The Russia House by John Le Carre Search Amazon for other books by or about John Le Carre. Rating: Reviewed by: John Walsh

A new generation of spies has taken over from the time of George Smiley and the Circus. Times have changed too, as the Cousins, who were once well-resourced allies at approximately the same level of ability, now bankroll all espionage operations--the Americans now routinely receive all intelligence discovered by the British services while occasionally and perhaps begrudgingly considering whether to release some needful titbit from time to time. Yet there remain times when a person on the spot can circumvent all the technology and resources that can be thrown at an operation: so, when a Russian publisher is looking to pass on a secret manuscript from a friend to a western contact who is not available, she gives it to a substitute whom she is obliged to trust in the hope that he will prove to be a good and faithful person. The recipient, Niki Landau, is a typical Le Carre protagonist, with possibly mixed loyalties and a potentially tragic flaw (an eye for the ladies, in his case). This begins the prologue, as observed by the principal narrator, Horatio Benedict dePalfrey, the lawyer to the service (MI5), who is himself subject to split loyalties and, through his long-term adulterous relationship with a woman he betrays and by whom he is betrayed, is just as much a turncoat as he hopes the Russian contact to become.

After the manuscript arrives in the clutches of the spies, the main action begins, which involves Barley Blair's progress into Russia to meet the woman Katya and the contact Goethe. Barley Blair is an unlikely secret agent, being a heavy-drinking failing publisher with a penchant for the saxophone, chess and failed relationships. Can the service instill sufficient discipline in him to travel to Moscow, make the necessary connections and manage to extract the contact? The procedural aspects of the life of espionage are, as ever with Le Carre, utterly compelling and believable--he is, of course, a veteran of the Circus himself. The quality of the prose is up to the usual extremely high level and the interactions between the main plot and the sub-plots will resonate in the mind of the reader for some time afterwards. It would be unfortunate indeed if John Le Carre is relegated to the "genre fiction" category when he so clearly has an enormous amount to say about the human condition and the difficulties of remaining true to just about anything, while creating a world of adult sensibilities and a realpolitik environment which suffuses every aspect of the action. He would certainly be a worthy winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.

It is fascinating to compare the feeling and nature of the British secret services in this novel, set at almost but not quite the point of collapse of the Soviet system, with the previous Smiley novels, when the Cold War was is full swing. The end of the British Empire is now further away in the past and the British protagonists seem to have less of a grasp on exactly what they are doing other than that it is a set of tasks that has always been done and must continue to be done. Yet the ties and the connections remain--as they will continue to do for the Russians for some time afterwards, of course. History influences the present and the future. A great book.