First a quote from page 188.

"America's determination to manage the Middle East at all costs, its habit of launching a new war every time it needs to deal with the effects of the last one it launched. NATO as a leftover Cold War relic doing more harm than good. And poor, leaderless Britain tagging along behind because it still dreams of greatness and doesn't know what else to dream about."

https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/john-le-carr%C3%A9-died-an-iris... Obituary from The Irish Times.

The NY Times, last I checked and I will affix it here, still claims John le Carre is a British citizen.

Although his books were very critical of the lack of humanity and deep betrayal of innocents by the allied service of UK-MI-6, USA CIA and Israel's Mossad, Le Carre never betrayed any operation or agent from his time in MI-5 and MI-6. He kept his anguish to himself.

His usual publisher thought that Agent Running In The Field was his final book and only after his death has the truth come out. I have a copy of Silverview and it is from that the quote appears.

Silverview should be on bookshelves soon, but so far, not a word about it has appeared in the Times. I have a copy because I pre-ordered it.

The story is a familiar one--how an agent/defector/ cooperates with MI-6 and is caught in an inexorable trap where they are betrayed and dead or in a deep hole in some CIA basement.

Agent in The Field has a very rare happy ending. The hapless innocent actually is helped by kind MI-6 bigwigs and gets away to live his life. I thought that was the final book and I loved the happy ending after so much misery which is the usual sad ending.

This new (not new) but unpublished novel, tells that same story. Only this time, the above paragraph spells out what John Le carre really felt and did about it. He relinquished his British passport to live and die in Ireland .

He was against Brexit. He died in Ireland. A member of the EU. Casting off the British stench. Harming nobody still in the Secret Service.

RIP
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/13/books/john-le-carre-dead.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/19/books/john-le-carre-silverview.html
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/apr/01/john-le-carre-chronicler-o...