Volume 43, Number 19 · November 28, 1996
The Lying Game
By Michael Wood
The Tailor of Panama
by John le Carré
Knopf, 332 pp., $25.00
'It is wonderful how the conception of honour alters in the atmosphere of defeat,' Graham Greene wrote, thinking of German officers he had known in Lisbon in the later years of the Second World War, when a German defeat seemed more and more likely. These men 'spent much of their time sending home completely erroneous reports based on information received from imaginary agents. It was a paying game, especially when expenses and bonuses were added to the cypher's salary, and a safe one.' The conception of honor here allows for elaborate deceptions, but perhaps has not entirely vanished, and Greene used this instance as a starting point for Our Man in Havana (1958) having shifted the scene from Lisbon to Estonia, and added some memories of his own from West Africa, before settling on Batista's Cuba. Novelists from Melville to Mann have thought of the artist as a confidence man. But that is not quite the same as thinking of the secret agent as the creator of extravagantly imagined worlds.
Review, 2967 words
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