Books: A Legacy Of Spies By John Le Carre

(Drivebycuriosity) - I like spy stories. I enjoy the fairy tales about James Bond`s glamorous global adventures and the clandestine deeds of "The Americans", but I also like John le Carré`s novels. The author, born in 1931, has been shaping the whole genre since the early 1960s. His spies have not much common with James Bond, they are almost ordinary people, just a little bit more shrewd. Reading Le Carré is more like watching a chess game than reading a thriller, but fascinates anyway.

I just finished his latest novel: A Legacy of Spies, published 2017 (amazon). The plot switches between the present and the early 1960s, the heydays of the Cold War. The story is told in first person by Peter, a retired spy living in Brittany France. Peter is summoned to come back to the London headquarters of his former employer, to report about events that happened in the 60s when he had to deal with agents of Moscow & the Stasi, the political police of communist Eastern Germany (I don´t tell more, this is a spoiler free blog).

The plot is as typical for Le Carré, complicated and sophisticated. Peter remembers moves and counter-moves, betrayals and deceives, which have implications till today. Carré delivered his usual precise style and dry humor. His musings about politics and bureaucracies - and their developments over the time - are pure gold. Often he refers to events and names he had told in his former novels. Maybe "A Legacy" is based on notes he had made for his former books, but his newest publication is still another masterpiece.