After a gap of 17 years, le Carré returns to George Smiley, although A Legacy of Spies (2017, UK) is actually a retrospective look at the events it describes, most of which centre around the stories of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963, UK) and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974, UK).

Peter Guillam has retired to Brittany, to the farm which has belonged to his family for generations. He is visited by an officer from the Circus. At the end of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, agent Leamas and his girlfriend, Liz Gold, attempted to escape over the Berlin Wall, but were both shot and killed. Now Leamas’s son and Gold’s daughter are suing the British government for compensation. And the Circus paperwork detailing the affair is not as complete as it should be.

Which, of course, is as was intended. Because Smiley kept the details of the operation from everyone, given it was a double bluff, and he hadn’t wanted the mole in the Circus, Haydon, to warn the Soviets and the East Germans.

Guillam wasn’t aware of all the operational details involving Leamas, but as he tries to prevent the current Service leadership from learning about the operation, so he discovers more about it himself. There was, for example, the East German woman Guillam helped defect, and with whom he fell in love – only for her to apparently commit suicide a handful of days after arriving in the UK. Not to mention numerous other details about the operation – all carefully concealed so Haydon would not know of them.

Guillam manages to deflect suspicion from himself, although not until after several threats by those involved, and tracks Smiley down in Germany. Who promises to clear Guillam’s name. I was, I admit, surprised Smiley was still alive – he seemed middle-aged in the first novel, Call for the Dead (1961, UK), so by the late 2000s or early 2010s, he would be in his eighties or nineties. But still active. As an indication, Alec Guinness was 60 when he played George Smiley in the 1974 TV adaptation of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, so even in 2000, years before Guillam recounts the events of A Legacy of Spies – an assumption, but not unlikely – Smiley would be 86. All perfectly believable – and Guillam’s disinclination to name the actual year makes it plausible.

Le Carré apparently wanted to write a novel about the stupidity that was the Brexit Referendum, and indeed Brexit itself. We all know it has failed, and has cost the UK more than the UK actually paid the EU in all the decades it was a member state. The only people still championing it are moronic racists and those grifters who profited from it – which is most of the Conservative Party, and the leadership of Reform UK. I’m not sure A Legacy of Spies makes this message clear, or that it actually adds anything worthwhile to the literary conversation around Brexit – but then neither does Ali Smith’s Autumn (2016, UK), which was written in direct response to Brexit, and may have been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, but had little impact on public discourse about the referendum. Preaching to the choir, no doubt.

Despite all that I’m not wholly convinced A Legacy of Spies adds anything to the plots of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold or Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. I mean, don’t get me wrong, A Legacy of Spies is a good book – le Carré was an excellent writer and all of his books are worth reading. But it’s not even a pendant; it fills out a few details but offers no substantial changes.

A Legacy of Spies may have been written for the right reasons, but it doesn’t feel like it adds anything worthwhile to the Smiley series. Read it because it’s a le Carré novel rather than because it’s a capstone to the Smiley series.