“Our Game” opens with one of those set-ups that have long been his speciality: it’s the end of the cold war, and a couple of first-rate British spies have been gently but firmly retired, owing to new political priorities at headquarters. Timothy Cranmer goes off quietly to tend a winery, but the counterspy he controls – Larry Pettifer, whom the Russians think they own – hates the idea of settling down to teach. One day he turns up missing, and Cranmer is summoned to headquarters to answer harsh questions about his onetime colleague. Soon both of them are under suspicion for treason, and Cranmer is on the run. All this is classic le Carre, spun out beautifully: the ex-spy treated shabbliy by his two-bit successors, then besting them by virtue of his superior spycraft. Delicious.
But as the plot grows more complex, both politically and psychologically, it becomes clear that even after 14 novels, le Carre has no intention of repeating himself. Turns out Pettifer has become an impassioned convert to the perhaps hopeless Chechen cause. This puts a whole new battlefield at the center of le Carre’s work, and the challenge has fired up his formidable skills.
We never do meet Pettifer head on: our knowledge of him is accumulated through Cranmer’s memories, fantasies and fears (and, of course, through the half-burnt papers and typewriter ribbons Cranmer manages to read). Hence the more we learn about Pettifer, the more insight we gain into Cranmer. The moral jockeying between these two figures is wonderfully constructed, and so is the harrowing conclusion in the Caucasus. As usual, the female characters appear to have been scribbling hastily into the text while it was being proofread. But never mind. Everything else in “Our Game” shows our greatest spymaster very much on his game.
