The beauty of John Le Carre, I suppose one can just call it that, is that he makes a virtue of being morally ambivalent.

Moral ambivalence is that vast twilight zone where most of Le Carre's characters dwell. For them, there is no such thing as sweet victory in betraying state secrets, no is there any in the final unmasking of a spy. But it is not an utter wasteland. Most of the time, Le Carre's people are conscious of who they are and carry with them a haunted, at times demented, desperation.

In The Secret Pilgrim, an ageing spy realises: "And when I looked at myself in the mirror of the undertaker's rose-tinted lavatory after my night's vigil, I was horrified by what I saw. It was the face of a spy branded by his own deception."

But what is particularly alarming then is that, as he gets older, Le Carre seems to become more morally righteous. As a desperate measure, case officer Leonard Burr physically threatens Harry Palfrey, the narrator of Russia House, now a toady in the labyrinths of Whitehall.

And as if Le Carre has had enough of pussy-footing with whatever he's been pussy-footing wit in the past, he has Burr bullying the corruptible Sir Anthony Joyston Bradshaw into holy submission. And to save his joe (and the joe's girlfriend), Burr even makes a deal with the bad guys - something totally unthinkable for George Smiley, in a situation that recalls Jerry Westerby's final moments in The Honourable Schoolboy. So, what is happening to John Le Carre?

The Night Manager actually is a continuation of the Smiley saga (he "appears" through stand-in Burr, who has been described as "Smiley's Crown Prince for years") and takes place chronologically after the events of The Secret Pilgrim. And structurally, even the characters recall earlier ones - Roper could have been an updated Bill Haydon; Jonathan is somewhat like Jerry Westerby and the plot and setting themselves, a lift from The Honourable Schoolboy - spy infiltrates enemy camp; spy falls in love with mistress and, naturally gets his cover blown; with the final showdown on board a yacht.

The Cold War has long thawed and the evil facing Western democracy isn't communism any more but total, unbridled capitalism, ironically, the very thing that Bill Haydon sold down the state for in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.

As about-to-retire Ned says in Secret Pilgrim: "All my life, I had battled against an institutionalised evil. It had a name, and most often a country as well. It had a corporate purpose, and had met a corporate end. But the evil that stood before me now was a wrecking infant in our midst..." And the end of the Cold War also marked the end of Britain as a superpower.

Like the screen version of James Bond, who has made a successful transition from spying to defeating megalomaniacs and what-nots. Le Carre simply lets his spies loose in the high seas to do battle against drug dealers and arms smugglers, the "new" evils of the '90s.

The plot, as usual, is wafer thin and can be expressed in a single sentence - Jonathan Pine allows himself to be recruited by Burr as a British secret agent with a mission to expose the murderer of the woman he himself betrayed. Jonathan's lost love is Sophie; his current love is Jemina, who is mistress of multi-millionaire and arms dealer Richard Roper, his quarry.

But by adopting a more humanistic view (Burr makes a deal with Roper to save Jonathan while Smiley had no qualms using Karla's retarded daughter to trap the head of Moscow Centre), has Le Carre simply gone soft?

However, the most worrisome aspect is how implausible some of the situations are, something which has never been so obvious in the past. For instance, the "friendship" between Jonathan and Roper doesn't bear scrutiny; or how Roper, being the rogue that he is, hasn't smelt a rat until the end; or even the fact that prisoner Jonathan is being kept alive, okay, so he was beaten, but to what purpose? If Roper is as deadly as he is made out to be, he must simply have ways of making Jonathan talk. Why doesn't he just simply eliminate Jonathan?

Le Carre doesn't have the mechanical flair of Tom Clancy (so his arms segment isn't all that technical) and he has constantly shown a weak hand at romance. One, however, read Le Carre for his wit, his insightful take on the bureaucracy, his interrogation scenes are probably the best in the business (not so here) and what he has to say about people in quiet desperation.

The spy setting and particularly the politicking and sniping in Whitehall, is his natural stage. And no one does London as well as Le Carre - one simply has to think to Baywater Road to think of Smiley.

At this point in time, there is another reason - like meeting old friends again, one hopes to find some continuity in the characters that have gone before. The Night Manager demands a re-reading of Russia House (to see how far Harry Palfry has fallen) and The Secret Pilgrim (for the emergence of Leonard Burr and Sir Anthony).

At the end, I'm afraid Le Carre doesn't really have a lot of new things to say. The Night Manager is a fairly decent yarn but looking at this last three books, one suspects Le Carre hasn't a strong idea as to who should be his (next) standard cup-bearer. His older characters, like Smiley, Ned and Burr, are getting on in years and there doesn't seem to be new ones in sight. As Russia watcher Connie Sachs once told Smiley: "Poor loves. Trained to empire, trained to rule the waves. All gone. All taken away. Bye-bye world."

Le Carre feels that there is still a place for his spies. But the nagging question remains, who should be the next perfect spy? - Stephen Tan

Note: This review was first published in BigO #92 (August 1993).