Book Review: 'A Legacy of Spies' is John le Carré at his most masterful

He'll be 86 next month but that's not stopping John le Carré from revisiting his best known and loved characters one last time.

His latest novel, A Legacy of Spies, reflects the secret shenanigans of the Cold War era through the lens of today's more technologically focused and bureaucratically controlled espionage world.

Peter Guillam, who will be familiar to fans of Le Carré's George Smiley novels as one of the former spymaster's most loyal and able disciples, is long retired from the service, living on a rustic farm in Brittany when he receives a letter requesting his presence at MI5's headquarters on the banks of the Thames.

There he's interrogated by two young members of the new-style service about the operation which formed the plot for Le Carré's 1963 bestseller The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. It involved the unfortunate death of former agent Alec Leamas, whose children are now intent on suing the government for their parents' death.

Deftly weaving a new take on his old material with a darkly cynical commentary on the current state of the UK and its intelligence services in the post-Cold War era, Le Carré crafts a multilayered thriller that brings readers up to date with his most famous creation, George Smiley.

Guillam gradually recounts with the help of documents and a few jogs of memory from his interrogators the circumstances of Leamas' demise, a process which leads him to become frustrated with both his interrogators and himself.

As always Le Carré's characters speak in their distinctively coded register which is eminently enjoyable and pleasingly familiar to fans of the author's previous novels.

The story also reintroduces readers to other characters from that era - Bill Haydon, Percy Alleline, Toby Esterhase, Jim Prideaux and Oliver Lacon - who are now considered in the light of hindsight. It is a means of revealing a concern of the book - whether all that skulduggery of yesteryear actually achieved anything in the greater scheme of things.

A Legacy of Spies is about Guillam's confrontation with growing old and fitting the narrative of his past together selectively to make sense of his present.

Le Carré, the most masterful spy writer of the last half a century, gives his readers one last, assured and thoroughly entertaining demonstration of his talents.

• 'A Legacy of Spies' by John le Carré, published by Penguin Viking, is available at Exclusive Books for R302.