Books: The Spy In Winter

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The critical reception of John le Carre's first work of fiction was mixed and typically British: he was flogged. "When I was about 10 or 11," he recalls, "I wrote a story about a jockey who loaded his whip with lead and beat the horse to run faster. The headmaster had a secretary who took me under her wing, and she agreed to type the story out because I thought it should be immortalized. And the headmaster discovered that I was giving work to his secretary and flogged me for it. He had a riding crop, and it made a hell of a cut into the flesh of the bum." A pause for amused reflection. "I don't know whether he flogged me because I was a rival employer or whether he didn't like the story."

Since then Le Carre has fared somewhat better with critics, but there will be readers of his new book who will agree with his old headmaster. Le Carre is best known for classic cold war espionage thrillers like The Spy Who Came In from the Cold and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. But the cold war is long over, and at 72, he has written a searing, startling novel that sweeps through much of the 20th century and up to the present conflict with Iraq, and it may shock his devoted fans. Absolute Friends (Little, Brown; 455 pages) is a work of fist-shaking, Orwellian outrage. "At the end of the cold war, people said I was finished," Le Carre says with quiet determination. "I felt I was really just beginning."

John le Carre is a pseudonym. He was born David Cornwell in 1931, the son of a high-flying, charismatic con man who racked up millions in bad debts; his mother left when David was 5. His father's many frauds left Le Carre with a natural gift for duplicity that he turned to professional advantage. For an undisclosed period of time from the late 1940s into the 1960s, he worked for Her Majesty's Secret Service, though he is quick to downplay his exploits. "I was never James Bond or anything like it," he insists. "I sat behind a desk."

It was as a maker of literary fictions rather than diplomatic ones that he found his calling. The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, published in 1963, was a sensation. Set among low-level intelligence operators in the chilly mists of divided Berlin, it lifted the curtain on a secret war fought in silence not by chiseled movie heroes in tuxedos but by paunchy, bitter men in ill-fitting trench coats, real human beings who loved and suffered and doubted and died in an atmosphere of profound moral ambiguity. They were James Bond come unbound.

And The Spy Who Came In from the Cold was more than a page-turner. In an act of literary spycraft, Le Carre had smuggled a great human drama inside a pulp paperback. He helped invent a new kind of novel, the literary thriller, and devised one to speak to the anxious pace, global scale and deadly stakes of 20th century geopolitics. Spy and the books that followed it, notably those starring the fictional spymaster George Smiley, laid bare the ticking watchwork of power and subterfuge that underlies our daily lives and established Le Carre as one of the principal fictional chroniclers of modern politics.