Agent Running in the Field
John le Carré
(VIKING, 288 PP, £20)
Tablet bookshop price £18 • Tel 020 7799 4064

Most of John Le Carré’s wonderful early books featured his unlikely, learned and immensely astute intelligence officer, George Smiley, and the “Circus”, headquarters of a British secret service pitted against that arch post-war foe, the KGB of Moscow Centre. When, with the end of the Cold War, the rationale for this created world dissolved, it was unclear what could possibly follow that would give readers equal ­satisfaction.

Undaunted, Le Carré produced a succession of novels that didn’t go remotely near either the Circus or the minarets of the Kremlin Square, but were nonetheless page-turning yarns of great complexity. Admittedly some suffered from a growing political tendentiousness – about Big Pharma, about Israel, about the imperialism of the West – that made them vehicles for views rather than demonstrations of his enormous narrative skill. There have been exceptions: A Perfect Spy, for example, is arguably an almost perfect novel, and in recent years, as Russia has returned to its ­earlier role as a fount of anti-Western ­subversion, Le Carré has also returned to the world of British counter-espionage – his last book even featured an extended cameo of an ageing George Smiley.