Spy for a New Millenium.

• Author: Ignatius, David
• Position: Review

SINGLE & SINGLE By John le Carre Scribner, $26

George Smiley is back! That's the treasure hidden in John le Carre's newest novel. He isn't called George Smiley anymore--the author famously buried him after The Secret Pilgrim, supposedly because Smiley, the quintessential creature of the Cold War, had to die with the fall of the Berlin Wall. (Le Carre offered a simpler, and much funnier, explanation in a recent lecture--namely that Alec Guinness kidnapped Smiley, by playing him so brilliantly in the BBC television productions that le Carre could no longer hear his favorite character's voice, only Guinness', and had to abandon him.)

But whatever voice he's speaking, Smiley is back. His name in this book is Nat Brock, which has a crisper, TV-anchorman ring to it than Smiley, but that's part of the message--le Carre chooses his characters' names as mischievously as Dickens. And there are other obvious differences. The new Smiley doesn't read classical German, he isn't pudgy, he doesn't have a house in Bywater Street, he doesn't have a faithless wife, he isn't a member of the Oxbridge upper-middle-class. Indeed, he lacks nearly all the superficial attributes of George Smiley. He isn't even a real spy--he's a customs agent!

Still, Nat Brock has the inner qualities that defined George Smiley--and perfected the literary genre of the spy novel. He is a gray man, with a world-weariness so profound that the reader senses immediately that Brock has gazed into the very bottom of the abyss. You have the feeling with Brock, just as with Smiley, that he knows how the story will end before it begins.

And, like Smiley, Brock has the deferential personal habits that mask an awesome competence in his trade. He is the perfect British operative--his politeness and bonhomie masking an obsessive quest for the truth. I've been convinced for many years that the central fact about the English is that they are the best liars in the world. They are raised from birth to dissemble, artfully and with self-deprecating wit. Where an American considers himself discreet if he keeps a secret for a week, the Brits take their secrets to the grave. And Brock is such a man.

Brock's enemy is a piratical gang of Russian crooks and the sleek, Turnbull-and-Asser-clad British banker, Tiger Single, who is laundering their money. Le Carre describes his villains with a reportorial precision, and the book is a veritable cookbook for money laundering--explaining how to use Swiss banks...