such characters as Alec Leamas, Jim Prideaux, George Smiley, and Peter Guillam himself, are to be scrutinized by a generation with no memory of the Cold War and no patience with its justifications.

Interweaving past with present so that each may tell its own intense story, John le Carré has spun a single plot as ingenious and thrilling as the two predecessors on which it looks back: The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. In a story resonating with tension, humor, and moral ambivalence, le Carré and his narrator, Peter Guillam, present the listener with a legacy of unforgettable characters old and new.

©2017 John le Carré (P)2017 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

“[Le Carré's] novels are so brilliant because they’re emotionally and psychologically absolutely true, but of course they’re novels.” (New York Times Book Review)

"[Le Carré] can convey a character in a sentence, land an emotional insight in [a] phrase & demolish an ideology in a paragraph." (Publishers Weekly [starred])

“Any reader who knows le Carré's earlier work, and quite a few who don't, will assume that any attempt to second-guess the mandarins of the Service will backfire. The miracle is that the author can revisit his best-known story and discover layer upon layer of fresh deception beneath it.” (Kirkus)

Listen closely!

I loved revisiting the characters from the other le Carre novels. Now I'm inspired to pick them up again.

Puts The Spy Who Came In From The Cold in context

This puts The Spy Who Came In From The Cold into context. John Le Carre weaves scenarios that occur before it, and skillfully tells the story of its aftermath. This is a great book, with Smiley, Guillam and Leamas characters, and Le Carre does a great job in prequeling and sequelng in the same book! A great read for the Le Carre aficionados. Tom Hollander provides a great story telling voice, enunciating nuances and emotions, providing a flow, and lending his voice to rasping characters, thoughtful ones, and intrepid ones.

Fantastic! All of Smiley’s loose ends

The narrator was fantastic, the story brings all of Smiley’s people to a close. I hated to hear the final words, I didn’t want it to end. And of course, George is now finally the age he always looked to be.

Marvelous, intelligent, passionate writing! I’ll miss George and LeCarre!

Highly recommend as your final book in the Smiley novels.

Lack of context without reading Spy Who Came in From The Cold

The main reason I’m giving a slightly lower rating is that the book to make it clear that it was a prequel/sequel to “The spy who came in from cold”. I thought, I was not able to follow as much as I could have.

le Carre does it again - thoroughly enjoyable!

His character and plot development are unequalled in the spy genre. Once you start it's hard to put it down.

Brilliant.

John Lecarre at his best after all those years and a wonderful weaving together of his great Smiley series.

The Gift

This is the best thing he has written since”Smiley’s People”. What a great gift David has given his readers. What perspective he has provided.

Wonderful for fans

This is a fabulous capstone for those of us who've been through Le Carre's tales.New depth to The Spy Who Came in From The Cold, Tinker Tailor, APerfect Spy etc etc. But for the unitiated, might be a bit tedious. Narrator is pretty good, but sometimes the accents seem too much.

A wonderful, mature wrap of the Smiley outreach.

Fantastic!

Marvelously narrated. The story’s move from past to present is brilliantly done. I thoroughly enjoy Le Carre’s novels.

Not le Carré's best, but still a good read

I read The Spy Who Came In From The Cold a while back, and enjoyed/was depressed by it quite a bit. It has some of the best "feel" of any spy novel I've read. Where Tom Clancy's novels are almost always a grown-up version of a Hardy Boys story, where you know everything will turn out in the end for Jack Ryan and his friends regardless of how many people of color they have to shoot, le Carré's books are almost the exact opposite--everything is shit, everything has always been shit, everything will always be shit, so we might as well kill a few commies and then die.

I got this audiobook as part of a 2-for-1 offer that Audible had (the other being The Black Echo), otherwise I probably would have waited on it. It was written in 2017, and it's set somewhere in the mid-2000s. It's a sequel to The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, and has the character of Peter Guillam, an Mi6 spy runner from the earlier book. I can't say much more without spoiling this novel, which isn't that big a deal, or The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, which would be a much bigger deal.

The narrator is great. At first I thought he was the guy that plays Spidey in the MCU, but his name is Hollander not Holland. He sounds more like Loki anyway. He does a great job with the different British, American, and German accents, and especially does a great job giving Guillam and his dialog (both internal and spoken) a lot of character. You really wind up rooting for him.

According to Wikipedia, le Carré wrote this as a response to the Brexit mess. That isn't immediately obvious, and if I hadn't read the Wikipedia article I probably wouldn't have noticed, but there's a monologue at the end that makes it pretty clear (one of the main characters says something along the lines of "I didn't do this for God and The Queen, I did this for Europe.")

Overall I liked this quite a bit, but it suffers from feeling like the stakes are incredibly low. The flashback stuff has a lot of great Cold-War ambiance, but even that lacks a feeling of immediacy because you already know what happens. I recommend reading all of le Carré's stuff, because it's all great, but I'd probably put this at the end of the list.