This final part in Smiley’s trilogy, which began with Iowa farmers Walter and Rosanna Langdon in the early 1900s, follows the fortunes of their children and grand-children from 1987 to 2019. It’s been an enormous undertaking as Smiley traces the sociological as well as the personal shifts experienced by a particular family over the period of a hundred years. How to maintain a story’s necessary intimacy whilst reflecting that broader scope is a supreme challenge.

By and large, Smiley achieves it. There are occasional weaknesses: Walter and Roseanna’s third son (they have seven children in all), the scholarly Henry, can feel occasionally like a cipher, used to carry the message about AIDS, changes in attitudes towards homosexuality, and so on. Inevitably, war rears its ugly head: having already claimed one grandson in Vietnam, a great-grandson is lost in the attack on the Twin Towers. Because certain events simply cannot be ignored, some characters cannot help but feel a little like points on a map, there to stress the action, rather than their own personalities.

But there are also some wonderful portrayals. This is the story of family: birth, marriage and death are really all that matters. But how those elements shape a life can take any number of routes, and in the marriage of Frank and Andy (short for Andrea), Smiley has shown us a man to be feared and a woman to be pitied. Frank is a ruthless go-getter, keen on excitement and affairs and money. But we remember Frank as a boy from the first novel in the trilogy, fearless but not invulnerable, often lonely but desperate not to be alone. We don’t forget our feeling for him, even at his foolish and selfish adult worst, and towards the end of his life we see something of that childish vulnerability return. It’s an utterly believable portrait, powerful and moving, and other characters struggle to compete.

Those who come off best against him are possibly his twin sons, Richie and Michael, the latter often appearing as a version of his father, the former as the struggling weaker brother. They echo the rivalry between Frank and his quieter brother, Joe, who just wanted to stay at home and work on the farm, and the Cain-and-Abel type betrayal that affects both generations of brothers is perhaps what this trilogy is all about.

The women may be the ones who bear the children and rear them, too, but it’s the men who carry the stories here. Smiley gives attention here to Riley, for example, the young eco-warrior who sets up home with Charlie, the Langdons’ great-grandson. But her real role is to keep the next generation of Langdons going, and true enough, she gives birth to her and Charlie’s daughter, Alexis. Janet, sister of twins Richie and Michael, struggles to be heard, but she finds the internet a useful way of voicing her opinions. Fiona, who is the mother of Charlie, has a good career training horses, but one searches in vain for the female doctors, lawyers, journalists, intrepid travellers amongst the Langdon women. Men make the laws and women obey them.

Is Smiley merely reflecting the world as she sees it? Or is she tied to something older, something more mythic here? We see the Greek gods and their squabbling children reflected in her trilogy of the Langdons and their family; we hear biblical echoes in fraternal treachery. Lillian’s husband Arthur has spent his career working for the secret service, at one time engaging nephew Frank in clandestine government operations. But it’s his son who is killed in Vietnam, and it’s his grandson who dies in the Twin Towers. Dramatic irony, so beloved of the Greeks, abounds in Smiley’s novel.

It’s perhaps the reason why there are so many doubles in this family tale. Rival households next door to one another, twin brothers fighting to the death, father and sons dying in battle, are the male doubles. Their female equivalents are sisters who replace baby girls who die too soon, or women who impersonate their best friends (as Andy does with her friend, Hildy), sisters-in-law who loathe one another. All these ‘doubles’ create a sense of conflict, and conflict, as we know, is the essence of drama. Some may think Smiley has written a modern epic tale here with her Langdon trilogy. But I suspect her intention is closer to an older kind of drama. The result is appropriately double and conflicting, producing in this reader, anyway, a mixture of satisfaction, awe and a little frustration.