The Secret Pilgrim

Summary

“The many ingredients are skillfully marshaled: story elides into story; flashback and flash-forward, reminiscence, analysis and prognosis are lucidly and elegantly controlled. Indeed, The Secret Pilgrim is, technically, Mr. le Carré's most magisterial accomplishment.” —The New York Times Book Review (1991)

With his time in British intelligence drawing to a close, veteran spy “Ned” asks his colleague George Smiley to address his graduating class of trainee spies in Sarratt. Smiley’s remarks on espionage in the wake of the Cold War serve as trigger and backdrop for a series of recollections and memories of Ned’s many decades as a British spy.

Both a reminiscence of times past and a meditation on the future, The Secret Pilgrim—published more than ten years after Smiley's People and little more than a year after the fall of the Berlin Wall—is a mosaic that masterfully captures the complex and contradictory moral landscapes of Cold War intelligence.