Giving Up the Game

THE LOOKING GLASS WAR by John le Carre. 320 pages. Coward-McCann. $4.95.

On a hillside overlooking East Germany, the men who have molded the spy, a Pole named Leiser, silently shake his hand. They have come thus far together. Now he must go on alone. "There were no fine words," writes Author Le Carre, his eye fixed on the solitary figure going down the hill into the obliterating night shadows. "It was as if they had all taken leave of Leiser long ago."

This is Le Carre's dark point, struck like a funeral bell on nearly every page of this book. Leiser is doomed. He descends the hill to foreordained failure in his mission, sensing that those whom he wants to trust will, if it comes to that, abandon him. He has all the significance of a pawn, played and sacrificed in a game that itself has no meaning.

Out of the Cold. After The Spy Who Came In from the Cold lifted Le Carre to the rank of writers liberated from considerations of market, Le Carre admitted that his real name was David Cornwell, his real profession the British Foreign Service, and came out of the cold himself by quitting his job to set up as a full-time writer. He also announced that he had one more espionage story in him and that that one would be his last. This is apparently it, and its thesis must be accepted as Le Carre's terminal conviction, at least on the art of spying.

Spy was successful in part because it was almost the exact antithesis of James Bond. Alec Leamas is more than a spy. He is aging and tired, skilled but fallible. Le Carre took infinite literary pains to limn him as an ordinary mortal, susceptible to mundane pressures, capable of cynicism about his craft, who in the end elects to rejoin the society that he never quite left.

Rusty Skills. In contrast, The Looking Glass War is totally dehumanized. Leamas is believable; Leiser is not. The book's tension depends not so much on Leiser's spying mission to East Germany as on the efforts of a scorned and inferior arm of British intelligence ("the Department") to haul itself back into the Establishmentarian swim on Leiser's shoulders. With a typically British mixture of ineptness and guile, the seven men who still operate the Department in the drab house on Blackfriars' Road, jostle for position, portentously con "the Minister" for a bigger budget, extra limousines, higher status. And on Cambridge Circus, another and superior division of British intelligence cynically sees the whole exercise as a chance to get rid of an inferior nuisance. "The Circus" provides only obsolete equipment and minimum cooperation. The Department men compound this by blunder after blunder. Leiser himself, who at 40 is really too old for the business, is only too pathetically eager to savor again the exhilaration he felt as a British agent during the war. There is something almost perverse about his zeal for the mission. And his skills are so rusty that East German security men, locking onto his radio transmissions, are mystified by what they think, at first, must be the handiwork of an amateur.

Le Carre spins out his story with impressive skill. It is not as good a spy story as Spy, which kept the reader guessing to the end as a good espionage story should. In Looking Glass, the author is graduating from his genre, as he promised he would. Having had his say about espionage, a profession that does not transect the common lot, presumably Le Carre will henceforth apply his considerable competence to themes much nearer human experience--and much worthier of his own understanding of it.

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