The Not-So-Good Old Days
GOODMAN, WALTER
The Not-So-Good Old Days The Secret Pilgrim By John le Carré Knopf. 335 pp. $21.95. Reviewed by Walter Goodman An upscale trivia question: Where these days can you find Bill Haydon, Peter...
...Answer, of course: In John le Carré's elegiac new book, The Secret Pilgrim...
...The book has its exotic settings, from Gdansk to Bangkok, each convincingly described...
...As Smiley says in his typical wise man's way, "And some interrogations are not interrogations at all, but communions between damaged souls...
...Did Ben betray the Service...
...The story is one long interrogation, with Ned working his way into Cyril's life, identifying with his prey even as he corners him...
...First comes a small joke concerning a surveillance assignment that Ned, as a neophyte, managed to get all wrong before being saved by a veteran spook from making an ass of himself...
...As any Masterpiece Theater buff can tell you, they all worked for the Circus in the great years of the fabled George Smiley...
...In pursuing him, is Ned betraying a friendship...
...its grabby lingo, like lamplighters, watchers, minders and safe houses...
...When Ned leaves off his moral vaporings and concentrates on tradecraft the reading is easy...
...Le Carré does have a way of laying it on...
...Ned's unrelievedly obnoxious adversary, a symbol of materialism amok, tells him, "One doesn't normally talk philosophy, but I'm afraid one doesn't like being preached to either...
...The souls at issue in one of the later and lengthier stories, for example, are Ned and Cyril Frewin, a Foreign Office cipher clerk and something of a cipher, who is suspected of passing along secrets to Moscow Center...
...The result is a set of reminiscences, from the anecdotal to the elaborate, about the not-all-that-good old days...
...But that fits another of le Carre's favorite themes: The best laid schemes as often as not go disastrously agley, with heavy costs to the best people...
...It consists of several short stories in the guise of a novel, like a spy dressed up to look like a reputable citizen...
...The great thing about Masterpiece Theater is that there are no pauses for commercials...
...Le Carré readers will recognize the ambiguity of success here, and the neardesire for failure...
...The dedication to Alec Guinness in the latest book may well be the author's generous acknowledgment of the actor's contribution to the Smiley legend...
...The psychology here is a trifle transparent to credit, but don't ask for too much...
...Now on the edge of retirement, Ned has invited the already retired Smiley to address the "passingout class" of newly trained recruits...
...If Stefanie had unlocked the door of doubt in me, Bella pointed me towards the open world while there was still time...
...The experienced agent, whether Smiley or Ned, gets at the heart of treachery by using every tactic of the practiced snoop, and especially by identifying with the person he will soon bring to bay...
...In the Caucasus, our escape lines had been rolled up overnight...
...and its timely touches...
...At the finale, which is a polemic in spy story clothing, Ned recalls Smiley's aphorism about the right people losing the Cold War and the wrong people winning it...
...Ned, that damp romantic, languishes over superbeautiful and sensitive women whom he loves and loses...
...Won't have it, you see...
...The second story gets into a favorite le Carré theme: personal betrayal by the hero agent in the interests of the Service...
...Ned helpfully catches us up with a little background on the period when the Circus was in disarray because of a mole at the highest levels: "The arrest ofBen'sagents.tragicinitself, was only the latest in a chain of catastrophes reaching across the globe...
...Toward the end of an adventure in the Baltics, Ned reflects: "I wonder what we thought we were promising to those brave Baits in those days, and whether it was the same promise which we are now so diligently breaking...
...Just as you're enjoying a smartly written, well plotted tale, he pauses for maunderings over the political morality of it all and some stale comments about Britain as a sellout to the United States, that vulgar, overbearing conqueror...
...Le Carré is particularly strong, as in all his books, on interrogations...
...I've had enough of your melancholy," one of Ned's masters tells him after he has done a good job, and this reader cried amen...
...Not in my house, thank you...
...It is agreeable, but you may understand the situation enough before Ned does to spoil the punch line...
...It has to do with tracking down Ben, a missing pal of Ned's and a runner of Eastern European agents, known in the trade as "joes...
...Smiley fans need no reminders...
...The author, Smiley and Ned can become tiresome on the subject, yet the plot does carry one along...
...Reviewed by Walter Goodman An upscale trivia question: Where these days can you find Bill Haydon, Peter Guillain, Roy Bland, and Toby Esterhase...
...Hear...
...Annoys me...
...Hear...
...The stories are told by Ned, the surnameless Smiley clone who figured importantly in The Russia House, le Carre's previous effort...
...It was of such stuff that the best of the books were made...
...The final revelation of the reason for Ben's delinquency is anticlimactic...
...Le Carré'syams of Cold War huggermugger, especially The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and Smiley's People are up there with the best of a genre for which your reviewer and several million other people happily confess an insatiable weakness...
...On that he can be a big bore...
...In northern Japan an entire Circus listening station and its three-man staff had vanished into thin air...
...We had lost networks in Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria, all in a space of months...
...The Secret Pilgrim seems to be le Carré's farewell to his hero, whose contest with his Soviet equal, Karla, warmed up the Cold War...
...This is the first time that Ned meets Smiley, an "owlish man," whose melancholy wisdom immediately infects the young fellow: "He continued to regard me with a wretched empathy, as if to say it comes to allof us and there's nothing we can do...
...And although he is adept at cornering traitors, he is always left with questions about the true natureof treachery...
Vol. 74 • March 1991 • No. 4
