THE SECRET PILGRIM

Chippings from a master's chisel: ten short stories and an epilogue artfully disguised as a novel of post-glasnost reminiscences of espionage, all showing le Carre at his most nervously relaxed. Grand old man George Smiley agrees to address narrator Ned York's graduating class at Sarratt; his urbanely pointed remarks serve as the text for each of the retrospective anecdotes that follow. A few of these are slight and unexpectedly charming: Ned and company surround a mysterious Arab following a princeling's favorite wife in a Knightsbridge store, only to learn that he's been sent to pay for the trinkets she's shoplifting; Ned gets the news of Bill Haydon's unmasking (Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy) just after repairing a priceless tapestry he's drilled through in inserting a bug for the Vatican in a corrupt bishop's room; Smiley plays along with a dead criminal's pretense that he was with the service in order to comfort his grieving parents. But even the more substantial stories—Ned's old friend Ben Arno Cavendish goes to pieces after literally mislaying the documents that betray his network in Berlin; Ned recalls his suspicions of a Latvian sea captain's young, uncleared girlfriend; a raffish Hungarian agent tries to bolster his stock by arranging to have a friend of his defect as the agent's would-be assassin; Ned goes to Israel to interrogate a terrorist who lectures him savagely; an American in Vietnam endures torture and imprisonment for the sake of the half-Asian daughter who, he realizes, despises him; a low-level clerk is turned to counterespionage by a Russian-language radio program—even these pieces are graceful and curiously humorous in a way new to le Carre's work, though not to be compared in scope or intensity with the Smiley/Karla novels. The epilogue—a gunrunner's impassioned self-justification—will make you wonder just who the real enemy is. Le Carre's earlier novels have made distinguished films and TV miniseries; this one, sure to attract the author's usual huge print audience, reads like a series of sketches for a weekly program—say, Spies Who Came in from the Cold.