Le Carré proves he's the spy-novel master

By John le Carré

Scribner. 330 pp. $28

Reviewed by Tim Rutten

The first recognizable English-language novels of espionage were published in the first decade of the 20th century - and both have been continuously in print ever since.

Rudyard Kipling's

Kim

came out in 1901, and Erskine Childers'

The Riddle of the Sands

followed two years later. Both were recognized, from the start, as works of literature, and as entertainments.

At midcentury, Graham Greene magnificently exploited the possibilities inherent in the porous membrane between the espionage genre and the novel of political criticism.

But no author has made better use of that literary passage than John le Carré, beginning with

The Spy Who Came in From the Cold

in 1963.

A Most Wanted Man

is his 21st novel and surely one of his best - intricately plotted, beautifully written, propulsive, morally engaged, timely as today's headlines. It's also a very angry book in ways that might discomfort some American readers.

In a recent memoir of incidents from his six-year service in British intelligence, le Carré, now 76, writes of "the madness of spies" and the way in which their occupational delusions infect the body politic.

A Most Wanted Man

is an exploration of the murkily ambiguous and morally turbulent waters in which America's spies - with their extraordinary renditions, torture and clandestine unilateralism - now fish.

Part of what makes this new book such enjoyably compelling reading is le Carré's return to two landscapes he knows so well. One is the moral geography of contemporary espionage, in which means and ends, loyalty and patriotism are obscured by necessity and deceit. The other is Hamburg, most Anglophilic of German cities, where le Carré - using his real name, David Cornwell - once served under diplomatic cover. (The author's most memorable character, British spymaster George Smiley, spent part of his boyhood in Hamburg.)

This Hamburg, however, is very much a post-9/11 city. On one hand, the collapse of communism has allowed the north German port to resume its historic role as meeting place of polyglot Middle Europe and the West. On the other hand, deadly new antagonisms between religions and cultures have turned it into a shadowy but deadly battlefield. Here, Melik, the German-born son of a Turkish immigrant mother, reflects on their adopted city:

Leyla and Melik scarcely ever went to mosque, not even a moderate Turkish-language one. Since 9/11, Hamburg's mosques had become dangerous places. Go to the wrong one, or the right one and get the wrong imam, and you could find yourself and your family on a police watch list for the rest of your life. Nobody doubted that practically every prayer row contained an informant who was earning his way with the authorities. Nobody was likely to forget . . . that the city-state of Hamburg had been unwitting host to three of the 9/11 hijackers, not to mention their fellow cell-members and plotters; or that Mohammad Atta, who steered the first plane into the Twin Towers, had worshiped his wrathful god in a humble Hamburg mosque.

Into this tense metropolis comes Issa Karpov, illegitimate son of a Russian father and a Chechen mother. He might or might not be a terrorist - or a sympathizer or perhaps even a funder of terrorists. He's definitely Muslim and an illegal immigrant: He escaped from a Turkish prison and a Swedish holding cell. He has come to Hamburg for something other than refuge.

His father, now dead, spied for the British, and the now-laundered million he earned for his betrayal is on deposit with a private British banking house operating out of the German city. Its proprietor, Tommy Brue, has his own secrets, mainly centering on the secret "Lipizzaner accounts" (named for the famous horses of Vienna's Spanish Riding Academy, which are born black and turn white as they mature) that his father had set up at the behest of British intelligence. The successful money-laundering operation earned the father royal honors, an OBE, and the son a guilty conscience, as the whole operation was illegal and still hangs like a cloud over the bank he inherited.

Brue is approached on Issa's behalf by Annabel Richter, a human-rights lawyer working for a refugee group. She sees in Issa, who claims to want nothing more than a medical school education and a place to pray, a chance to make amends for all the clients she's failed. Brue hopes he sees something more in her.

Issa, meanwhile, has been spotted by three intelligence agencies - the Brits with an eye on their investment, the Americans eager to scoop up any suspected terrorist, and the Germans (still smarting over their failure to spot the Hamburg 9/11 cells), whose leader, Gunther Bachmann, is the novel's most memorable personality. He heads the local security operation and hopes to use Issa to compromise an ostensibly moderate local imam suspected of funneling money to jihadists.

Even the minor characters in

A Most Wanted Man

are deftly sketched, but all three of the protagonists are brilliantly drawn.Each character has his or her reasons and secrets, and le Carré skillfully intertwines them in a narrative conclusion no less haunting and enraging for all its seeming inevitability.