Civil Wars In the Soul

By Pico Iyer

TITLE: THE NIGHT MANAGER

AUTHOR: JOHN LE CARRE

PUBLISHER: KNOPF; 429 PAGES; $24

THE BOTTOM LINE: Even unresolved Le Carre offers more style and excitement than most authors at their peak.

Thirty years ago, at the opening of The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, the protagonist, Leamas, was defined as a person who could not quite pass for a London clubman, a "man who was not quite a gentleman." Now, early in his new book, we are told that John le Carre's latest alienated loner, Jonathan Pine, though taken for a gentleman, did not in fact go to "that kind of school." A pungent reminder that the real wars Le Carre has been chronicling -- the class war in Britain, and the civil (very civil) war between one side of a man's soul and the other -- are in no way affected by the coming down of the Berlin Wall. Besides, in the very first paragraph of the new book, we see the Gulf War being followed in a posh Zurich hotel -- the very definition of a safe "neutral" zone -- and are reminded that espionage nature abhors a vacuum: if the cold war is over, a hot one must be cooked up in its place.

There are, you might say, at least two kinds of Le Carre admirers: the official reader, who turns the pages avidly to follow the byzantine and brilliant interlacing of plots and identities and places; and the covert reader, who reads between the lines for Le Carre's searching and intense examinations into the counterfeit gentleman, and the divided heart of Englishmen. The official reader responds to the master storyteller whose narratives purr by with the smooth whoosh of a Bentley; the secret reader finds him the most interesting English novelist alive for his discussion of the quest for absolutes in an ambiguous, secular age.

Both kinds of readers will find plenty to delight them in The Night Manager. For starters, there is the title character, who is (as usual) a slippery outsider, a "refined impostor" in search of a conscience (or a mission at least), and like nearly all Le Carre protagonists, half German and half English (which is to say, half romantic and half skeptic). A night manager in discreet hotels, Pine is, by definition, a "close observer" of people, a spy -- or novelist -- without a cause. In this instance his eye is trained largely on a glamorous slice of the "English leisure class": a jet-setting arms dealer, Dicky Roper, who is charming enough to be a Cabinet minister; his young plaything of a mistress; and such attendants as Sandy Langbourne, a sulky, beautiful, ponytailed lord with a gift for extermination.

As the spy enters the enemy's lair, all the master's usual, unequaled scenes are on display: the minuet between expert interrogator and expert evader; the battles in London between men of principle and Old Etonian Iagos; the appearance of a beautiful woman who offers a way out of the spy's maze of mirrors. Without raising a sweat, Le Carre propels us from Cairo penthouses to Cornwall pubs, from Quebecois mining towns to secret islands in the Bahamas, from Miami to London to Panama, all of them evoked with an insider's authority.

Even more impressive, Le Carre is a one-man orchestra of voices. When "wispy young men of the polo-playing classes" come into contact with Bahamian villagers, Le Carre catches both notes perfectly. Famously fluent in the tones of English smooth dissemblers, he is equally able to conjure up an American bureaucrat saying, "This is geopolitics, Rex. And what we have to do here is, we have to be able to go to the Hill and say, 'Guys, we accept the imperatives in this.' " Behind all this is the steady drumbeat of Roper's worldly defense of his murderous trade: "This isn't crime. This is politics. No good being high-and-mighty."

For what gives the book a new and particular force is that it is powered by a moral rage not only against the idle rich, and against the silky "espiocrats" of Whitehall and Washington who flick away men like lint, but most of all against the arms dealers, who, like spies, have an investment in war and are deserving, Le Carre suggests, of "a Nuremberg Trials Part Two." At the heart of the book is a passionate claim that Western governments are in the lap (and employ) of these mercenaries and drug smugglers, in a complicated scheme of mutual benefit. In other hands this might sound like a standard leftist conspiracy theory, but Le Carre documents so commandingly how Colombians deal cocaine for guns, and how offshore banks provide the backing, all with the support of those in power, that his theory gains a high-gloss plausibility.

A worldly-wise romanticism, in fact, drives Le Carre. His protagonists come armed with irony and soft spots, as well as such Bondian devices as a "subminiature camera got up as a Zippo lighter." In this case the narrative dwindles into a slightly Bondian ending. The secret reader may feel that the private demons are still unresolved, while the official reader may be shocked that the public devils are still at large. But both of them will surely agree that by now Le Carre is almost incapable of producing anything other than a beautifully polished, utterly knowing and palpitating book. His most wide-screen and well-toned dazzler ("thriller" seems too mild a word) since The Little Drummer Girl ten years ago, The Night Manager seems sure to be the most stylish explosion of intelligence of the summer.