Some time after “A Perfect Spy” came out, in 1986, Philip Roth remarked that it was “the best English novel since the war.”
So that was le Carré’s greatest book. Yet many were puzzled. Since the war? That would cover at least forty-one years, and works by George Orwell, Kingsley Amis, Angus Wilson, Graham Greene, Muriel Spark, Anthony Burgess, and Anthony Powell. Still, I was willing to trust Roth’s judgment, so I began to read. And, on two separate occasions, I found “A Perfect Spy” so densely worked and allusive that I fell out of the saddle, slightly embarrassed, after about fifty pages.
That goes for le Carré, too, who has always been scornful of American spying. The Americans lack style, subtlety, patience. They burst forth from an incoherent, mongrel society, innocent of family and tradition and manners—every lack that Henry James complained of a hundred fifty years ago—before departing for London.
Most of all, as son. Magnus wants to finally unload his obsession with his father Richard Pym, a swindler, liar, scoundrel, and enchanting son of a bitch; a Falstaff who does genuine harm. Rick screws people, and they almost always come back to him. He’s where the action is, right up to the end of his life, and Magnus adored and imitated him, becoming not a criminal but a professional con man and teller of tales, an agent. Like Rick, he betrays everyone, which is why he’s “perfect.