Volume 40, Number 14 · August 12, 1993
Le Carré's New War
By David Remnick
The Night Manager
by John le Carré
Knopf, 429 pp., $24.00
The end of the cold war is a hard bargain. Certainly it is an advantage to mankind that our chances of being vaporized into radioactive mist have been reduced considerably, and yet, on the debit side, we have lost one of the greatest characters in the history of the espionage novel, George Smiley: OBE, master of the Cambridge Circus, combatant of the Soviet spymaster Karla, and world-weary creation of John le Carré. For a half century Smiley made a career of the artful comeback. But unless le Carré enjoys the torture of geriatrics, we cannot reasonably expect him to prod his creation from retirement for yet another adventure. 'It's over, and so am I,' Smiley wistfully told a graduating class of spies in the 1990 valedictory novel, The Secret Pilgrim. 'Time you rang down the curtain on yesterday's cold warrior. And please don't ask me back, ever again. The time needs new people. The worst thing you can do is imitate us.' We imagine our hero now slumped by the fire at his house on Bywater Street, poring once more over Goethe and Grimmelshausen, absently polishing his glasses with the fat end of his tie.
Review, 4826 words
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