Stephen Garrett, Diego Calva, Tom Hiddleston, Georgi Banks-Davies and David Farr at 2026 Deadline Contenders Television held at the Directors Guild of America on April 26, 2026 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by JC Olivera/Deadline via Getty Images)

Silverview takes this to its logical but tragic extension, as Proctor slowly and inexorably tracks down his man. But somewhere along the way, in this sad and lonely book, Proctor’s sense of mission stalls, the Suffolk landscape becalms him, the urgency is diluted by a wistful sense of loss. It feels like the great elegiac German writer W.G. Sebald, much referenced in le Carré’s novel, and who lived and worked in East Anglia, begins to haunt the master of conspiracy Le Carré and to question the worth of it all.

Silverview is a slim volume but contained within it is the very kernel of le Carré’s philosophy. It is in a sense a disappointed philosophy – that European Romanticism, for all its glory, created only fascism and totalitarian communism. That both those terrors were threats that needed fighting. But that English romanticism is a fading rose, that the decent Englishman is no longer to be relied upon, and that when push comes to shove, le Carré will always vote with the idealist. For this reason Silverview is a true testament to its author, the greatest espionage writer of the last century.