From John Le Carré's Smiley's People:
An abbey, the Superintendent decided. That’s what he was, an abbey. He would work that into his sermon the next time his turn came around. An abbey, made up of all sorts of conflicting ages and styles and convictions. The Superintendent liked that metaphor the more he dwelt on it.
Does that suggest Smiley have a complex character? Or does it mean he's a solitary man? Or something else?
As the quotation says, an abbey is made up of "all sorts of conflicting ages and styles". This is due to the long, sometimes century-long process of building and finishing, see e.g. the mixture of styles at Westminster Abbey. The text uses this observation of mixed and also conflicting elements of architecture as a metaphor for Smiley's character which presumably, in the eyes of the Superintendent, also exhibits a mixture of different and contradictory or conflicting elements acquired or developed over time.
