John Le Carre's Smiley returns in A Legacy of Spies

New John Le Carre novel A Legacy of Spies brings back his most famous protagonist George Smiley - and the critics are thrilled.

Published in the UK today, the book is the 24th novel from Le Carre, now 85. Despite fears that the author's "mnemonic power" might be diminished, says Dwight Garner in The New York Times, the good news is that A Legacy of Spies "delivers a writer in full".

Le Carre's prose "remains brisk and lapidary" and his "wit is intact", Garner says; and while the spymaster maintains his interest in the values and conflicts of loyalty, "he wears his gravitas lightly". There's even some showmanship as the author brings out "his greatest creation, the Yoda-like spymaster George Smiley, for a cameo".

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While A Legacy of Spies may be considered a Smiley novel - possibly his last - "the paterfamilias of the Circus is absent until its final chapters", notes Paula L. Woods in the Los Angeles Times.

The book is framed as the memoirs of Peter Guillam, one of Smiley’s most trusted lieutenants. Smiley has decamped for parts unknown, leaving Guillam to face the music at MI6 when trouble emerges.

One of book's great pleasures, says Wood, is "watching the battle of words and ideas between the old and new agents". She adds that fans of Le Carre’s earlier fiction "will feast at the historical banquet" it offers.

It's also an "immensely clever piece of novelistic engineering", writes John Banville in The Guardian. Not since The Spy has Le Carre "exercised his gift as a storyteller so powerfully and to such thrilling effect".

However, in The Daily Telegraph, Jake Kerridge wonders if Le Carre's latest novel is an attempt to shape his own legacy. Behind "the old spies’ attempts to justify their behaviour", the critic senses "an authorial apologia for the existence of the novel itself".

According to Kerridge, Le Carre seems to want to "revise and reconfigure his past glories for a modern audience, to tinker and tailor". This attempt to recalibrate the events of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, argues Kerridge, is "not true to the spirit of that original book".

Smiley does indeed offer some bland comments on the meaning of his long battle into the Cold War twilight, says David Ignatius in The Atlantic, but the critic suspects "it’s all hooey".

Smiley doesn’t really know why he did what he did, argues Ignatius, and "he wouldn’t tell us in any case". Less is more with Smiley, as with any great enigmatic character, says Ignatius, who is "glad le Carre has left the spaces between the words for us all to fill in".