John le Carré’s Cold War spy stories are more like a Graham Greene novel than an Ian Fleming’s James Bond adventure. Le Carré (David John Moore Cromwell) fills his novels with a moral miasma: the characters are occupied with internal, psychological struggles, and the ethical differences between Eastern and Western policies are indistinct.

Ned, the narrator in The Secret Pilgrim (written in 1990), is a British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) agent who is spending his final years in the service as a trainer because his ‘cover’ was blown. He invites his mentor, George Smiley, to give a talk to his students; and, while Smiley speaks, Ned recalls episodes from his own past. The novel is a collection of Ned’s reminiscences, presented as linked short-stories.

Ned is an intriguing character, but George Smiley is one of my all-time favorite fictional personalities and I found myself wanting more from him, which detracted somewhat from Ned’s stories at the beginning of the book. I’ve read quite a few le Carré novels, but I somehow missed this one; it was pleasant to revisit Smiley’s world, however briefly (and this certainly felt like le Carré’s farewell to George Smiley).

The stories in The Secret Pilgrim were all good — some were excellent — and by the end Ned was a fully formed character, with all the tell-tale, humanistic blemishes and scars of a le Carré creation. The writing is vintage le Carré: intelligent (even donnish at times) and infused with melancholic, humane, and authentic characters. The author was in the SIS during the Cold War and I think that his depiction of  ‘the game’ is genuine.

Recommended, but read the ‘Karla Trilogy*’ first; or, at the very least, Tinker Tailor, Soldier, Spy (I think that TTSS and The Spy Who Came In from the Cold (in which Smiley appears, but only briefly) are his best books: both are classics in the genre).

[Other John le Carré books I’ve read: A Murder of Quality; Call for the Dead; The Spy who Came In from the Cold; Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy*; The Honourable Schoolboy*; Smiley’s People*; The Drummer Girl; Russia House; Our Game; The Constant Gardener; The Tailor of Panama; and  The Perfect Spy]

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