A Spy Is a Spy

...Their victories have a way of turning into defeat...

...With a memory like yours, how will you ever forget a girl like me?' " This gloomy Gus is a le Carré affectation, borrowed perhaps from Graham Greene...

...One hat...

...How long did it take...

...He's painted a picture of failure at every level—inaccuracy, incompetence, mismanagement and, on top of that, falsified test results sent to Moscow...

...Evident here as in his other books, especially The Little Drummer Girl, is a compulsion to editorialize and attitudinize...

...It is a weakness that comes naturally to authors who seem to feel that spy stories are too light-minded on their own and require messages as ballast...

...Where Smiley broods about his beautiful faithless wife, Palfrey broods about his beautiful mistress, Hannah, whose love he cannot match: "'Poor Palfrey,' she had taunted me in one of her cruel moods, studying her naked body in the mirror as she sipped her vodka and tonic and prepared to go back to her husband...

...We' re dealing with the wrong things...

...Who for...

...It is only a middling effort from the best spy-story spinner around, but after all, as le Carré never tires of telling us, nobody is perfect...

...That all...

...The characters, while sufficiently defined for their purpose, lack the depth or fullness we want of the inhabitants of a novel...

...Why do I keep coming back to her, I wondered...

...Some of the extra-espionage elements in his new book, especially the love between Katya and Barley, are strained: "'Why do you always trytoeducateme to the meaning of death?' she had demanded of him, sickened...

...A shop...

...As Palfrey reports, "the Bluebird material had set the industrial-military factions at one another's throats and raised roars of outrage from some of Washington's most sleazy lobbies.' Le Carré needs the military-industrial complex in much the way that the arms merchants need the Soviet threat...

...Just a hat...

...It requires no more documentation than is already in the libraries to confirm that le Carré is a better teller of spy tales than a novelist...

...Writers of spy tales often double as travel writers, and le Carré knows how to lay on the scenery of espionage...

...Here is Brady of the CIA pressuring Barley on ho w he spent a few unaccounted-for minutes in Moscow: "I think you did something...

...That a girlfriend...

...Miss Coad...

...To seek, for the thousandth time, her absolution...

...Still, such failings are common to the form...

...She's the housekeeper at the safe house in Knightsbridge," Ned cut in before Barley could reply...

...Is Goethe genuine...

...Reviewed by Walter Goodman John le Carre is a virtuoso of deception—not just the finaglings among nations, though those of course come into it, but the personal deceits and evasions that shatter friendship and blast love...

...The clandestine meetings are deftly reported, filled with a sense of place and of menace: "The first courtyard was gloomy, the second dark...

...The tale, unfortunately, is entrusted to a rather remote narrator, Palfrey, known to all as old Harry, a Prufrockian "legal advisor to the illegals...

...The connections Palfrey insists on making between his own timid love and the vibrant, daring love of Barley and Katya is an authorial imposition...

...Everybody wants to be Conrad...

...Among the incidental pleasures of The Russia House are its passages on Moscow...

...The plot of his latest best seller, though not so compellingas, say, Smiley'sPeople, is related in a wickedly veiled way that lures us into the shadowy speculations of the spymasters, always at several removes from their "joes" in the field, never able to give all-out trust to the bits of information drifting at them, or to their colleagues or, most tellingly, to themselves...

...Two long-haired boys who might have been students were playing across a row of packing cases...

...How long did that take you...

...Is Katya kosher...

...Le Carré also shows an amused acquaintance with the litchat of international book fairs...

...On the way between the tram stop and the hotel...

...What else did you do...

...And when you stepped from the juddering lift and braved the frown of your floor concierge, crouching in her box surrounded by blackened room keys and mossy telephones, you were quite likely to have the sensation of being returned to the vilest institutions of your youth...

...Where'd you buy it...

...A third leaned against the wall...

...Perhaps it's true, perhaps he's made it up...

...Cats stared at them from the rubbish...

...And the prose, heavier than the story warrants, lists toward the aphoristic: "Some people, I reflected, watching him, are cursed with too much loyalty, for a day could come when there was nothing left for them to serve...

...We're all the wrong men," says Ned...

...I don't know...

...A fur hat...

...I bought a hat.' "You're lying, Barley...

...All that the reader ever learns of Goethe comes in the form of interrogations of those who say they met him, recordings of conversations about him, and detective work to pin down a real Soviet scientist who fits his description—assuming the description can be trusted...

...His tone of generalized regret and resignation may remind you of le Carre's favorite melancholic hero, George Smiley...

...Because you have taught me how to live,' he had replied...

...I think you think so too...

...Nothing...

...Although the determinedly earnest le Carré does not let us forget the drearinessoflifeintheSoviet system even as it is undergoing gtonoiiization, he emphasizes the similarity of spy services of every nation, East and West...

...All nurture betrayal, he keeps insisting, and the most thoughtful and best spies, creations like Smiley and Ned, know they are committed to a dubious line of work...

...Or so it seems...

...The source here is Bluebird, also known as Goethe, a supersmart Soviet physicist who is determined to have his devastating exposure of Moscow's nuclear deficiencies published in the West...

...What kind of hat...

...Le Carré is more adroit in the interrogations conducted by the superspy Ned (the professional side of Smiley), timeserving Clive, brilliant, flaky Walter, good-natured Bob from the CIA, and others—all of whom operate under pressures and incentives that may distort their judgment as they dig, dig, dig...

...The Odessa Hotel, he writes, "was so ill-lit that the brass lamps and blackamoors and galleried dining room recalled the bad old past at the point of its collapse rather than the Socialist phoenix rising from the ashes...

...Amid the hocus pocus at which he is so adept, the deeper concerns of his best entertainments—from The Spy Who Came in From the Cold to Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, and now the somewhat less tantalizing The Russia House— have been the knowing or unknowing or half-knowing betrayals that lovers, friends and comrades practice on one another...

...Yet they cannot forget that fallible as they are, lives depend on them...

...A door stood ahead of them, daubed with graffiti and a red crescent moon...

...If that sounds patronizing, try to read The Naive and Sentimental Lover, his attempt at a straight novel...

...A woman's hat...

...They are led astray by faulty judgment, wishful thinking, the pressure of their careers...

...I bought a hat...

...I don't know where...

...As Ned, the brainy head of Russia House, sums up the matter, "He's told us that a lot of things on the Soviet side don't work...

...The American spymaster, Sheriton, who takes charge of the case, is brought in mainly to tell us that the politicians, industrialists and generals back in Washington will resist Goethe's information because it would compel them to rethink their own strategies and jeopardize their own interests in maintaining the specter of a Soviet threat...

...Perhaps somebody made it up for him...

...Goethe's remarkable manuscript, destined for the saxophone-playing British publisher Bartholomew Scott Blair (Barley, to us), makes its way via ravishing Yekaterina Orlova and plucky Niki Landau to Britain's Russia-watchers at Russia House, who must decide whether it is real or some sort of tricky concoction of their counterparts in Moscow...

...Is Barley benign...

...You don't have to be much of a spy, however, to detect the weaknesses of the writer's arsenal...

...Should you be in the mood, The Russia House offers a smartly constructed, if fairly conventional, yarn that carries you pleasurably along its devious passages to a fast, slightly facile conclusion...

...Palfrey's thoughts of Hannah tend to be tiresomely overdrawn...

...Watch for the red marks,' Wicklow had advised...

...To visit the scene of the crime...

...Or do I visit her as we visit our old schools, trying to understand what happened to our youth...

...I had to queue...