Books: The Spy In Winter

But this time around, Le Carre has something different in mind. The action moves restlessly forward in time, past the fall of the Wall, through the Gulf War and up to the present day. Ted and Sasha watch the triumph of the cold war--a triumph for which they mortgaged much of their lives--being squandered by corporate cowboys and callow compromisers. "You think the war's over because a bunch of old Nazis in East Germany have traded Lenin for Coca-Cola?" Sasha demands of Ted in one of his bravura harangues. "Do you really believe that American capitalism will make the world a sweet safe place? It will pick it dry." The novel comes to a head in the present day with the two friends attempting a final, desperate gambit in pursuit of the ideals they shared in their youth, ideals that seem childish and dated even to them but that, like their friendship, they somehow can't abandon.

This is Le Carre in career form: his anger burns cold and clear. Rage has given back his pacing its sharp, irresistible snap, his wry social observation its bite and his signature backstage knife-play its deadly edge. But even more, he shows us without sentimentality or self-righteousness that a deeply moving, deeply personal story can be alloyed with a powerful political argument and that a single novel can express both an urgent, immediate sense of grievance and the melancholy perspective of an old man looking back on a long life lived in a tragic, tumultuous century.

With a political statement this pungent, Le Carre knows he runs the risk of alienating his sizable American following, even of coming off as a crank--an aging, forgotten ex-spook railing at the world from his Cornish crag. He also knows that he is leaving behind the sense of moral ambiguity that permeated his most acclaimed novels, trading those many delicate, literary shades of gray for a palette of clear-cut black and white. He has taken a stand. "I have a kind of middle-class constituency of fans who don't want me shaking the bars," he says, smiling sadly. "This is uncomfortable; this isn't ambivalent. This isn't Smiley saying 'Well, this is really tough, what we're doing, but I'll carry my horse uphill.' This is Smiley saying 'F___ this! This has got to stop!'" He laughs delightedly, but he is in no way joking. "There was something that I could not look away from. I felt I could not look myself in the eye and not write this. I think there may be no going back." Another pause for reflection. "Maybe I just felt that it was time to be a little less polite about it."