Volume 33, Number 9 · May 29, 1986
Underground Men
By Noel Annan
A Perfect Spy
by John le Carré
Knopf, 475 pp., $18.95
It is nearly midnight in Vienna. Magnus Pym is saying goodbye to his dinner guests while his second wife Mary is itching to make love with him. Pym, counselor at the embassy, is really head of the British Secret Intelligence Service station; and the last guests to leave are Grant Lederer, who is his opposite number in the CIA, and his sexy wife. But the Pyms do not make love that night or ever again. During dinner Pym had got a call from London. It is from Jack Brotherhood, the officer who recruited him thirty-five years ago into SIS (what used to be called MI6 or 'the Firm') to say that his father had died. 'I'm free,' says Pym.
Review, 4804 words
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