Imagine that you are the United States. You have agreed to return the Panama Canal to Panama in 1999. But in the post-Cold-War world with a wide-open market, with hordes of oil tankers squeezing back and forth through the isthmus, you have come to regret it. More than ever you want the income and the military presence. So perhaps a low-profile friendly nation might be persuaded to provoke an incident to justify an invasion and the abrogation of the treaty.
Imagine that you are friendly England. You want a few shreds of your old empire back-perhaps in the same explosive nexus of world interests that is the new Panama. If you can help provoke the Yankee invasion, you might earn a piece of the action. The problem is, you'd need one of your own-such as an expat living in Panama who knows everybody, perhaps with a few personal problems to ease recruitment.
Harry Pendel, the hero of John Le Carré's latest novel, fits the bill. He's an émigré tailor with a criminal record; a misfit who has passed from jail to gentility through camouflage and survival. After all, Harry is a child of the street: of a deserting Jewish father and a wayward Irish Catholic mother. Taken in by a wily uncle in the London rag trade, Harry became a fall-guy for the uncle's insurance fire. Caught holding the match, he was sentenced to two years of prison rape and humiliation.
Upon his release and in recognition of his sacrifice, Uncle Benny set Harry up with business contacts in Panama, tailoring to the powerful. All the brass and sleaze of this post-Cold-War equivalent of Berlin (or Casablanca)-Panamanians of government and opposition, drug lords, and swaggering American honchos of the Southern Command-go to Harry Pendel for their suits. Ever accommodating, pins in mouth, tailor's chalk and tape in hand, Harry relaxes and flatters them and they begin to let slip their agendas.
Harry's nemesis is Andrew Osnard, an upper-class failure, a rake, and a sociopath: just the qualifications needed by the London Spy Office to find and nail a mark, a fall guy, a British asset in Panama. And Osnard chooses Harry not just for his intimacy with the powerful, but also for his concealed criminal record and his enormous debts incurred pathetically for status, which he secretly services with the savings of his beloved, moralistic American wife. It's blackmail in the grand old style of spy-writing. Harry turns his talents to the satisfaction of Osnard and the London Spy Office: just as he makes suits to flatter, he fabricates the evidence that Osnard and London want to hear, to incite rebellion and intervention. This includes false rumours of Panama's sale of the canal to the Japanese and, tragically, the false portrayal of an old buddy and retired Panamanian revolutionary as an active subversive.
So Harry sells his best friend, exploits his high-minded wife and her sensitive job with the Canal Commission, and rationalizes away in the face of a love affair with a Panamanian dissident employee-all in the belief he can do it without hurting anyone.
This is the high order of intrigue that readers expect from Le Carré. But is it a spy story? He seems to be a Cold War novelist without a cold war, or even, perhaps, the old hankering to write spy thrillers. With the messy, post-ideological, mercantile ambitions of the great powers, there's no guerilla war, no countryside, and little action. It's mostly fallen humanity: urban, venal, smarmy ambition framed in diplomatic intrigue. But here I must concede that this is my first Le Carré; I read it because I knew, briefly but intimately, the Panama City that he writes about. What is striking is that The Tailor of Panama wants to be a deep novel, perhaps even a great novel.
Here, after all, character looms larger than the cleverest intrigue, as it does in art. And the English class system looms larger than Panama itself; the book's not really about Panama but about England and class, and their embodiment in Harry Pendel. His checkered past makes him, if not quite the perfect arriviste ("And what's life if it isn't invention? Starting with inventing yourself?"), at any rate a subtle and engaging lick-spittle, flattering his customers and full of sunny, smarmy turns of phrase. There are shades of Harold Pinter in the seamy, cocky cadences and repetitions; in the class and power relations, in Osnard's snide caddishness. Adept at adapting and anticipating every wish, Harry fabricates past and present-inventing even a gentleman-founder for his clubby horses-leather-and-alpaca men's shop in Panama. And his compassion is spread just as wide-and as thin-as his mobile life between the bottom and the top. He takes care of everyone and uses all of them to take care of himself.
Still, there's something that grates, and it's a matter of style. Le Carré writes with an ironic high-flown grandeur in which things are never given, passed, or directed by one character to another, but always "bestowed" like a mantle or a blessing as if there were some mock-theological subtext for all these doomed, tragicomic Icaruses. And Le Carré rarely describes, but rather dismisses with glib and stilted metaphors which he seems to stretch into realms where they can no longer fly: Pendel's wife wakes up "with a crash"; a telephone book passes from one name to the next "without drawing breath"; and "Osnard's pen had stopped in mid-caress."
There's also something missing: jolly, grubby Panama itself; its amnesiac cheer among the ruins, crazy in poverty and degradation. The vulture-ridden baroque of the old city and the centreless new city swathed in exhaust and destitute chaos surrounded by oases of palmed, suburban elegance, is all reduced to a mere line: "the Old City and its ugly sister across the bay." Le Carré's is a blind man's Panama, curiously devoid of shape. He rarely sees-though the novel is filled with sound, and here he is dead-on about the affectionate noisiness of Central America. The closing acknowledgements show that his Panama was researched-and it feels that way: more gathered than lived. Perhaps, again, that's because the book's really about England.
But there's a more serious, more interesting problem. In The Tailor of Panama Le Carré has in effect written two novels. In both, there's something new and something old, and none of it quite makes a whole. What's new is the intrigue of the world-wide market. What's old are the ghosts of the anglophone greats of colonial degradation in Central America: Graham Greene (in the afterword, Le Carré admits a dollop of inspiration from Our Man in Havana) and Malcolm Lowry.
And I will risk comparisons with those greats-however unfair it may be-because the "first" novel lurches and strains suddenly, and uncomfortably, into the higher fiction of the "second" novel, a sea-change in style and achievement that consists of the last thirty pages. Until the first ends, landscape, character, and feeling are not integrated as they were in Greene's transparent simplicity or Lowry's disturbing pathos. Le Carré's characters-particularly the British embassy staff-keep falling into seamy caricature. But the climax and epilogue vastly outstrip anything that has come before. Here, without warning, we are in the land of Lowry in Under the Volcano, and no imitation, but Le Carré's own. Suddenly the style no longer clunks; gone are the facetiousness, the clumsy, jazzy adjectives, the elaborate, mock-ecclesiastical irony. It's whole and compelling and effortless.
And Pendel himself is the test. It's not until the novel starts to fly high near the end that you really like him. And here, I suppose is my defence of the Great and Grand Novel: it makes you feel passionately for people you wouldn't otherwise care for. And at the start, Pendel (with all due respect to survivors) is a toady and a phony; ingratiating and saccharine, telling customers, strangers, and intimates only what they want to hear, and indeed fabricating it for them.
But suddenly, all too close to the end, a hero who at times has made the novel as purblind as he is himself becomes preternaturally aware and fully integrated with a new, terrible Panama, fiery and nocturnal and soaked with festivity and death. And the toadying tailor walks into the inferno of the invasion he has helped provoke, his final creation made to measure-for once facing the fire instead of evading it. One only wishes the novel had begun and continued in such haunting grandeur and exchanged its decorous, glib irony for the tragic force, simple yet portentous, with which it ends.

 Hugh Graham is a Toronto writer and screenwriter.