Our Game by John Le Carre Search Amazon for other books by or about John Le Carre. Rating: Reviewed by: John Walsh

The ending of the Cold War was thought by some to signal the end of the spy novel: if there was no one left on whom to spy, the argument went, then there would be no need to write about the spying that would not take place. Here in 2009 it is known that the rise of the terrorist threat has been more than enough to justify substantial budgets for clandestine operations. However, the ending of the cold war was not a cut and dried affair in which the situation moved from enmity to if not friendship then at least the willingness to co-exist. Many repercussions continue to be felt of the events that occurred both on the personal level and at the state level. In others of his books, John Le Carre has written about the personal implications of lives and families broken by the Cold War; here, in Our Game, he unites the personal with the national as he considers the impact on two old friends of their history of mutual spying tradecraft in the context of the post-Soviet world.

Tim Cranmer is the former spy-master, whose work at the Circus has seen him control a variety of assets in their efforts to penetrate Soviet security. Principal among them is Larry Pettifer, would-be Marxist and rebel and a highly charismatic man who is, in some ways, quite the opposite of Cranmer. Pettifer successfully engaged the interest of the Soviet spies and became an agent of CC--Constantin Checheyev--in fact, of course, he is a double spy. However, CC is from the Caucasus and, in the long and whisky-fuelled conversations they pursued together, he has persuaded Pettifer of the injustices being done to his people, the Ingushetians, by the Russians and their stooges among the ranks of the Ossetians. Ultimately, the former spy-master attempts to rescue the former spy from the consequences of his quixotic actions in the Caucasus mountains, at considerable cost to himself (albeit that the cost might be seen as an investment in his own personal development). As is almost compulsory in a Le Carre role, the central protagonist is tormented by the thought of his wife's infidelity to him and this is repeated here, with the obvious individuals forming the eternal triangle. The woman concerned, a much younger musician with a faux (because immature) rebellious past of her own, explicitly draws the contrasts between the two men in her life: on the one hand, Cranmer is stereotyped as the inward-looking, complacent Englishman more than willing to close his eyes to the misery that his country's foreign policy has inflicted upon so many people in the world; Pettifer is extroverted and apparently fully engaged with the world, although this might be viewed as the result of a rampant ego. In any case, there is little doubt into whose bed young Emma will jump when the opportunity presents itself. The duality is presented with intelligence and subtlety and there is no sense that Emma, for example, represents a kind of Hegelian solution to the thesis-antithesis of the two men. That this is not the case, indeed cannot be the case in the real world, betokens the tragedies that will inevitably befall the characters both on the personal and the national level.

Le Carre is one of our best and most intelligent and humane living novelists and his work deserves to be read by everyone with an interest in the world. His books effortlessly transcend what some people term "genre fiction" in the same way that Dickens transcended the episodic novel or Dostoyevsky the religious-philosophical tract. His very best work might include the incomparable George Smiley but this is a very considerable piece of fiction in its own right. Those who have yet to discover his work are in for a real treat.