Looking back at the spy master

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Novelists recycle themselves. PG Wodehouse trounced a reviewer who had complained that one of his novels contained all the old characters under new names by writing a sequel which, Wodehouse boasted, featured all the old characters under their old names; Beckett fore-saw for himself as early as 1931 a career of "that most necessary, wholesome and monotonous plagiarism - the plagiarism of oneself". Just as the world we inhabit amasses its solidity through innumerable repetitions - a kitchen-knife's familiarity to the hand, the same last, left turn as ever on the way to your front door - so those select novelists who have created an imaginary world we recognise as theirs - Austen, Dickens, Le Carré - serve up the mixture not quite but almost as before.

A simile from the early A Murder of Quality - "at an enormous desk, Brigadier Havelock, OBE, Chief Constable of Carne, sat like a water rat on a raft" - resurfaces three decades later on another continent: "a desk the size of a tennis court and Ram - n Rudd clinging to the far end of it like a very small rat clinging to a very big raft" (The Tailor of Panama). Roddy Martindale's "confid-ing upper-class bellow" which grates on Smiley in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy resounds as "the hectoring, horribly familiar, ten-acre voice of an Englishman of the imperious classes" in the excruciated ears of Justin, the hero of The Constant Gardener. If the recurrence is large enough, it becomes one of the writer's "themes" and can be descanted on by critics; when Single and Single rewrites and improves on A Perfect Spy, this demonstrates Le Carré's inside knowledge of "the rich but barren landscape of the human heart" (The Times).

Le Carré's work gives a special twist to such persistences of the past because his stories so often have at their centre a painful research into shady yesterdays. He has never equalled the classic sequences in which Smiley reads his slow way through many manila files to the core of betrayal; those pages are inaction-packed, a lonely man in the Hotel Islay checking cross-references, but grip the reader because we read as Smiley reads, come close to him. The Constant Gardener jazzes the process up a bit by introducing lap-tops but the effect is much the same: "To read. To travel. To slow down his head ... To charge and yet stand still ..." Le Carré likes to convey how reading, or interrogation, prompts reliving; he peppers his narratives with rapid switches between past and present tenses, so that one paragraph ends "They began" and the next begins "Lesley explains". His prose constantly looks back over its own shoulder, like a spy checking he's not being followed; his most distinctive tone is "a distant, deeply private tone of recollection", which manages to be simultaneously haunted and vivid: "It is the time when he feared he might have lost her."

Harry Pendel in The Tailor of Panama passes "recruitment posters demanding his involvement in forgotten wars" and this friction of "involvement" in something at once present ("demanding") and past ("forgotten") generates Le Carré's best writing. It is his version of patriotism.

The passing of Mrs Thatcher from Number 10 was perhaps most sincerely regretted in the Spitting Image studio; Le Carré has been similarly bereaved by the declared end of the Cold War. Each of his novels now has to hunt out fresh villainies - the arms-trade, Rus-sian gangsterism, the "new rich media class" and, in The Constant Gardener, pharmaceutical corporations. He musters eloquent and justified indignation about each of these horrors but flits from one to the next in such a way that burning issues dwindle into mere back-ground-colour; he seems like a man trying to keep a jaded conscience alive by confronting it with ever more atrocious dilemmas.

This latest novel is also saddled with an insufferably perfect heroine, a crusading feminist with a vulnerable side, a sexy-yet-faithfulto-her-husband, academically brilliant, rich but with a common touch to which the natives instantly respond, disbelieving Roman Catholic (who has the added advantage of being dead), and a hero who is a cross between Lord Jim and Fotherington-Thomas.

When the saintly Tessa is unsurprisingly butchered in Kenya, Justin embarks on what some hack is bound to call an odyssey, in search of justice and his true self, which takes him through a long succession of least-desirable holiday destinations: Whitehall, Elba, the outskirts of Hanover, Saskatchewan, the edges of the Sudan. Cynics who have noted that in recent years Le Carré's researches have required visits to tropical paradises and luxury hotels will be silenced by the new book's itinerary. He is a dedicated story-teller.

Le Carré seems to me better when he's more like Muriel Spark, as in his Sparkiest book, The Tailor of Panama, than in this turgid Conrad vein.

He's not strong on those Big Issues like global capitalism or saving one's soul, which distract him in The Constant Gardener from his home territory of self-disbelief and half-heartedness, though we glimpse that Smiley domain in details such as "some bit of beaten ground" in Germany "where cautious women walked their dogs" or in the figure of Gloria Woodrow, "one of those exemplary Foreign Service wives who are determined to see the good side of everything. If there wasn't a good side in sight, she would let out a jolly good laugh and say, "Well, here we all are !"

I've met her.