The Spy In Winter

(2 of 3)
Today Le Carre is hale, white-haired and vigorous. He has a hearing aid discreetly tucked in each ear, but he is otherwise undiminished. His speaking voice is patrician in tone (he was once, briefly, a tutor at Eton), and he quotes fluently from the annals of military historythe British in Suez, the CIA in Iran, the Abkhazian War, obscure, half-forgotten intelligence scandalsbut he is also an almost unnervingly gifted mimic. Over the course of an afternoon, he does, among others, the author James Jones, a snooty French photographer, Truman Capote and Mel Brooks' 2,000-year-old man.

These days Le Carre lives a life apart. He steers clear of the London literary scene. He refuses to allow his books to be submitted for prizes, and he declines all honors offered him. "I am not a Commander of the British Empire," he says. "I will never be Sir David, Lord David or King David." He and his wife Jane spend most of the year in self-imposed exile in a compound on the rocky, wave-scoured coast of Cornwall, at the very southwestern tip of England, a surreal, almost uninhabited landscape of ancient stone circles, 12th century churches and sheep-dotted, wind-blasted meadows. He rises early to writeoften before 6and when he isn't writing, he takes long walks along the gray, fog-baffled cliffs.

He is far too polite--too English, really--to raise his voice or shake his fist, but Le Carre is an angry man. After the demise of the Soviet empire, he was optimistic about the future of the West, but his confidence, he feels, has been betrayed. To be quite clear: he feels that the Taliban got exactly what they deserved, and the terrorists responsible for Sept. 11 deserve the same. But when the U.S.'s military focus shifted to Iraq, he became increasingly alarmed. "It suddenly seemed to me that we were really watching the preparation of a much larger campaign based on very dubious grounds," he says. "I kept thinking, Don't lie to me. Don't lie to me. Don't pretend that this is not religiously based. Don't pretend this is not a crusade. Don't pretend this isn't about oil. Don't pretend this isn't about making a fortune and keeping the American people on their heels in fear."

Absolute Friends bristles with that outrage. It is the story of Ted, a tall, genial, impressionable Englishman, and Sasha, a tiny, misshapen, brilliant, fiercely idealistic German. The two men meet for the first time as fire-breathing anarchists in a counterculture commune in Berlin in the 1960s and, improbably, become fast friends. The book's rhythm is that of their chance meetings. Over the years, Ted drifts into life as a minor diplomat, and a decade later, he re-encounters Sasha at an official reception. Now an East German functionary, Sasha proposes an intelligence operationsmuggling state secrets to the West under cover of Ted's menial diplomatic duties. It's a classic Le Carre caper--fans will recognize it as a variation on one he used in A Perfect Spy.

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