A master of spy fiction to the end — John Le Carré’s Silverview reviewed

Literary estates work to preserve a writer’s reputation — and sometimes milk it too. The appearance of this novel by John le Carré less than a year after his death seems almost suspiciously opportune, but whatever the publishing expediency involved, it is a very fine finale.

Julian Lawndsley is the 33-year-old owner of a bookshop in an East Anglian seaside town, having fled the City, where he has made both his fortune and his name asa canny trader. Any echoes of The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald soon fade as we discover that Lawndsley knows virtually nothing about books and even less about the customers he sells them to — until Edward Avon, an exotic foreigner, enters his shop one evening.

The bookseller’s interest is initially piqued by Avon’s claim to a boyhood friendship with Lawndsley’s late father, a sex-mad vicar long ago defrocked after announcing one Sunday to a startled congregation that God does not exist.