IN FROM THE COLD WAR

By Paul Gray

AMID SO MUCH EVIDENCE to the contrary, one sign suggests that the U.S. is not totally dumbing down: the continuing popularity of John le Carre's novels. He has been making best-seller lists for more than 30 years-ever since The Spy Who Came in from the Cold revolutionized espionage fiction-and he has done so with none of the typical thriller trappings. Evil geniuses do not hold the world hostage in his books; violence takes place off-page; and if there is sex, it is wistful rather than graphic, tinged with the foreknowledge that pleasure seldom lasts.

What Le Carre offers readers instead of bells and whistles is hard to summarize but clearly present once again in Our Game (Knopf; 302 pages; $24). There is a sinuous plot, leisurely introduced, whose coils become increasingly constricting. There is crisp, intelligent dialogue, much of it riding an undercurrent of menace. And there is a hero who does not see himself as heroic but who struggles with inner demons as much as with the forces arrayed against him.

Approaching 50, Tim Cranmer tends a fine old house and vineyard in Somerset bequeathed to him by a wealthy uncle. His retirement is not of his own choosing. After a long stint in British intelligence, coinciding with some of the iciest years of the cold war, he has been bounced by his new boss as unsuited for the new world order: "I mean twenty-five years do rather shape the mind, don't they? I'd have thought you'd be far better off agreeing you'd served your stint, and time to find pastures new." Whatever disappointment Tim feels has been assuaged by the love of Emma Manzini, a beautiful, emotionally frail musician half his age who has agreed to live with him. After all his years of spying and secrecy, Tim thinks of her as "my self-imposed security risk, my new openness, my one-girl glasnost."

And not far away, teaching at Bath, is his old friend from prep school and Oxford, Larry Pettifer, who has also been cashiered from intelligence and given a professorial post where, his former masters hope, he will stay out of trouble. Tim was one of those masters; he recruited Larry into spying and "ran" him, in the parlance of the trade, for some 20 years, while a succession of KGB chiefs in London were fooled into believing that Larry was actually working for them. Despite his skill as a double agent, Tim's protaga retains a belief in his own innocence, a Byronic flair with women and a hunger for lost causes. "My sin," Tim reflects, "was to promote the cheat in him above the dreamer, which is why he sometimes hated me a little more than I deserved."

Suddenly, Tim's comfortable country life is shattered. Emma withdraws from his love and his house at about the same time that Larry disappears. The inquiring police take a cheeky tone with him: "Yes, well, your ... friend has gone a bit missing, to tell you the truth, Mr. Cranmer, sir." And then Tim is called back to his former office to be grilled and told something astonishing: Larry and his last KGB contact have somehow stolen some L37 million from the Russian government. His ex-bosses think the high-living Tim may have shared in the booty. They demand his passport and order him to talk to no one but them.

One of the myriad pleasures of reading a Le Carre novel, including this one, is the sense that the journey undertaken, no matter how preposterous its destination, proceeds through a series of carefully prepared and utterly plausible steps. So it makes perfect sense, given the work he used to do, that Tim would begin an unauthorized search for Larry and Emma, since he assumes they are together, and that his quest would lead him ever deeper into the literal and ethical rubble of the post-cold war era.

But it is not just professional curiosity or the pain of a rejected lover that drives Tim into ever greater risk taking. He feels a moral responsibility for what is happening, even if he is not sure what that might be: "It was I who had consigned Larry to a life of fiction, who had taught him the arts of subterfuge and set loose in him the mechanism that had now run so disastrously amok. It was I who had thrown a noose around Emma, never guessing that when I appointed her the perfect mate she would turn out to be the perfect mate for Larry."

All that should be said about the place where Tim finally winds up is that it is a trouble spot of which the world is likely to hear more within a year or two. Le Carre was the first to depict, in fiction, how cold warriors dedicated to radically different causes nonetheless came to resemble one another in the execution of their duties. Our Game is equally prescient about the new conflict between established powers and small ethnic or religious groups demanding nationhood. Larry, the romantic, champions their rights and is prepared to risk his life for them. Tim, the practical man, sees no point in "saving barbarians from one another in countries no bigger than a letter on the map." Both views are persuasive, and Le Carre does not take sides. But readers drawn by the irresistible tugs of this novel will come away from it with something more than thrills.