I have just finished reading John Le Carré’s George Smiley series, in order, as I said I would. So I have a minute or so ago turned the final page of A Legacy of Spies. I have read it before, and posted having done so eighteen months ago. But when I read it this time around, I didn’t recognise it at all. I may be becoming forgetful in my old age, but I don’t think so. It’s to do with the genius of Le Carré. It is so important to read the series in sequence.
I see it now. The series is a giant jigsaw puzzle, ten thousand pieces perhaps, and an epic account, perhaps a jigsaw of the Bayeux Tappestry. You complete one piece of the puzzle and reveal a magnificent scene. But there are pegs and sockets waiting to meet their mate. And so it was with the George Smiley series. When I first read A Legacy of Spies I had no hope of really understanding it, because I had not read The Spy who Came in for the Cold. But this closure of Smiley’s career makes sense of the whole series. The individual scenes, viewed in sequence, tell the greater story.
So what next? I think I shall start the plotting phase of the sixth book in the Sir Anthony Standen Adventures. I have the germ on an idea. I need to start drawing the characters involved and see what they might be prone to do.