Author: By Gail Caldwell, Globe Staff

Date: SUNDAY, March 7, 1999

Page: H1

Section: Books

Single & Single
By John le Carre. Scribner.
345 pp. $26.
Most writers, no matter how artful their camouflage, write the same story again and again. Some do it for love and some for money; in either case, if they are worthy of the task, we don't mind seeing the return of the familiar beast. From John le Carre, we've come to welcome it in all its guises: the old headquarters hero of British intelligence who's lost his joe somewhere in the field; the bright young female agent who further complicates matters; the moral clarity and heartstopping pace that finish off the job. Oh, and the exquisite foreign sheen that hovers over a le Carre journey. Returning, I always feel I've been walking lonely London streets at 3 a.m., or packing heat to protect me from a crisis of the soul, or tasting the wind outside Istanbul from the back of a motorbike bent for hell.

In the case of his new novel, that machine is a BMW idling loudly inside a palatial foyer, and it's emblematic of the getaway wealth that procured it. Despite a lot of well-hyped fears to the contrary, the end of the Cold War didn't slow down le Carre; no fool he, this former queen's agent knew that, when the Berlin Wall fell, the machinations of intelligence East and West would merely seek refuge beneath its rubble. Or maybe try to sell it, piece by piece. So it is that ``Single & Single'' sets its sights on filthy lucre: the spell it casts and the prisoners it takes, whether in its false promises to the desperate or its poisonous allure to the power-hungry. This is a story of venture capitalism in a new global regime, where the cowboys on all sides are as reckless as ever and the profits are tallied in flesh and blood.

In more ways than one, as it turns out: One of the lewder deals being tossed around herein concerns the vast sums to be made in human blood supplies. But when the story opens, it's the spilling of one fellow's in particular that has our attention. Alfred Winser, chief legal officer to the London financial house of Single & Single, has found himself bound, on his knees, on a hilltop in southern Turkey, about to be executed for his firm's alleged crimes against their biggest clients. The guy holding the automatic is a terrifying man named Alix Hoban, with Soviet intelligence in his past and a look in his eyes as empty as space itself. This agonizing sequence sets the stage as well as the tempo of the novel, which backtracks to the wildly speculative last days of communist Russia in order to unravel its tangled web.

``Single & Single'' is acceptably solid le Carre in the post-Smiley days: not up to the psychic ache of ``The Perfect Spy,'' say, but as satisfying in its way as such later works as ``The Night Manager.'' At its heart is a sweet giant of a man passing himself off as Oliver Hawthorne, who in four years on the lam has trained himself as a magician and now spends his days entertaining children. He used to make coins disappear on a grander scale: As the junior half of Single & Single, he watched his father, Tiger, turn the investment house into a money-laundering operation that could orchestrate every trick in the book. Wary of, eventually sickened by, his father's finesse with odious commodities, Oliver calls for a customs agent one night on a return trip from Istanbul -- and lands in the welcoming arms of the white-haired Nat Brock, who's probably as trustworthy as anyone in Oliver's life.

This familiar triangle -- Tiger, Oliver, and Brock -- offers the melancholy, displaced paternal relationships that le Carre understands so well; it also allows a couple of subplots to thrive simultaneously. Tiger disappears after the news breaks of his lawyer's murder, but before he goes, he manages to transfer more than 5 million pounds into an account for Oliver's young daughter -- a child whose existence Oliver had thought was a secret from his father. Brock's intention is to use Oliver to bring in Tiger: An old-school Foreign Office man with a heart as well as a conscience, Brock wants to gain access through Tiger to the criminal conspiracy British intelligence refers to as Hydra -- many-headed and pernicious, its reach extending everywhere from drugs and murder to police corruption. The prototypical le Carre good replacement father, Brock is as hard-boiled as he is noble: ``In our world, Brock liked to preach, you did best to think dirty and double it.''

All this action is set up in the first 100 pages of ``Single & Single,'' which returns with dizzying acumen to the Soviet Union of the last months before the fall in 1991 -- a world where blood and scrap metal and oil were equally valuable resources, where dealers and middlemen traded their souls for the numbers being crunched in their dreams. Nobody can deliver this sort of arcane financial milieu with such riveting (and moral) force as le Carre, who can make a deal cemented in a West End office reverberate to the gates of hell. He achieves that level of consequence here with icons of innocence: the beautiful, doom-ridden Zoya, Hoban's reluctant wife; her father, Yevgeny Orlov, ``Moscow's patriarchal fixer,'' who still believes in something besides money; the children, specific or anonymous, for whom Oliver could weave his magic spells. Quieter but just as insistent is the innocence, sullied and then reclaimed, of Oliver himself: The son who betrays the father, then tries to save his life.

As much as le Carre is lauded for the labyrinthine intelligence of his fiction, what's more often overlooked is his expertise as a set designer. ``Single & Single'' has a captivating physicality about it, from that opening moment in the Turkish hills to the plush and formidable inner sanctums of Tiger's offices. The dialogue, cold-blooded and wry and often spoken between translators, sounds nearly flawless. The only persistent failure that tugs at one's sleeve is le Carre's relative inattention to a few important characters: Bernard Purlock, Brock's British nemesis, is too dangerous to be this vaguely drawn. Usually le Carre's women are either sanctified or doomed, and delivered with a bit too much remove. That's the problem here with Zoya, who in some ways is the dark conscience of the novel, as well as with Brock's supergirl agent, a Scottish woman named Aggie. Such sketchiness can't help affecting the novel as a whole: What elevates le Carre's fiction from merely first-rate suspense is the thick dimensions of his characters, all of whom ought to be crafted with equal precision.

With its various forms of sorcery and deception, ``Single & Single'' possesses that resoundingly moody finish that le Carre mastered a lifetime of novels ago. Rife with the themes of love and regret, it most of all gives us each of its Singles in prismatic relation to the other. ``You kill your father once and that's it,'' thinks Oliver in the midst of his disaffection. Well, not in John le Carre country, where Oedipus is set loose, then tailed, down a road that never ends.

By the time he had blurted these words his English had begun to labor as if he were interpreting from other languages in his head. Yet he possessed no other languages, no Russian, no Polish, no Turkish, no French. He stared round him and saw Monsieur Francois the surveyor standing up the hill, wearing earphones and peering through the sights of a movie camera with a sponge-covered microphone fitted to its barrel. He saw the black-masked and white-shrouded figure of Hoban posed obligingly in the shooting position, one leg histrionically set back, one hand folded round the gun that was trained on Winser's left temple and the other clutching a cell phone to his ear while he kept his eyes on Winser and softly whispered sweet nothings in Russian into the extended mouthpiece. He saw Hoban take one last look at his watch while Monsieur Francois made ready, in the best tradition of photography, to immortalize that very special moment. And he saw a smear-faced boy peering down at him from a cleft between two promontories. He had big brown unbelieving eyes, like Winser's when he was the same age, and he was lying on his stomach and using both hands as a pillow for his chin.

John le Carre
From ``Single & Single''