History has dealt John le Carré two problems since his elevation to Graham Greene-like status as a respected bestseller writer and national treasure during the 1980s. One of these was the end of the cold war, which had provided the context for his two best novels, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963) and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974). Having stamped his distinctive version of that conflict on the popular imagination, he could have been forgiven for using it as his main setting for the rest of his writing life, as many of his readers might have preferred. Instead he has made a point of moving with the times, bringing his pessimistic vision to bear on such matters as post-Soviet gangster capitalism, the wrongdoings of multinationals in the developing world and the lawlessness and cruelty engendered by the "war on terror". It's possible to find some of his later novels a bit preachy without denying that they're classily assembled or failing to appreciate to the leftish indignation behind them.
The other problem has to do with social change. Born in 1931, Le Carré is a product of a time when the civil service rather than banking or commercial law, as now was the stereotypical career path for beneficiaries of elite educations. The spy chiefs and Whitehall functionaries in his 60s and 70s books are explicitly presented as a grotesque "vision of the British establishment at play", as he once put it; and Le Carré's mordant knowingness about the snobberies and mannerisms of the postwar governing class helps to make his spies' activities seem insiderishly plausible too. It's hard to believe that today's backroom mandarins have an equally fruity style of speech, or that they represent the dark heart of British privilege in quite the same way. Le Carré is aware of this, and indeed spends a lot of time pinning down more recent modes of elite self-presentation, from "high-Tory curdled cockney" to "Blairite wannabe-classless slur". But despite or because of that, his younger characters don't always ring true.
Perry Makepiece and Gail Perkins, an innocent couple dragged into the world of crime and the security services in Our Kind of Traitor, Le Carré's 22nd novel, are two such figures. Perry is a conscience-ridden leftist, born in the late 1970s, who teaches English at Oxford; Gail, his girlfriend, is a rising young barrister. Le Carré repeatedly emphasises a lack of grandeur in both their backgrounds: Gail's parents were cash-strapped actors (though her father left her a flat in Primrose Hill), while Perry, "the state-educated son of secondary school teachers", owes his posh first name to "a rabble-rousing Methodist prelate of the nineteenth century named Arthur Peregrine of Huddersfield". In practice, however, Perry comes across as a relentlessly clean-limbed public school type, addicted to tennis, alpine sports and PG Wodehouse and equipped like many of Le Carré's characters with a streak of romantic patriotism that's survived his disquiet about Iraq and British complicity in torture.
Dispirited by his apathetic students, Perry decides to leave Oxford and do something more useful. But first, thanks to another fortuitous inheritance and perhaps not altogether plausibly for a leftwing academic aged 30, he takes Gail on an upmarket tennis holiday in Antigua. The first third of the novel details their encounter on this holiday with a charismatic Russian plutocrat known as Dima, who makes his presence known by requesting a tennis match the first of several in the book. Dima has an ulterior motive for bringing the English couple into his orbit: he is a large-scale international money launderer who's been placed under virtual house arrest by his murder-minded colleagues, and wishes to cut a deal with British intelligence, using Perry as a middleman. Back in the UK, Perry makes contact with some spooks, to whose point of view the narrative swings as Le Carré sketches out a network of influence-peddling and corruption involving bankers, politicians and tainted Russian money.
The ensuing story centres on an operation to spirit Dima and his family out of the Russian mob's clutches, an operation in which Perry and Gail are persuaded to play major roles. As is customary in late Le Carré, string-pulling in London causes as many difficulties as developments in the field, and the novel arrives at a downbeat conclusion in which British justice and idealistic secret agents are once again sacrificed on the altar of profit. The intelligence operation and the bureaucratic tussles are, as usual, spiritedly done, but the plotting often conveys the feeling of a writer going through the motions. By this stage of his career, Le Carré seems more interested in the telling than the tale, and in the actors more than in their actions. But his deft setting up of colourful characters, and slightly less deft meshing of psychology and plot requirements, doesn't always make for narrative tension. The long, fussily narrated opening, in particular, takes nearly 100 pages to get the reader hooked.
All the same, the book has many good touches. Dima's background in Russian crime is lightly and believably fleshed out, and Le Carré cheerfully embellishes the British end of the corruption plotline with barely disguised, disgusted allusions to the saga of George Osborne, Peter Mandelson and Oleg Deripaska. There's also a carefree quality to his choices of setting. One tense meeting is staged in the stalls at the French Open, allowing a few paragraphs on Roger Federer. If you're a figure of Le Carré's stature, why the hell not? Somerset Maugham, another writer of dark spy stories, once had a character say of an aspiring grand old man of letters: "It is no good his thinking that it is enough to write one or two masterpieces; he must provide a pedestal for them of forty or fifty works of no particular consequence." Our Kind of Traitor may fall into the second category, but it's good to see Le Carré having fun as he reinforces the pedestal under his classic productions.
