Silverview by John Le Carré
I’ve read just about all John Le Carré’s books and liked them too. Most of them start a bit slow until the story catches a thread at a time and gets going. This one, his final book, started rather slow too. A small-town bookshop owner meets a slightly over-inebriated gentleman who claims to have known his father. A woman with a baby delivers a letter to a London house. She’s been told to wait for a response. These two incidents then start a whole process of actions in typical Carré manner, to find out if there’s been a leak in security and if so, who the culprit is. The book was completed by Le Carré’s son after the author’s death.
My review ⭐⭐⭐⭐
The story is low key, nothing much really happens. Most of it is told as memories by multiple people to explain the behaviour and motivations of different people in the past. How spies get to be spies and how they stop, or can a spy actually stop being a spy? And typically to Carré, everybody has their reasons for doing things, staying in the shadows. The book is short, only 200 pages. I liked it.