TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/011491/0114470.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 3.5 KB | 80 lines

                                                                                BOOKS, Page 61

Ice Cubes


By PAUL GRAY

THE SECRET PILGRIM
by John le Carre
Knopf; 335 pages; $21.95


    Attentive John le Carre fans may recognize the narrator of
the author's 13th novel. He is Ned (no last name given), the
British intelligence official who ran the operation so vividly
bungled in the best-selling The Russia House (1989). That
fiasco was not Ned's fault, to be sure, but he has been
punished by his Service superiors anyhow, unplugged from the
power loop and farmed out to teach spycraft to young recruits.
On an inspired whim, Ned manages to lure his old mentor,
George Smiley, out of retirement to spend an evening talking
with these students. As the legendary Smiley reminisces aloud
about the past history of the Service, Ned finds himself
privately doing the same.

    And that arc of Ned's memory is essentially the plot of The
Secret Pilgrim. The novel has no grand, tantalizing design; the
individual adventures that Ned remembers are chiefly connected
by the fact that he took some part in them. Readers familiar
with Le Carre's multi-volume fictional saga of postwar British
intelligence will see in Ned's recollections a series of
outtakes from a story that has already been told.

    There is nothing inherently wrong with that, provided the
new material is interesting. Most of Ned's additions are.
Several are funny, including Ned's attempts as a Service
neophyte to tail and protect an oil-rich sheik and his
shoplifting wife on spending binges across London's West End.
There are tales of betrayal, accidental and cold-blooded. And
there is some rough stuff. Ned remembers a beating he had
suffered at the hands of a Polish military officer who then,
rolling down his sleeves, offered his services as a double
agent for the British. Another episode seems a conscious
reprise of Heart of Darkness. Ned is sent east to find out what
happened to an agent who disappeared; he turns up an account
of appalling brutality at the hands of the Khmer Rouge, and
unbelievable paternal devotion from a father to his
half-Cambodian daughter.

    Another of the book's blessings is the reappearance of
George Smiley, who has not been seen in Le Carre's fiction
since Smiley's People (1980). In what is basically a walk-on
or, in this case, a sit-down role, Smiley retains his
enigmatic, nondescript power. At the after-dinner session,
introduced by Ned as a "legend of the Service," Smiley tells
the expectant students, "Oh, I don't think I'm a legend at all.
I think I'm just a rather fat old man wedged between the
pudding and the port." Not true. Ned paraphrases the remarks
of an extremely clever and thoughtful man: "He scoffed at the
idea that spying was a dying profession now that the cold war
had ended: with each new nation that came out of the ice, he
said, with each new alignment, each rediscovery of old
identities and passions, with each erosion of the old status
quo, the spies would be working round the clock."

    Good reasons exist for hoping that Smiley is wrong, although
writers and readers of espionage thrillers may confess to mixed
emotions on the matter. In the meantime, The Secret Pilgrim
bridges a gap between the recent past and the unforeseeable
future. No longer able, because of the innate honesty that has
characterized his storytelling career, to offer a full-blown
cold war drama, Le Carre pops out some discrete and
satisfactorily chilling ice cubes.