“Today, all I know is that I have learned to interpret the whole of life in terms of conspiracy,” George Smiley, in a letter to his wife at the conclusion of John le Carré’s novel The Honorable Schoolboy (1977).

The author who epitomized the literary spy genre kept one last novel concealed from his vast readership before he passed in December 2020. Silverview is a relatively short tale set primarily in Britain where John le Carré’s descriptions of his native land masterfully capture the remnants of the Cold War and a world that has moved on. The dust jacket illustration alludes to a passage with characters walking through the remains of a civilization on a run-down quayside with “distant forests of abandoned aerials rising out of the mist, abandoned hangars, barracks, accommodation blocks and control rooms, pagodas on elephantine legs for stress-testing atom bombs, with curved roofs but no walls in case the worst happens.” England’s more pastoral landscapes and small towns, as well as London, are depicted in cinematic detail and read like a deeply affectionate adieu from the aging author.

Yet as Le Carré readers would expect, this posthumously published (October 2021) novel includes many remembered scenes of recent history in distant lands and several vividly imagined foreign characters. With his half-French pseudonym, the author (whose real name is David Cornwell) was a cosmopolitan who spoke German with native fluency—the novel title itself is a translation of a name, Silberblick, the house in Weimar where Nietzsche spent his final days.

Le Carré returns in his twenty-sixth novel to the subject of an internal security investigation, this time a cyber breach. Gone is the impassive yet deeply perceptive George Smiley, the author’s celebrated mole-hunting, agent-running character seen in eleven prior novels. Enter Stewart Proctor, the nearly retired head of internal security for the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS or MI6, previously euphemized by the author as “the Circus,” more recently “the service” or “the office”). Proctor, like Smiley, suffers from marital problems and inferior superiors. Unlike his predecessor who largely ignored his wife’s promiscuity, Proctor uses his bloodhound sense to sniff out his wife’s suspected infidelity to his satisfaction through a probing phone conversation that borders on an interrogation. Proctor hangs up on her, which is something Smiley would never do to his wife.

Le Carré is particularly skillful when exploiting the advantageous gap afforded to novelists between speech and thought during these interrogatory dialogues. At one point Proctor listens to his wife’s travel schedule and thinks to himself: Too much information. One lie after another in case the last one didn’t work. Le Carré uses this gap in several other ways—such as having a younger character, bookstore owner Julian Lawndsley, first take in what is said then pose questions to himself about what is really meant by the star of the book, the aging polyglot Edward Avon.

A complex personage of Polish origins and many lives, Avon speaks his native tongue, French and German like the author, as well as Czech, Serbo-Croatian and “a bit of Hungarian.” Also known as Edvard, Ted, Teddy and Florian, he exudes a charming false modesty through his excessively eloquent English. Avon’s obvious intelligence is undermined by his romantic attachment to a succession of causes, which is how he ends up in hot water.

John le Carré

A dual storyline is established around Proctor’s investigation and Lawndsley’s transition from City trader to the owner of an East Anglia bookshop where Avon becomes a frequent visitor. Through the voice of the Avon character, the reader experiences the full effects of Le Carré’s worldliness and the hall-of-mirrors quality of an agent’s life. Elsewhere the author says of his style and technique that he combines “classic austerity” with “neurotic excess” and often disguises the one with the other, which might well describe the voice given to Avon.

The novel is populated by numerous strong women characters who are essential to the tale, almost as if the author went all out to disarm his critics. Readers of Adam Sisman’s John le Carré: The Biography (2015) will be aware that the novelist suffered abandonment by his mother as a child and that critics of prior novels have found shortcomings with his female characters. Readers of the novel might want to know more about Avon’s intriguingly elusive lovers—the Jordanian militant Salma and the Polish dancer Ania. Readers will not, however, be disappointed by the authenticity of Lily, a foul- mouthed, single mother of a mixed-race child; or by Lily’s retiring intelligence analyst mother, Deborah, who seems to harbor racist sentiments for her grandchild yet gets along fine with her black, Bahamian caregiver.

Then there is Joan, the retired agent-handler whom Le Carré portrays with great love despite the failings of age and to whom the author gives stunning descriptive powers of remembered scenes of war in the hills outside Sarajevo. Joan and her husband Philip, who is recovering from a stroke, give voice to some of the most perceptive character analyses regarding agents—these views are so insightful and forcefully expressed that they can be read as lessons on ignoring the elderly and injured at one’s peril. More sagacity comes through in depictions of the stages of retirement with Stewart Proctor on the verge, Deborah Avon in the process, and Joan and Philip recently retired. Proctor drops what is perhaps the ultimate pearl of wisdom in the novel when he wonders to himself whether marriage is just “one big cover story.”

Silverview is not a work on the scale of Our Game (1995) or Absolute Friends (2003), to mention two colossal Le Carré novels that that have not yet made it to the silver screen.

A younger version of the author might have written more than the 208 large-type pages in this Viking hardback—although the concision in this last work may come as a relief to readers who have struggled with the outsized casts of characters, often with aliases, and plots that can be tortiously complex making for what reviewers sometimes said were books that are too long. The 1979 seven-part BBC television series based on the novel Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, for example, was generally well received yet famously left the public perplexed as to what was going on.

Unfortunately Le Carré is no longer here to give us another of his expertly shifting narratives, which in Silverview is primarily omniscient yet occasionally moves subtly into the first person for the last paragraphs of a chapter. Readers are left wondering about the fate of Edward Avon’s lofty proposal for Lawndsley’s bookstore, the creation of a Republic of Literature. Another well-mannered, multilingual Pole transplanted to England, Joseph Conrad, may have inspired the Avon character. Le Carré has mentioned Conrad as a major literary influence so it’s no stretch to view the Avon character, his Homburg hat in hand among the bookshelves, as an homage to the author of The Secret Agent (1907). The Graham Greene novel Confidential Agent (1939) also comes to mind with regard to Avon as its chief protagonist was a former university professor from Europe on a clandestine mission in Britain and Greene was another acknowledged influence on Le Carré.

Both authors worked for MI6, for a few years at separate times. They famously clashed over what motivated high- ranking British intelligence officer Kim Philby to spy for the Soviet Union. Greene sympathetically cited ideological motives in his introduction to Philby’s memoir. Le Carré characterized the defector as “a shit” and refused to meet him during a trip to Moscow.

In his afterword to Silverview, the author’s youngest son, Nick Cornwell, recounts the circumstances in which the book was written and his own role in making limited edits prior to publication, which he equates to a “clandestine brush pass,” assuring the reader that the novel “is by any reasonable measure pure Le Carré.” Nick shares numerous insights that are worth the price of the book, notably about his father’s relationship with the service and the strong views on it in Silverview—Proctor, for example, concludes that the service has “become too big for its britches.”

There is one passage in the novel which makes one wonder whether Nick might not pick up the story of his father’s life where Sisman’s biography left off—Julian Lawndsley says of his departed father’s archive: “Nothing was too humble to be stored away for his future, non-existent biographers: no sermon note, no unpaid bill or letter—be it from a discarded mistress, an outraged husband, tradesman or bishop— escaped his egomaniacal net.” Will more be published about Le Carré’s life, beyond his semi-autobiographical novel A Perfect Spy (1986) and essay collection The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life (2016), either by the father or the son? Or could this passage indicate authentic humility and be a sign that whatever remains will be left untold?

Published by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, in October 2021; 215 pages; price, $28)

Len Bracken is a former international trade reporter for a major news service and the author of numerous books, including three novels.

“Chesapeake Appreciation Days,” hand-tinted black-and-white photo print by Lisa Krentel.

When Lisa Krentel was preparing for the annual holiday show at Cambridge’s Main Street Gallery on Poplar Street, she reached deep into her artistic and maritime past for inspiration. It was during the fifth annual Chesapeake Bay Appreciation Days at the Western Shore foot of the original two-lane Chesapeake Bay Bridge in 1969, three years before the parallel three-lane span opened. That’s when Krentel shot images of skipjacks sailing past celebrants gathered on the beach.

“We sailed our boat down from the Chester River to Sandy Point State Park for the day,” she recalls.

Lisa Krentel

Krentel comes from an extended family of artists whose talents ranged from silversmithing and jewelry-making to pottery and painting. “From a very young age, I was always creating things,” says Krentel, a graduate of Philadelphia’s Moore College of Art and Design who double-majored in painting and photography. She deployed both majors in creating six 11-by-14-inch reworkings of her photos in 16-by-20 frames. Krentel dug out vintage negatives from that day in 1969 and digitally printed them on photo paper. She then painted over the black-and-white photo surfaces, including one image of a skipjack sailing past the Sandy Point Lighthouse. Rephotographing the finished product, she made as many prints as she hopes to sell before the show ends on Jan. 2. (The prints are priced at $175 each.) 

“There were still hundreds of working skipjacks in the Bay back then,” Krentel says. “Now there are less than 10,” a few are based at Deale Island.

While photography was her primary artistic pursuit at the time, “I got tired of it when everybody started shooting photos with their cell phones,” she says. Although she admits that today’s smartphones can produce “great pictures,” Krentel misses the f-stops and lens choices at the fingertips of photographic pros back in the day. “Besides, I like to move on. So I gravitated toward mixed media.”

Among her other pieces on display and for sale at the “Bright and Beautiful” holiday show is a poster-like painting of Hulk Hogan posing aboard a Harley-Davidson to promote “Love Ride, November 1990,” a Jerry Lewis fundraiser to fight muscular dystrophy. She also photoshopped a print of sunlight-reflecting water with a blue crab painted near the surface. For $35, Krentel is also selling – sales was one of her earlier for-a-living careers – small “slices of life” circles in a box framing pen-and-ink drawings, among them “Queen Anne’s Lace.” Or her “Evening Glow” acrylic waterfront painting could be yours for $185.

“Casa de Botin,” acrylic painting by Lisa Krentel.

Krentel moved back to the Eastern Shore from Sedona, Ariz., in 2007 to be near her elderly parents, who have since passed. She’s now settled in Cambridge with her partner, Paul Clipper, former editor of the local weekly newspaper, The Banner and also an exhibitor. Three of his cigar box guitars were a hit in an earlier Main Street show and are prominently displayed in the front window.

As with most Main Street Gallery shows, all the nine-member artists, including Krentel, are featured. Linda Starling, an original member, and co-founder creates silver jewelry with beads of all kinds and sea glass, which is an inspiration for much of her work. Another co-founder, Theresa Knight McFadden, specializes in iPad art to create still lifes and interiors. Karen Bearman, also an original member, is Main Street’s resident potter, while Kathy Flament, a “paint toss” practitioner, is the gallery’s fiber artist as well, with wearable art for sale.

Deborah Colburn specializes in prints and acrylic paintings, both figurative and abstract. In contrast, Ellie Ludvigsen’s land- and seascape photos are printed on high-grade watercolor paper sprayed with a sealer that makes it unnecessary to cover in a glare-distracting glass. 

Pam Watroba, the newest member, is represented in the show with intricate mosaics composed in part of stained glass. Her pieces include “Pocomoke Riverdance” ($1,025) and “Lady of the Sea” ($225). Another relative newcomer, Leslie Giles, originally from England, sells her work internationally and makes a full-time living at it. Best known for oils on canvas, her “Last Light Choptank” is available for $390.

Next up at Main Street is “That 50s Show,” which has nothing to do with the 20th-century decade. Instead, “50s” refers to the sale price of selected artworks, none more than $50. “That 50s Show” runs from Jan. 7 through Feb. 27, 2022. Meanwhile, if you’re shopping for “Bright and Beautiful” art, be sure to arrive at the gallery with a mask, even if fully vaccinated, so as not to give or receive COVID for Christmas.

Steve Parks is a retired New York arts writer and editor now living in Easton.

‘Bright and Beautiful’

Main Street Gallery holiday show and sale through Jan. 2, 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Thursday and Friday, 11 a.m.-8 p.m. Saturday, 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Sunday, closed Christmas and New Year’s, 518 Poplar St., Cambridge; mainstreetgallery.net, 410-330-4659,

What better way to greet a new year than to know The Mainstay performing arts center in Rock Hall will be under the seasoned hand of newly hired Executive Director Matt Mielnik.

Mielnik, a Utica, New York native with an extensive background in professional performing arts presenting, looks forward to continuing The Mainstay’s three-decade tradition of showcasing top-notch musical talent.

“I’ve spent most of my adult working life in the presenting business, whether for profit or the non-profit sector,” he says.

Fresh out of college with a liberal arts degree, Mielnik opened a bar in upstate New York, where for six years, he experienced the power of live entertainment. The venue soon became a hotspot for musicians traveling from New York to Chicago.

From there, Mielnik took a job as a technical director with a museum offering classical ensembles, national touring companies, dance ensembles, and traveling children’s performers. Five years later, he found himself in another multi-performance venue in a nearby community and was tasked with developing their signature brand. This was an opportunity to express some of his tastes in music. An acoustic guitarist himself, Mielnik brought in musicians like Tom Rush and David Bromburg and at the same time promoted local arts, a combination he also sees as a key to The Mainstay’s longevity.

Mielnick is excited about The Mainstay’s future and says the outdoor pavilion will be an additional draw but wants to make sure everyone knows that it will not replace the intimacy of the indoor stage that has been the venue’s hallmark.

The new director is amazed at the quality of the local talent and cites pianist Joe Holt and his invitational ensembles as an example of the kind of performance he’s like to present. Mielnik says he is acutely aware of the great singers and musicians who reside in local communities.

“The plan for February is to have something every weekend with Joe Holt on Friday evenings and even some classical presentations throughout the year,” he says,

Mielnik wants The Mainstay to be known for its wide range of music rather than one particular genre like jazz or bluegrass. He wants to share that exploration with us. 

Tom McHugh founded the Mainstay as a single concert that grew into a series in a rented space and then a year-round non-profit venue in its own building on Main Street in Rock Hall.

BTW, get tickets for The Mainstay’s New Year’s Eve Potluck with Joe Holt on December 31 at 5 pm soon!

This video is approximately seven minutes in length. For more information about The Mainstay, go here.

One very positive sign locally as the region recovers from the pandemic is that the Avalon’s extremely popular annual holiday show is finally back in the Avalon’s main theater. And they have come back with one of this country’s most beloved seasonal favorites, Irving Berlin’s classic White Christmas. 

But, according to director Tim Weigand and musical director Kimberly Stevens, their version is based on the newer stage production rather than taking the script and songs from the earlier Paramount Pictures release From 1954.

Veterans Bob Wallace and Phil Davis (played by Will Chapman and Phil Roberts)  have a successful song-and-dance act after World War II. With romance in mind, the two follow a duo of beautiful singing sisters en route to their Christmas show at a Vermont lodge, which just happens to be owned by Bob and Phil’s former army commander. With a dazzling score featuring well-known standards including “Blue Skies,” “I Love A Piano,” “How Deep Is the Ocean” and the perennial title song, White Christmas is an uplifting musical worthy of any Holiday Season.

The Spy talked to the Avalon gang yesterday as they finished their final rehearsals and prepared for taking the stage for the opening on December 9.

This video is approximately four minutes in length. For more information about tickets and schedule, please go here. All ticket proceeds go toward the Foundation’s year-round mission to provide diversified arts and educational programs that improves the quality of life here on the Eastern Shore.

Tara Gladden, Juror; Rosemary Cooley; Nancy McNary-Smith: Nanny Trippe, AAM Board Chair; Pamela Into; Doug Fahrman; Elizabeth Casqueiro; Sharon Thorpe; Lori Yates; Sarah Jesse, AAM Director. Not pictured: Mark Nelson & Robin Stricoff.

The Academy Art Museum is celebrating the Annual Members’ Exhibition through December 15, 2021. Museum members were invited to get creative, imaginative and experimental in any medium. All works in the exhibition are for sale and the proceeds benefit both the artist and the museum. Tara Gladden, Director and Curator of Kohl Gallery at Washington College, Chestertown, Maryland, served as Judge for the exhibition and presented the exhibition awards.

At the exhibition reception, the following awards were given: Best in Show in Honor of Lee Lawrie – Sharon Thorpe, “Family Oasis”; The Jane Shannahan Hill Offutt Memorial Award for Painting – Lori Yates, “Bright Spot”; Arielle Marks Award for Best Print (excluding photography), sponsored by Richard Marks – Rosemary Cooley, “With Hey Ho, the Wind and the Rain”; M. Susan Stewart Award for Best Collage – Pamela Into, “My Öli in the Autumn Grass”; Excellence in Photography, sponsored by the Tidewater Camera Club – Robin Stricoff, “Choptank Mist”; Nancy South Reybold Award for Contemporary Art – Doug Fahrman, “Prescription Encapsulation/Desvenlafaxine Reaction”; Trippe Gallery Award for Best Work on Paper, sponsored by Nanny Trippe – Elizabeth Casquiero, “Amazing Maze”; Best Landscape Award, sponsored by the St. Michaels Art League – Mark Nelson, “Saturday Morning”; Academy Clay Award – Nancy McNary-Smith, “She Awaits.”

Best In Show in Honor of Lee Lawrie: Sharon Thorpe, “Family Oasis,” Inkjet Print

As soon as he stepped to the podium Thursday evening at the acoustically sublime Easton Church of God sanctuary before a masked and vaccinated audience, Mid-Atlantic Symphony Orchestra music director Julien Benichou dispensed with what might have become a lingering elephant in the room. Why was it that the premiere of his concerto would not be performed as advertised? “The work is still in the works,” he said succinctly. And while we were left to wonder when his Romance for Strings might no longer be a work in progress but a part of the repertoire of the MSO, which he has skillfully led for 15 years, he moved on to the job at hand.

In place of his own piece, Benichou chose J.S. Bach’s Concerto No. 3 of his six Brandenburg masterpieces. As an unassailably safe and popular selection, the concerto also has the virtue of familiarity with any classically trained musician, of which the 18 assembled for the opening concert of three in this series. (You can still catch a performance Saturday night in Rehoboth Beach or Sunday afternoon at Ocean Pines.)

Before raising his baton to the string orchestra before him, Benichou advised the audience to listen for solo portions within the violin, viola, and cello sections, as well as the solo harpsichordist. The violin section, led by Celaya Kirchner and Regi Papa, and the violists, led by Dorothy Couper, stood while performing the 15-minute concerto to emphasize their collective role as occasional soloists. At the same time, principal cellist Katie McCarthy and Bozena Brown on harpsichord remained seated, of course. The stand-up effect was stimulating, even if the seemingly enhanced vibrancy in the sound might have been an illusory trick of the imagination. Regardless, it made for a rousing performance of a classical standard, taking the place of something new.

The two pieces that followed showcased the rock-star guest soloist of the evening, Joshua Lauretig. The first was Vivaldi’s Oboe Concerto in C Major. MSO followers may remember that Lauretig, then 25, played its solo portions to win the runner-up prize in the inaugural Elizabeth Loker Concerto Competition in January 2020, just before COVID shut down live performances. Here, with a full-string orchestra, his virtuosity became apparent with a lyricism that suggested actual lyrics on layered waves riding above the cello and bass underpinnings of the opening movement. The more somber second movement took on a seductively hymnal tone while he played lead “guitar” to lush string ballroom accompaniment on the minuet finale.

Benichou dug deeper into the oboe repertoire for a Venetian contemporary of Vivaldi, Alessandro Marcello. But if the heart-strings second movement of his Oboe Concerto in D Minor sounds like something you’re heard before, it was probably at a wedding. After Mendelssohn’s famous down-the-aisle march, the Marcello Adagio is one of classical music’s standard wedding themes, and Lauretig’s unmasked double-reed fortissimo soared above it all.

Following intermission, Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for String Orchestra brought to mind both the composer’s talent and his torment. To be gay in 19th-century Russia, or most anywhere for that matter, was equivalent to being forbidden to live one’s true life. Serenade debuted in 1880, 13 years before his death and his most productive stretch as a musical genius. (Symphony No. 6 Pathetique, as well as the Sleeping Beauty, Swan Lake, and Nutcracker ballets, were yet to come.) The opening movement is almost schizophrenic in its moody and melodic teasing, never deciding where to go with either tendency.

The second movement, however, could find a home in any of the composer’s beloved ballets. A lovely and embraceable waltz that only strings could produce, this is Tchaikovsky as his best and most vulnerable. Knowing his history, you want to shed a tear for him. But the beauty, as tenderly rendered by the MSO string orchestra, is too joyful to be mourned.

Personally, I would have been happy to leave it at that. But for good reason, Tchaikovsky didn’t believe in happy endings. Subsequent movements of his serenade are both ponderous and reflective of his Russian folk musical background. But somehow, the piece manages to close with a note of hopeful harmony.

And the standing ovation was more than deserved for these purveyors of great music performed with skill, grace, and feeling.

Steve Parks is a retired New York arts critic and editor now living in Easton.

MID-ATLANTIC SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA’S ‘DOUBLE REED & SERENADE’

Tchaikovsky’s String Serenade with guest oboe soloist Joshua Lauretig, Vivaldi’s Oboe Concerto in C Major, and Alessandro Marcello’s Concerto for Oboe and Strings in D Minor. Thursday, Nov. 11, at the Church of God in Easton. It will also be performed at 7:30 p.m. Saturday at Epworth United Methodist Church, Rehoboth Beach, and 3 p.m. Sunday at Community Church, Ocean Pines. Tickets: midatlanticsymphony.org, 888-846-8800