Double-Fault, review by Chelsea Cain

OUR KIND OF TRAITOR

By John le Carré

306 pp. Viking. $27.95

Everyone knows that pop culture is bonkers for brooding, romantic, dangerous types with underworld connections. I am speaking, of course, of vampires. But a long time ago, before Bella and Edward even started dating, there was another dark romantic hero who captured our imaginations. He was called a spy. He drank gin or whiskey, not blood. He was preferably English. Educated. And if he had to kill someone he did it like a gentleman, which is to say with a poisoned dart at the end of an umbrella.

John le Carré is to spy fiction what Lindsay Lohan is to TMZ. It’s hard to imagine one without the other. He is the papa of cold war spy novels. (His literary agent must have wept when the Berlin Wall went down.) In his new book, “Our Kind of Traitor,” le Carré may not bring back the old-school secret agent, but he’ll certainly warm the hearts of those of us who long for the era before Jack Bauer, when spies quoted P. G. Wodehouse and wore mackintoshes.

Sure, “Our Kind of Traitor” takes place more or less in the present. Characters send text messages, and find that they cannot visit the gardens of the Champs-Élysées because “Michelle Obana and her children are in town.” The evil-doers are bankers, gangsters and money launderers, not the K.G.B.

But there is a filter of nostalgia that gives the narrative a jaunty midcentury feel.

Characters go on tennis holiday. Spies sing from “La Traviata” while cooking. Everyone speaks French. And Britain is a major player in a global conspiracy.

It all starts with the above-mentioned tennis holiday. Gail and Perry, a “strikingly attractive” and upwardly mobile English couple, find themselves caught up in espionage intrigue while practicing their backhands in Antigua.

Gail is a “sparky young barrister on the rise.” Perry is a former tutor in English literature at Oxford and an accomplished athlete. They have been together for five years and have yet to get married. (“Marry that girl,” almost every male character in the book tells Perry at some point.)

The couple are on Day 1 of their vacation. There’s some swimming. They make “languorous love in the afternoon,” then hit the tennis courts. Perry plays qualifiers for Queen’s and made it to the Masters; he is, in short, a bit of a tennis stud. It does not go unnoticed, and he is soon challenged to a match by a “muscular, stiff-backed, bald, brown-eyed Russian man of dignified bearing in his middle 50s called Dima.”

Perry agrees, and things quickly get hinky.

I mean, hello — Dima is wearing a crimson blouse with gray tracksuit pants, a diamond-­encrusted gold Rolex and leather espadrilles. He’s clearly a very wealthy Russian crook. Or Mickey Rourke.

The match is set for the next morning. Perry and Gail show up at 6:45. (The kind of people who go on tennis holiday are also the kind of people who will get up before 7 a.m. on vacation.)

Perry wins. Naturally. He is a tennis stud, remember? But Dima is so impressed by Perry’s sense of fair play that he forgives him. In fact, “he’s not merely gracious, he’s moved to tears of admiration and gratitude.”

Oh, yeah. One tiny thing. Dima has a favor he’s hoping that Perry can help him out with: he wants to flee to England, spill some secrets about the Russian underworld and enroll his children at Eton.

Soon Perry and Gail are elbow to elbow with the British secret service trying to get Dima and his large sullen family to Mother England, a process that involves some enviable European travel.

Their contacts in the service are Hector, Luke and Ollie — their code names, I swear, are Tom, Dick and Harry. They are classic spy archetypes, morally complex but loyal to their calling.

It’s all a little familiar.

But le Carré’s execution is perfect. There are no narrative missteps. His gift at character shorthand is as strong as ever, whether he is describing “flaxen-haired boys, chewing gum as if they hated it,” or Gail’s first impression of Luke, whom she considers too small. “Male spies, she told herself with a false jocularity brought on by nervousness, should come a size larger.” It is always a pleasure to be in the hands of an entirely competent writer.

Le Carré pays his usual attention to plot. This one involves Russian gangsters and international banking — all very of-the-moment. I suppose le Carré is trying to be relevant. (The publicity materials even include a 2009 article from The Observer of London that echoes the narrative conspiracy.)

Yet the appeal of the book is not in its modernity, but in its stubborn embrace of the past.

Spies wear berets and fedoras. A vacationing teenager wears “a Hakka-style lampshade hat and a cheongsam dress with toggle buttons and Grecian sandals cross-tied round her ankles.”

This is le Carré’s universe, not ours.

All the better.

Le Carré made a name for himself by injecting a sense of moral ambiguity into spy fiction. But these days, post Watergate, post weapons of mass destruction, post Jack Bauer and Jason Bourne, institutional corruption and moral ambiguity are a given. Governments do bad stuff?

Well, yeahhhh. No duh.

It’s sort of thrilling to inhabit a world, even briefly, where characters are surprised when people and institutions fail to live up to their expectations.

Chelsea Cain is the author of “Heartsick.” Her new thriller, “The Night Season,” will be published in March.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/24/books/review/Cain-t.html?nl=books&emc=booksupdateema3&pagewanted=print