Le Carre made his name writing Cold War spy novels, but in the 90s, it seemed his field of expertise had dried up, relegating all of his stories to corporate espionage – a broad field but not as gut-wrenchingly life-or-death as international intelligence work. Then radical Muslim fundamentalists stepped onto the world scene, saving thousands of government spy jobs and providing new fertile ground for fictional espionage.

However, this new world is murky. Who is good? Who is bad? How bad are they? As I write this, in the non-fiction world, autocratic rulers are being challenged throughout the Muslim world and it is hard to tell if these changes will be good or bad for the US. The world is a multi-polar mess.

In his world, Le Carre is still able to build a neat package of competing agents, targets, handlers and sources. It’s hard for a layperson to grasp how the war on terror really works, but A Most Wanted Man does a great job of showing the modern spy apparatus as it tries to reformat itself to a new enemy. It is a game with new rules, and Le Carre shows that some of the biggest battles are internal to the various western agencies as they all try to figure out what they are doing. The main spy, Gunther, has to play a delicate game just to win approval from his various higher-ups so that he can follow through with his mission.

The other half (possibly two-thirds) of this novel is spent with a human-rights lawyer, her client, and a banker that may be able to help them. Annabel, the lawyer, is only a few years into her career and is simultaneously trying to win respect from her family and find her role as an advocate for the needy. Brue, the banker, lives a comfortable life, but it is built on a foundation with an illicit crack. Issa, a mysterious refuge on the run, was problematic for me. In creating a damaged, mal-developed victim, Le Carre has given us a character with a shaky grasp on reality. With his lack of motivation and guile, Issa becomes an object, rather than a character to progress the action. This is done intentionally, but it leads to a lot of frustrating scenes involving one of the main characters who seemingly does not know what he wants or how to get it.

One of the reasons why turned to this book was the recent Wiki-leaks story. We have been flooded with thousands of examples of real-time statecraft. The New York Times has pieced together these documents into revealing stories, but only Le Carre's fiction can go even deeper into a shrouded world that can’t ever be fully documented or revealed.