John le Carré’s Silverview Project

About the book

The plot starting point of Project Silverview

Julian Lawndsley has quit his demanding job in the City of London to lead a simpler life as the owner of a bookstore in a small seaside town. However, a few weeks after the inauguration, their tranquility is interrupted by a peculiar visitor: Edward Avon, a Polish immigrant who lives in Silverview, the large mansion located on the outskirts, who seems to know a lot about Julian’s family and who Furthermore, he shows an exaggerated interest in the operation of his modest business. In London, when a letter appears on the door of a high-ranking spy warning him of a dangerous leak, investigations will lead him to this quiet town by the sea… Project Silverview is the fascinating story of an encounter between innocence and experience, between public duty and private morality. In the latest novel by the greatest chronicler of our times, John le Carré asks what we owe to a country that we are no longer able to recognize. The fascinating story of an encounter between innocence and experience, between public duty and private morality.

«Bosnia! Six little nations disputing Papa Tito’s inheritance. All of them fighting in the name of God, all of them wanting to be the most biting dog, without making any concessions to each other. All full of reason, as usual, and all fighting wars that their grandparents had already fought, and lost, two centuries before. Joan, Former Director of Operations in Levante

A complete and revised novel

John le Carre began writing Project Silverview after the release of A Delicate Truth in 2013. However, he did not publish it immediately. Before, in 2016, he presented his autobiography, Flying in Circles, and three years later, A Decent Man, a novel anchored in the current affairs of that time, a harsh plea against Brexit and the excesses of the Trump administration. When the writer died in 2020, his son Nick examined his father’s archive and was surprised to discover the Silverview Project manuscript: it was not an incomplete text with notes for his conclusion; It was an unabridged novel that le Carré had already revised several times. Nick and the editors just went over it, resolved some typos, and clarified a few paragraphs that were a bit confusing.

1961-2021.60 years of great novels

Project Silverview is the twenty-sixth novel by John le Carré. Its launch has coincided with the 60th anniversary of the publication of the author’s first book, Call for the Dead, in 1961. Of these twenty-six titles, seventeen are independent, with their own characters and self-contained plots, and nine form the agent series George Smiley, which Editorial Planeta presents with its own logo. As Nick Cornwell points out, Silverview Project is related to A Delicate Truth, in that both offer us “a distillation” of the great themes that marked le Carré’s literary career for six decades: idealism, betrayal, loyalty, ambiguity morality, love, classism, the decline of the West—especially the former British Empire—and the ethical limits of power.

Two threads, two John le Carré

Until the final part of the book—chapter eleven of the thirteen that make up the Silverview Project—two stories with different protagonists and settings alternate. They are narrated in the third person focused on Stewart Proctor, in the odd numbered chapters, and on Julian Lawndsley, in the even numbered ones. The figure of Edward Avon is the link between the two. In Proctor’s story, John le Carré recovers his best pages on the interiors of the secret services, the delicate system of personal and departmental relationships that sustain it, and the game of half-truths and complete lies with which errors and errors are covered up. the failures. He is, again, the le Carré of the Smiley and the Circus series. On the other hand, the story starring Lawndsley refers us to the most critical le Carré, the one after The Girl with the Drum (1983), in which he presents us with “normal people” who find themselves trapped, and often instrumentalized, by the relentless machinery. of the secret services and the perverse logic of State interests.

Various forms of suspense

John le Carré masters different forms of suspense and uses them in Project Silverview. The reader is the only one who knows (almost) all the facts and, of course, knows much more than the characters in the novel. Following Alfred Hitchcock’s advice on the tension that a bomb creates when the protagonists do not know it exists and the viewer does, le Carré places a card with explosive content – in the metaphorical sense – in the first chapter and keeps it in a disturbing second. flat throughout almost the entire novel. Who wrote it? What does it say?

A combative le Carré

The “distilled” character of his literary career, which Nick Cornwall grants to his father’s posthumous novel, makes the great themes common in the works of John le Carré appear and, in particular, loyalty, betrayal, love and the limits of friendship when there are state interests at stake. However, above these issues, two concerns related to the recent European reality stand out, such as the racism and classism that infect our most important institutions.

International politics, history and NGOs

In Silverview Project there are hardly any references to the internal politics of the United Kingdom, a central element in his previous novel, A Decent Man (2019). John le Carré began writing it in 2013, two years before Prime Minister David Cameron promised, in the 2015 election campaign, a referendum to leave the European Union. There are, however, echoes of two conflicts: the Middle East, with Palestine as the nerve center, and the Balkans. The author also addresses a very thorny issue: the infiltration of Western intelligence services into NGOs that operate in these conflict zones. One of the most interesting subplots of Project Silverview is related to this issue.