A Legacy of Spies: Peter Guillam

A Legacy of Spies

Towards the conclusion of John Le Carré’s summative novel, A Legacy of Spies, his twenty-fourth work of fiction, the author’s protagonist, the retired MI6 operative Peter Guillam, the spymaster George Smiley’s most entrusted acolyte, observes a relic of World War Two as he, in his age, laboriously strolls across the cove by his farmhouse within Les Duex Eglises, Brittany, and looks out towards ‘monstrous concrete bastions built by the Germans for their U-boats’ (352). Despite the allied forces efforts, Guillam opines that ‘no amount of allied bombing could dent them, but the town was laid flat’ (352). It is during such moments of introspection that Le Carré, the pseudonym of David Cornwell, draws the omniscient presence of war to the forefront of his work; even in its wake, the trace of war remains physically imposing and inescapable for Le Carré’s cast of loners and exiles. Indeed, Le Carré’s work is populated by such figures: men and women who, typically in service of their country, will forever remain relics of bygone wars and skirmishes. Peter Guillam is, despite his distinct service within Le Carré’s oeuvre, no different. But, this work, his latest addition to his chronicle of the Circus, it is the village ‘laid flat’ by the allied shelling which he draws our attention to. Beyond being a novel centred upon the presence of the past, it is also a work which narrates the collateral destruction wreaked upon the innocent. How in one noble endeavour the causalities of war far exceeds the boon of victory.

While accompanying his ‘small, podgy’ (20) taskmaster, Guillam, in his prime, was tasked with tracking both double-agents and their unforgiven master, the elusive equal to Smiley, Karla, ‘the proverbial cold war orphan’ (233). Here, within A Legacy of Spies, however, Guillam does not face-off against another agent, but rather the bureaucratic wrangling and the virtuosity that hindsight has birthed for a younger generation of counter-intelligence operatives. Facing Guillam across the table is now Bunny, a ‘Secret Service lawyer’ (19) and his colleague, Laura, rather than the other members of the Windfall cadre: here, Guillam is not devising a scheme but rather being questioned upon such schemes. Despite his position, defending his record of service, and his administrative adversaries, it is not to say that Guillam has lost his bite.

Guillam remains, like his erstwhile prey, elusive. While stringing a narrative together for his inquisitors, Guillam remains steadfast in his true complicity within the Windfall operation, succinctly summarised by Bunny as a plan to ‘mount a deception, mislead the enemy, protect a vital source’ (25). The lines we read are composed by Guillam, purportedly labelled a ‘truthful account’ by its author, as he delineates the fact of his involvement within long-buried operations within the Circus.

Guillam’s enigmatic nature, however, is one which must be noted. Once the leader of the scalphunters, Guillam was tasked with overseeing the field-agents of the Circus:

      They had been formed by Control on Bill Haydon’s suggestion in the pioneer days of the cold war, when murder and kidnaping and crash blackmail were common currency, and their first commandant was Haydon’s nominee [Guillam]. A small outfit, about a dozen men, and they were there to handle the hit-and-run jobs that were too dirty or too risky for the residents abroad. (35)

Within, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974) Guillam’s chagrin at his posting to the scalphunters was equalled by Smiley’s disgust, with the latter shuddering at the mention of the organisation’s unscrupulous operatives and their dealings. Despite Guillam’s record, being ‘good at your [sic] work, loyal, discreet’ (34), his demotion, if you will, is one entwined with his work with his taskmaster, Smiley. Ostracised by the then-chief, Percy Alleline, Guillam’s repute as a competent agent has always been shaded by his association with Smiley, and, in the present, the darkness is as deep as ever. Even now, as a retiree living a far more sedentary life upon a ‘remote farmstead in Brittany’ (1) alongside a young mother, Catherine, and her daughter, Isabelle, Guillam is dragged back into the annals of his service, and is compelled to face his complicity within The Circus’s operations. It is a request demanded by the Circus, or its new ‘incarnation’ (19), but it is one which Guillam initially attempts to dismiss:

    I resolutely fought off the accusing voices that from time to time attempted to disrupt my sleep. I was too young, I protested, I was too innocent, too naive, too junior. If you’re looking for scalps, I told them, go to those grand masters of deception, George Smiley and his master, Control. It was their refined cunning, I insisted, their devious, scholarly intellects, not mine, that delivered the triumph and the anguish that was Windfall. (1-2)

The knowing nod to his erstwhile employment with the scalphunters, the Circus now looking for his ‘scalp’, is an allusion to his position as the hunted, no longer the hunter of the outfit. Nevertheless, Guillam acquiesces. Once there, he is granted the title of ‘Reader’; a historian, of sorts, who is tasked with returning to his fictionalised accounts of the Windfall operation, and delinating the truth of the matter to the account he commited to the page. To say each report of Guillam’s is fictional may be too simplistic; tasked by Smiley, Guillam is to ‘draft an official report on the affair’ (160) centred upon the source known as ‘Tulip’, a ’neurotic’ (109) sub-source of the truculent agent Alec Leamas. In his authoring of such a report, Guillam is to produce an ‘overlong’, ‘irrelevant’ report in which the elided information will forever be masked. It is an act, however, which Guillam, in his private testimony, reveals to be the start of his, and the Circus’s, endeavour to conceal the failings of their operation.

Le Carré’s deft skill lies in exhuming the bodies of several key figures of the Circus’s history. A Legacy of Spies serves as both a sequel and prequel to his 1963 novel, The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, and the Karla Trilogy — Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974), The Honourable Schoolboy (1977) and Smiley’s People (1979) —, respectively, in its dredging of the Circus’s clandestine operations and the agents’ attempts to conceal their actions. Towards the conclusion of his seminal work, The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, Alec Leamas, the embittered pawn within the Circus’s Windfall ploy, opines that spies are:

          A squalid procession of vain fools, traitors too, yes; pansies, sadists, and drunkards, people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives. Do you think they sit like monks in London balancing the rights and wrongs? 

Indeed, while Leamas’s assessment was scathing, A Legacy of Spies is a novel which evidences the treachery of such people. With Le Carré’s prose, however, the tale told of a spy is as beguiling as the lies which they attempt to spin for themselves and for each other.