2019/38: Smiley's People -- John Le Carré

With dismal foreboding Smiley agreed a date. After a lifetime of inventing cover stories for every occasion, he still found it impossible to talk his way out of a dinner invitation. [p. 170]

An Estonian émigré is murdered on Hampstead Heath, and George Smiley is summoned from retirement to investigate the death: General Vladimir was one of his agents, and he suspects that the old man might have been trying to contact him with some morsel of information that he deemed vital. Too right: Vladimir, contacted by a Soviet woman living in Paris, has deduced the presence in Europe of a young woman who is very significant to Russian spymaster Karla.

There are many twists in Smiley's journey to the final duel of a battle begun decades before. He has to contend with the new regime at the Circus, Enderby and his lapdog Lacon; he tracks down several of his old cohort -- Toby Esterhase, Peter Guillam and Connie Sachs, the latter of whom is living out her final days with her lover Hilary -- and pursues clues, agents and the two halves of a postcard through sleazy Hamburg nightclubs, an isolated mooring in Lubeck and a Swiss sanatorium, before the final climactic scene on a footbridge linking East and West Berlin.

I confess that, again, I struggled to get through this novel. Le Carré's writing is superlative as usual, but the story is complex and full of reversals. This is not a book to pick up in odd moments: it deserves to be savoured over a day or two, without the distractions of mundanity. I did find myself liking Smiley more in this volume, and the scenes with Connie were marvellous: meticulously observed, precisely described, emotionally locked down because Connie, dying, cannot bear to be pitied and George can only keep his feelings at bay with the rigorous application of his professional skills.

Was Hilary's story ever covered in the novels? I am vastly intrigued: she seems to have smashed up the Circus's comms room, and I'd love to know why.