Our Game, by John le Carré (Knopf, 302 pp., $24)
THE plot, laid bare, could be outlined on a postcard, but mustn’t be, because the intricacy of its unfolding, the carefully paced revelations, are what make le Carré’s apparently complex novels absorbing. The narrator—indeed the hero, since he’s brave and resourceful—a prematurely retired officer in Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, falls under suspicion when his best agent, a former schoolfellow, disappears. Gone too is the hero’s girlfriend. He knows more than, at first, he reveals either to the police or to the reader, and eventually finds himself, at once hunter and hunted, on a frightening trail which leads from rural England to the wild, war-torn mountains of the Caucasus. This is vintage le Carré adapted to the new struggles following the collapse of the Soviet Union. The familiar features remain: details of a spy’s craft and his disillusionment with the trade of spying; painful reflections on loyalty and betrayal; manifest sophistication; excellent prose (“The rain had ceased, leaving a pall of ground mist that made autumn bonfires of the Peugeot’s headlights”). The trouble, also inherent in all le Carré’s work, is that the reader, like the narrator, is left with no firm ground, no cause worth fighting for, only nothingness at the rainbow’s end; which, in literature as in life, is ultimately dissatisfying. Meanwhile, though, it’s a very good story.
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