Corrupt Practices

International crime will probably never attract the sort of headlines and public anxieties that were expended on the Manichaean struggle between the West and the U.S.S.R. Compared with the prospect of nuclear annihilation, hoodlums smuggling things across borders strike most people as an inevitable and tolerable fact of life. But John le Carre, the most artful chronicler of fictionalized cold war espionage (The Spy Who Came in from the Cold; Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy), takes a less sanguine view of the outlaw capitalism that only intensified after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the breakup of the old world order. Single & Single (Scribner; 347 pages; $26), his 17th novel, provides a fascinating journey through the new landscape of corruption.

Le Carre stakes his complex and typically elliptical tale, with frequent shifts between time frames and narrative voices, on a fairly basic premise: the tangled relationship between a son and his father. Oliver Single begins as the heir apparent to the legendary Tiger Single, founder of the House of Single, a high-flying London financial firm renamed Single & Single after Oliver, law degree in hand, is brought aboard by his father. The son's initiation into the family business goes smoothly until the firm takes on some new clients: Yevgeny and Mikhail Orlov, Russian brothers who offer Tiger and his son the chance to reap huge profits, with commensurately generous kickbacks to the Orlovs, by acquiring assets of the crumbling Soviet state.

Tiger makes Oliver the trusted liaison with the Orlovs, who dismissively call him "Post Boy," until he grows sickened by the sort of traffic they conduct for their and his firm's profit. "lf I can go along with selling the blood of poor Russians," he asks himself, "where if anywhere will I draw the line?" So, after one more disillusioning visit with the Orlovs, Oliver deplanes at Heathrow Airport and impulsively asks to see a high-ranking officer of Her Majesty's Customs Service. As it turns out, Oliver is just the person that Nat Brock has been waiting to meet.

Along about here, Single & Single begins to get really complicated, in the way that Le Carre's fans have come to expect. To give away as little as possible, let's cut to the present. Oliver has been living under an assumed identity in a remote part of England, all arranged and financed by Brock, for four years, during which he has married, fathered a daughter whom he adores, and then divorced his unfaithful wife. But Oliver's past refuses to remain in that tense. First he finds evidence that his father has finally tracked down his whereabouts and may possibly be seeking vengeance. He then learns from Brock that the Orlovs and Single & Single have had a falling-out. The Russians and their henchmen have murdered a high official of Single & Single and videotaped the act to impress on Tiger their displeasure with him and his firm. The elder Single, in response, has gone into hiding or perhaps into the clutches of the Orlovs.

Obviously, Oliver wants to save the father he once betrayed, if only to assuage his own guilt. And Brock, as he tells Oliver, also wants Tiger alive, not to punish him, but to find out who in official power allowed Single & Single and a gang of thieves to profit so handsomely. "I want those less-than-perfect coppers he's got on his payroll. The overpaid white-collar civil servants who signed up with him for their second pensions. The bent MPs and silk-shirted lawyers and dirty traders with smart addresses. Not abroad. Abroad can look after itself. In England. Up and down the road. Next door."

Although Le Carre does give Oliver the chance for some last-act heroics on behalf of the endangered Tiger, this conclusion seems more fanciful than inevitable. The power of Single & Single stems from the author's portrait of a world in which individuals are no match for the organized mania of greed. The people in the novel who have somehow immunized themselves to the lure of money, however made or stolen--Oliver, Brock, a few upright minor characters--seem to be in the underwhelming minority. How can they prevail against Tiger's motto, which proclaims, as Oliver recalls it, "the sacred right of every citizen regardless of color, race or creed to the best legal loopholes that illicit wealth can buy"? The Apocalypse may no longer loom now, but Le Carre has triumphantly portrayed another sort of death.