Summary: A fine set of twisty thrillers set in the contemporary world of Western espionage operations against Islamist extremists and functionaries of the Russian kleptocracy

Any contemporary spy novel is going to draw comparison with John le Carre. So, if it’s George Smiley you are most familiar with, these are stories from the lower ranks, the roles occupied by the likes of Peter Guillam or Toby Esterhause in the Smiley books.

When we first meet Thomas Kell he is pretty washed up. On indefinite leave due to allegations of torture plaguing him, with his marriage to a habitually unfaithful wife on the rocks. However he is quickly called back into service to track down a friend who has gone missing: a fellow MI6 officer, Amelia, who is on the verge of being appointed head of the service.

The reader is quickly pitched into the minutiae of the trade craft of intelligence operations. Hence it takes a while to get to know the sort of person that Kell is, as operational priorities dominate the characters’ actions and Kell’s assessment of individual colleagues and targets.

In the pauses in the action Kell is often found reading Seamus Heaney, which is always a dependable indicator that someone is a good egg. As the books progress there is more opportunity for rumination on a profession in which treachery is stock in trade, the toll this takes on its practitioners, and the challenges of the contemporary world, particularly the threats from Islamist extremism, a resurgent kleptocracy in Russia, and most troubling, their points of overlap.

But none of this is allowed to get in the way of mounting narrative tension and twisty plotting: the books often end up in completely unexpected places from where they start out. The Kell trilogy are gripping thrillers and across these three books Kell is an engaging protagonist, wounded and conflicted, but striving towards a moral purpose that often eludes him.

Summary: two fine, late career works by le Carre assert that Europe is indeed something worth fighting for

It’s no secret that David Cornwall (aka John le Carre) was a MI6 officer before the extraordinary success of his novel The Spy Who Came In From The Cold. His subsequent Cold War thrillers, many of them featuring George Smiley and his various colleagues, depicted an amoral conflict fought by cynical people for questionable gain but considerable pain. Indeed The Spy Who Came In From The Cold set something of a template for these subsequent works with its gripping portrayal of a British Intelligence plot to kill a senior East German spymaster.

A Legacy of Spies revisits that very plot, exploring it from the perspective of Peter Guillam, another of Le Carre’s recurrent characters, a fellow MI6 officer and friend of Alec Leamas, the eponymous Spy Who Came In From The Cold. It fleshes out some background, ties up some loose ends and answers some nagging questions about that earlier great work.

Agent Running In The Field is a more contemporary story set in the aftermath of the UK’s bizarre decision to leave the EU and bet its future on the whims of the profoundly flaky Trump-Putin axis. Nat, an MI6 officer coming to the end of his career, stumbles across an operation to betray British secrets to the Russians. As he digs into it he finds, with the shifting alliances of the post-Brexit world, and with the corruption of the upper echelons of British society by Russian kleptocrats, that the operation comes closer to home than he could have imagined. (The title is a cheeky nod to Theresa May’s response when asked, “What is the naughtiest thing you’ve ever done?”)

Of the two books Agent Running in the Field is perhaps the more satisfying, peopled with believable and likeable characters trying to come to grips with the lunacy of our contemporary world.

But together the two books perhaps represent a reassessment by le Carre of his own life as an intelligence officer. For all the moral ambiguities and unethical activities in intelligence operations, le Carre seems to now conclude that the battles he himself helped fight were indeed important ones, aimed at preserving liberal democracy in Europe from all foes, domestic and foreign. “Everything I did,” Smiley says in A Legacy of Spies, “I did for Europe”.

As the UK falls under the sway of the increasingly authoritarian cabal around Boris Johnson, Michael Gove and Dominic Cummings it is sobering to contemplate what can happen when the UK’s intelligence agencies do not fulfil their most basic functions of protecting national democracy. Johnson and co have, of course, already taken steps to ensure that their links with Putin are never explored by either MI5 or MI6. Whatever they do next is unlikely to even be in England’s interests, let alone Europe’s.

The pope is dead. It falls to Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, to oversee the Conclave to elect the new pope.

The one hundred and eighteen men who gather to elect a new pope are a diverse mix: conservatives and liberals from every corner of the world, some desperate for the prize, some dreading the prospect.

I started reading this book the day after Donald Trump was elected, on a minority of the votes as it transpired, as President of the United States. I was desperate for a story to transport me from the bleak reality.

It can be a bit hit and miss on the cheeriness front with Harris – things turned out okay for Dreyfus in An Officer and a Spy, Cicero not so much. But Harris always puts together a good political thriller, and this is no exception with the growing tension as the voting in the Sistine chapel proceeds.

At the heart of the story is Lomeli, a man of faith and doubt, trying his best to behave honourably in the face of the dark secrets and challenges that emerge. I don’t know what Harris’ own religious views are but he provides a deeply sympathetic and empathetic account of the beliefs and thinking of the high cleric and committed Catholic at the heart of the story.

As a remarkable coincidence after I finished this book early one morning I switched on the television to see a 2011 interview with Robert Harris talking about Graham Greene’s novel, The End of the Affair. In the interview Harris concluded that there has never been anyone who can quite fill the gap left by Greene, a writer of gripping thrillers which wrestled with serious moral concerns and complex philosophical issues. I’m not so sure that since he gave that interview in 2011, Harris himself hasn’t made a creditable claim on Greene’s mantle.