Book Review: "Silverview" by John Le Carré

Silverview (2021)
John Le Carré (1931-2020)
215 pages

Typical espionage novels thrill with cat and mouse action, as seasoned spies carry out fraught missions in foreign lands or seek to protect their homeland from the clandestine activities of probing foreign counterparts. Although the protagonists may question the goals and means and orders of their superiors, in the end they generally serve the mandate of their organization, in spirit at least, if not too the letter. And, whether they have a cynical and hard-bitten or calm and debonair nature, they generally do so at the apparent sacrifice of their relationships and a normal life, at best connected closely to only some few of their colleagues.

But at what cost?

John Le Carré turns to this question in his final novel, Silverview, published shortly after his death. No cold war or great power conflict motivates the plot; instead, Le Carré explores the manifold impacts of a life of espionage on a spy and his family, and how the institution he serves deals with the consequences when those impacts lead him to question his vocation.

The story develops around two men on opposite sides of the stark divide between the public and the organizations charged with protecting their safety: Julian Lawndsley, who has recently left the hectic life of a job in London’s financial district to open a small bookshop in a coastal village in south-eastern England, and Stewart Proctor, a high ranking official in England’s security services.

Into Julian’s quiet shop appears one evening an unusual customer – an older man, Edward, who takes an active interest in Julian and his store, and who eventually reveals that he knew Julian’s father while at university. Although Julian has his suspicions about this new customer and his sudden interest in the shop, readers realize early on that Edward is, if not with certainty a spy, then at a minimum actively of interest to Stewart as he pursues a Domestic Security case.

Chapters alternate between Julian’s interactions with Edward, and Stewart’s prosecution of his investigation. Instead of the white-hot, non-stop thrills of a standard spy novel, here Le Carré ratchets up the tension only slowly, deliberately. Julian, despite his concerns, allows himself to be drawn into Edward’s orbit, enticed by the mystery and hint of risk that perhaps fills a void created by having given up the excitement of a job in the financial markets. And Stewart, for his part, can trust no one but his superiors with even the motivations for his investigation; forced to play a delicate dance around the truth even with his colleagues, Steward struggles to discover the truth about Edward, and determine the danger he may pose.

It becomes clear, however, that Le Carré’s after more introspective concerns here than the potentially explosive danger of a traitorous double agent. Instead, through the character of Edward, he explores how the same intelligence and talent necessary for someone to serve a successful career in espionage can lead them to eventually become undone by their experiences, and so to begin to profoundly question the duty they had dedicated their life to – and the challenge that this can pose for a service requiring absolute loyalty to the cause.

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Other notes and information:

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Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf

Book Review: "The Home Place" by J. Drew Lanham

The Home Place (2016)
J. Drew Lanham
217 pages

In The Home Place, J. Drew Lanham reflects on the deep and abiding love of the natural world that he developed growing up in western South Carolina. More poignantly, he goes on to explore the realities of American society that confronted him when he embraced this passion as a career, as captured by the book’s subtitle: Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature. (Emphasis in the original, as can be seen in the cover photo at left.)

Lanham spends the first half of the book describing his up-bringing on his family’s homestead – the Home Place of the title – a mix of farmland and forest. He writes loving portraits of his parents, and of his grandmother, who had a separate house on the Home Place, and with whom he lived for much of his youth. His parents taught in the local school system and farmed the land of the Home Place, a combination of occupations that helped instill in their son a passion for observing and understanding the natural world. His grandmother’s more visceral connection to the flora and fauna of the Home Place clearly also hoped awakened in Lanham a profound awareness of the world’s wonder and mystery.

At Clemson University, Lanham first studied Mechanical Engineering. But the truth will out, and in his junior year, he notes “I … reversed the course of my destiny,” (138) shifting focus to the biological sciences building on campus, and a path that eventually led to doctoral studies in Ornithology and a position as an Alumni Distinguished Professor of Wildlife Ecology at Clemson.

The courage to make such a dramatic shift presages his ability to deal with the challenges that he came to encounter with his new vocation, and that he describes in moderate but resolute prose in the second half of his memoir. Moving beyond the borders and familial security of the Home Place to pursue his research in the natural world, he discovers wonders aplenty, “moved to tears by the beauty of snow capped peaks” (178) and “devoured by remnant forests that from far away look uniformly verdant but from within are every shade of green imaginable … a living breathing thing.” (179) Unfortunately, however, these marvels come paired with an uglier side, and not simply the threat from grizzly bears and wolves. As innocuous as birding might appear at first glance, Lanham discovers the profoundly disquieting reality of, as one of his chapter titles labels it, Birding While Black.

At times these dangers and associated fears have concrete form. But perhaps more damaging is the constant mental distraction of feeling that one stands out, in situations which someone who is white would not give a second, or even first, thought. It's an experience Cathy Park Hong refers to as

minor feelings in her eponymously titled book,

the racialized range of emotions that are negative, dysphoric, and therefore untelegenic, built from the sediments of everyday racial experience and the irritant of having one’s perception of reality constantly questioned or dismissed. Minor feelings arise, for instance, upon hearing a slight, knowing it’s racial, and being told, Oh, that’s all in your head. (55, Minor Feelings, my review linked to at right)

Hong goes on to describe the crazy-making reality of wondering whether her concerns are real in any given moment or encounter. Lanham asks similar questions, including in situations in which getting it wrong could have a deadly result, the stakes raising one’s thoughts to an exhaustingly persistent fever pitch.

And so, a memoir about Lanham’s profound love of nature becomes a clear-eyed, powerful revelation of race relations and experiences in America today. It can be easy for the majority to assume that the civil rights movement resolved these issues, that they are now largely things of the past; certainly, one shouldn’t ignore the advances that have been made since the middle of the 20th century. But Lanham’s memoir makes clear, as does Hong’s and a deafening drumbeat of other personal accounts and stories and images, that much work remains to be done to get to a uniform level of life experience without fear. Ignoring or dismissing that reality will only extend the time required to shift American society to a better, more socially sustainable place for all.

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Other notes and information:
I first heard of Lanham, and his book, in his wonderful interview with Krista Tippett for her program On Being.

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Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf

Book Review: "Stories of Your Life and Others" by Ted Chiang

Stories of Your Life and Others (2002)
Ted Chiang (1967)
285 pages

For his collection Stories of Your Life and Others, Ted Chiang has crafted eight mesmerizing gems. Each story draws readers into a meticulously constructed, deeply convincing world, with plots that build deliberately but surely to a fever pitch.

Though they qualify as science fiction, Chiang centers his stories around a solid foundation of science fact and philosophical tradition. The science fiction aspects then motivate the action, a means through which to explore the vagaries and vicissitudes of human life, our strivings for both good and ill. His mastery and incorporation of the science will particularly thrill readers with a scientific or engineering background and interest, even those who normally avoid science fiction, while leaving the stories still accessible to a lay audience.

In the opening story, Tower of Babylon, groups of miners converge on the famous tower, which has reached the rocky surface of the vault of heaven, far above the dusty Middle Eastern plain. The miners have been asked to ascend to the far distant top of the tower, and then mine upwards through the rock to open a passage into heaven. Referencing the mysteries of ancient texts and traditions, Chiang explores humankind’s longing to reach for what lies beyond our understanding, the potent pull of the unknown on our imagination.

Another ancient tradition, the Christian doctrine of divine nomenclature, lies at the heart of Seventy-Two Letters. Set in the 1800’s, the story describes scientists exploring the possibilities and limits of animating objects by giving them particular names, developing a secular physics of nomenclature. What appears to be a kind of alternative history, however, suddenly transforms into a much more complex vision of physical reality. (I’ve little doubt that readers with a deeper understanding of biology will experience that realization rather earlier in the story than I did…)

The book’s title piece will be familiar to many readers as the basis for the film Arrival. Asked to try to communicate to aliens through a kind of portal they’ve placed on earth, a professor of linguistics discovers that they have a less linear, more comprehensive view of past, present, and future, and that they have reflected that in the structure of their language. The intensity of her engagement as she learns their language gradually begins to shift her concept of reality, causing her to rethink events in her own life. As well done as the movie is, this original story allows readers a more profound understanding of the main character’s mindset and transformation.

I came to Stories of Your Life and Others backwards in a sense, having already read Chiang’s marvelous, more recent collection Exhalation. (A link to my review at right.)  Although wildly different in themes, the two sets of stories share a distinctive sensibility, as well as a dedication to the wonders and mysteries of science and ancient traditions, stretched and bent just a bit through Chiang’s imagination to create marvelously engaging works that explore our human condition. Don’t miss them, even if you are not normally a science fiction fan!

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Other notes and information:

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Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf