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Suitably prompted by Osnard--and understandably motivated to save his marriage, business and skin--Harry starts inventing the stories that his new benefactor wants to believe and to feed back to London. He doesn't have much to go on, only a couple of friends battered during the regime of Manuel Noriega. So Harry embroiders these unfortunates into a so-called Silent Opposition, "the decent part of Panama," he tells Osnard, "that you never get to see or hear about." Inventing conspiracies comes naturally to Harry; he is, after all, a tailor, used to dealing in "loose threads, plucked from the air, woven and cut to measure."
Le Carre is at the top of his form in setting up this spy story about the creation--out of whole cloth, perhaps--of a spy story, a looking-glass world where the dupers and the duped are hard to tell apart. Readers in thrall to his page-turning enticements have not always appreciated his comic skills and epigrammatic skewerings. How did someone as dubious as the amoral Osnard get into British intelligence? "This was the new slimline Service, free of the shackles of the past, classless in the great Tory tradition, with men and women democratically hand-picked from all walks of the white, privately educated, suburban classes." A junior member of the British embassy in Panama City looks at his tall boss, the ambassador, and realizes that he "hated the ground he loped on."
Such grace notes necessarily compose The Tailor of Panama, since the novel is manifestly about a series of events that do not happen until, near the end, the accumulated fabrications precipitate some harsh and punitive actions. More wheelspinning, in short, takes place here than actual traction on a plot line. Le Carre's detractors, those who want their spy fiction hard-boiled over a short fuse, have dismissed his books as offering more art than matter. This novel can be seen as the author's cheeky rebuttal to such complaints. Its artistry makes mere events seem ho-hum.