Even without a Cold War, le Carre can still turn on the heat

DATE                  07/09/93
NEWSPAPER             THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER
SECTION               SHOW
EDITION               MORNING
PAGE                  P40
STORY LENGTH          21 INCHES
HEADLINE              Even without a Cold War, le Carre can still turn on the 
                         heat
BYLINE/CREDIT         DAN FROOMKIN:The Orange County Register
SUBJECT TERMS         BOOKS

  Gunrunning and drug smuggling -- they just don't sound like the
  stuff of a great John le Carre novel.
     Le Carre fans, after all, are used to beautifully convoluted,
  epic tales of espionage in which betrayed, haunted men at the
  pinnacle of their respective intelligence services fight the Cold
  War mano a mano.
     What's a little arms dealing compared to that?
     But what Graham Greene and le Carre did for the pulp spy novel,
  le Carre has now done for "Miami Vice." He has taken a genre
  handled tritely even by such near-greats as Len Deighton and turned
  it into art.
     "Night Manager" is a dazzling, hypnotic, multilayered,
  compelling and deeply thoughtful piece of literature.
     And it's a brilliant and unexpected continuation of le Carre's
  saga of British intelligence.
     Most le Carre fans have probably wondered what he would do now
  that the Cold War has ended. "Night Manager" answers that question
  in many deeply satisfying ways.
     "Night Manager's" world may lack the old ideological battles, but
  it does not lack evil. In fact, things are even more complicated
  now. And the so-called intelligence community is, if anything,
  trickier and more ruthless.
     On one level, the hero of this book is Jonathan Price, former
  commando and night manager of the Hotel Meister Palace in Zurich.
  The villain is Dicky Roper, the amoral arms dealer whom Jonathan
  dedicates his life to destroying, for deeply personal reasons.
     But at the core of the book, there is another even more dramatic
  opposition. The real heroes of "Night Manager" are the cops, and
  the villains -- vastly more odious even than Dicky -- are the spies.
     In this new world the cops, or "enforcers," as le Carre calls
  them, want to put bad guys like Dicky away. But the spies, or
  "espiocrats," still insist on seeing people such as Dicky as
  geopolitical assets worth coddling.
     "Pure Intelligence," so long the home base for le Carre's
  protagonists, is now not just hopelessly out of date, but evil.
     Le Carre's new heroes work for the Drug Enforcement
  Administration and a British counterpart.
     "You can be exploitative, or you can enforce," says the lead DEA
  hero. "Be exploitative, that's a never-ending story; that's
  recruiting the enemy so that you catch the next enemy . . . ad
  infinitum.
     "Enforce, that's what we have in mind for Mr. Roper. A fugitive
  from justice, in my book . . . you lock him up."
     The old-time spies, however, are not about to give up their
  methods or their power just for some quaint notion of justice. They
  are, as one of le Carre's characters describes them, "Cold heads
  left over from the Cold War. Scared of being out of a job."
     Complexity is the glory of le Carre's novels, but at the same
  time it's the biggest obstacle to new readers. "Night Manager" has
  too many subplots, minor characters, point-of-view shifts and
  variations on the theme of post-Cold War espionage to make it an
  easy book to read.
     And as usual, le Carre's women characters -- while inspiring
  admirable amounts of obsession -- are basically beautiful, weak and
  stupid.
     But for those readers who feared that the end of the Cold War
  might cause le Carre to lose his voice, the good news is that his
  voice is clearer and more compelling than ever.

  `The Night Manager'

  Author: John le Carre

  Info: Alfred A. Knopf, $24, 429 pages.

  Bottom line: Smiley may be gone, but John le Carre rises to the
  challenge of a new world order with a brilliant and defining new
  novel.