The Stasi

Some people think that the United Kingdom ranks as an unusually surveillance-heavy society, what with all the CCTV installations, doorbell cameras and automatic number plate recognition systems that have proliferated in the public sphere – but they would be wrong. In fact, according to Ruben Andersson’s Age of Security, the whole world is sliding towards a state of perpetual surveillance, where everybody is spied on all the time, by cameras and communications interceptions and data capture, without debate or accountability or even much public reflection on what is happening. Do we actually want to live in this state of heightened supervision, looked over by what we are told are ‘machines of loving grace’ (as the novelist Richard Brautigan once wrote)? Does it matter?

Publishing is a business. Authors are its brands and books its products. When, as sometimes happens, one of the bigger brands inconveniently dies or retires, there’s an understandable desire to keep the brand going and to attach its lucrative name to new products. And why not? If it’s done well, everyone benefits – publishers, readers and authors’ estates. In the past 60 years, there have been few bigger brands than the late John le Carré, so it’s no surprise to find a posthumous outing with the words ‘A John le Carré novel’ plastered over the cover. Its author, Le Carré’s youngest son Nick Harkaway, is a well-established novelist in his own right, albeit in a different genre. He served his apprenticeship by completing his father’s last book, Silverview (2021).