Roanoke Times Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc. DATE: SUNDAY, February 24, 1991 TAG: 9102270011 SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: D-4 EDITION: METRO SOURCE: Reviewed by ROBERT HILLDRUP DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
The dying of the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the West has left more than a few espionage novelists on the verge of unemployment as the fickle nature of public interest shifts, along with the headlines, to other areas and other problems.
John le Carre, one of the most popular of this class of novelists, shows a skillful adaptation to this change in "The Secret Pilgrim."
He does it by visiting his long-running and popular character, Smiley, upon a new school of British spies. As Smiley spins tales to entertain the new breed, le Carre's narrator, Ned, hovers in the background and thinks his own thoughts of old cases and old times which the new spies will never know.
What emerges from all this is not so much the thin gruel of the vignette, but a series of tales complete in themselves: how Ned unwittingly became the love object of a homosexual fellow spy, and the mess that created; how the bumbling British intelligence services of the '50s and '60s almost lost whatever credibility they had with their American cousins, so riddled had they become with traitors and Russian "moles."
Le Carre does all this with a skill that, frankly, I have not seen in his earlier work. It takes a special kind of patience to wade through most le Carre novels. Their pace is the slow pace of reality, of dark chilly rooms and endless conversation and self-examination. His most recent - and popular - work, "The Russia House," is a good example.
As Smiley tells the new spies, "The purpose of life was to end the time I lived in. So if my past were still around today, you could say I'd failed. But it's not around. We won. Not that the victory matters a damn . . . "
"The Secret Pilgrim" is le Carre at his best. And for the few who don't know his work, it's a good place to begin.
by CNB