Center for a New American Security

Cold war spy fiction had had its day, and it had been, for a generation of readers on airplanes and beaches, a very good day indeed. Len Deighton, Derek Marlowe, Charles McCarry and, at the top of the heap, the magnificent John le Carré, most notably in his Karla trilogy: “Tinker, Taylor, Soldier, Spy,” “The Honourable Schoolboy” and “Smiley’s People.” The great character of the trilogy was the meek, brilliant George Smiley, a character le Carré had used before but here was his full flowering. And if his reality on the page was compelling, his rendering in human form — by Alec Guinness in the BBC’s two miniseries, adapted from “Tinker, Taylor” and “Smiley’s People” — made him even more real. You reread the books, and visualized Sir Alec. Perfect.

But then, something changed. And, coincidentally, a few weeks after the cold war sat up in its coffin and smiled, John le Carré publishes one of the best novels he’s ever written. Maybe the best, it’s possible. What the hell got into him? Well, not quite 9/11, more its aftermath.

Bachmann is not the only spy in “A Most Wanted Man”; he swims in a sea of them — German espiocrats and national police; some adroitly verbal Brits, savage but polite; and, at the margin, some Americans, savage and not polite. And, taken together, quite a crew. Do they respect law and lawyers? No, they eat law and lawyers, just for an appetizer. Compared with them, the fine old le Carré characters — Connie Sachs with her total recall for Soviet thugs, Toby Esterhase and his street-surveillance Lamplighters — seem wistful, melancholy figures from a different time. In history, in fiction. And they are. Because in “A Most Wanted Man,” the sheer desperation of those whose job it is to prevent another 9/11, another Madrid commuter train, another London Tube attack, is written as a slow-burning fire in every line, and that’s what makes it nearly impossible to mark the page and go to sleep.