The Shadowboxers

A SMALL TOWN IN GERMANY, by John le Carre. 383 pages. Coward- McCann. $6.95.

"A genuine argument can be made that sex is one of the few realities left in a world of confused identities." David Cornwell, who as John le Carre wrote The Spy Who Came In from the Cold and The Looking Glass War, says this in discussing the exploitation of sex by the publishing trade. In his spy novels, Le Carre himself has ignored the libidinous and gone directly to the problem of the confused identities of bumbling antiheroes. A Small Town in Germany is more a skillful novel of political intrigue than a spy story, but Le Carre's aim is still the same.

The scene is the "recent future" in Bonn, a time of Britain's critical attempt to negotiate her way into the Common Market. Leo Harting, a minor official in the British embassy, has disappeared with secret files that could ruin the negotiations. Alan Turner, a counterespionage agent reminiscent of the half-burnt-out, seedy Alec Leamas of The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, has been sent from London to find Harting and recapture the missing documents. So far, a familiar situation. But Turner's main antagonists are not foreign spies; they are the British embassy officials themselves--a caste-conscious, emotionally aborted, washed-out crew of professional liars.

Counterpunching. Le Carre has picked up the destructive intramural rivalries of espionage in The Looking Glass War and moved them into the illusion-fed machinations of the diplomatic life. The search, ultimately, is not only for Leo Harting but for clues to the personal identity that Harting managed to retain while in the service of depersonalizing ideological powers. As it turns out, both Harting and Turner have been Counterpunching with a diplomatic shadow world; they are both, says Turner, "looking for something that isn't there." Le Carre, playing off the man of ideals against men of duplicity, touches once again on the theme that has elevated him above the average suspense novelist. The philosophical conclusion he arrives at is basically the same that he found for Leamas. Speaking to another character, Turner says of Harting:

"For you and me there are always a dozen good reasons for doing nothing. Leo's made the other way around. In Leo's book there's only one reason for doing something: because he must. Because he feels."

It is this awareness that reveals Le Carre as the Sartre of diplomatic and espionage literature. His protagonists stumble through the subterranean maze of contemporary crises in search of a sudden illuminating truth, such as the one that strikes Turner as he unravels the cause of Harting's betrayal. Hatred was not Harting's motive; instead, it was a need to defy the aimlessness and indifference of diplomatic life. "He'd escaped from lethargy. That's the point, isn't it: the opposite of love isn't hate. It's lethargy. Nothingness."

Le Carre tells about that journey through nothingness with the same clean, tough style that he mastered in his earlier works--a lucid grasp on the physical and emotional landscapes that allows him the occasional power of poetic insight.

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