BOOKS

By Paul Gray

THE SECRET PILGRIM

by John le Carre

Knopf; 335 pages; $21.95

Attentive John le Carre fans may recognize the narrator of the author's 13th novel. He is Ned (no last name given), the British intelligence official who ran the operation so vividly bungled in the best-selling The Russia House (1989). That fiasco was not Ned's fault, to be sure, but he has been punished by his Service superiors anyhow, unplugged from the power loop and farmed out to teach spycraft to young recruits. On an inspired whim, Ned manages to lure his old mentor, George Smiley, out of retirement to spend an evening talking with these students. As the legendary Smiley reminisces aloud about the past history of the Service, Ned finds himself privately doing the same.

And that arc of Ned's memory is essentially the plot of The Secret Pilgrim. The novel has no grand, tantalizing design; the individual adventures that Ned remembers are chiefly connected by the fact that he took some part in them. Readers familiar with Le Carre's multi-volume fictional saga of postwar British intelligence will see in Ned's recollections a series of outtakes from a story that has already been told.

There is nothing inherently wrong with that, provided the new material is interesting. Most of Ned's additions are. Several are funny, including Ned's attempts as a Service neophyte to tail and protect an oil-rich sheik and his shoplifting wife on spending binges across London's West End. There are tales of betrayal, accidental and cold-blooded. And there is some rough stuff. Ned remembers a beating he had suffered at the hands of a Polish military officer who then, rolling down his sleeves, offered his services as a double agent for the British. Another episode seems a conscious reprise of Heart of Darkness. Ned is sent east to find out what happened to an agent who disappeared; he turns up an account of appalling brutality at the hands of the Khmer Rouge, and unbelievable paternal devotion from a father to his half-Cambodian daughter.

Another of the book's blessings is the reappearance of George Smiley, who has not been seen in Le Carre's fiction since Smiley's People (1980). In what is basically a walk-on or, in this case, a sit-down role, Smiley retains his enigmatic, nondescript power. At the after-dinner session, introduced by Ned as a "legend of the Service," Smiley tells the expectant students, "Oh, I don't think I'm a legend at all. I think I'm just a rather fat old man wedged between the pudding and the port." Not true. Ned paraphrases the remarks of an extremely clever and thoughtful man: "He scoffed at the idea that spying was a dying profession now that the cold war had ended: with each new nation that came out of the ice, he said, with each new alignment, each rediscovery of old identities and passions, with each erosion of the old status quo, the spies would be working round the clock."

Good reasons exist for hoping that Smiley is wrong, although writers and readers of espionage thrillers may confess to mixed emotions on the matter. In the meantime, The Secret Pilgrim bridges a gap between the recent past and the unforeseeable future. No longer able, because of the innate honesty that has characterized his storytelling career, to offer a full-blown cold war drama, Le Carre pops out some discrete and satisfactorily chilling ice cubes.