If Frederick Forsyth could write as well as he can plot and if John Le Carré could plot as well as he can write, one of them might have produced Eye Of The Needle.

This is, quite simply, the best spy novel to come out of England in years. If it ranks below Ambler and Greene at their best, it is because Ken Follett is writing in retrospect about a world and time he could not have known. The 1939–45 war was, to its philosophic witnesses, a moral crisis. A sense of hesitant and then enraged ethical speculation permeates the literature of the period. (pp. F1, F4)

Because the retrospective view is simpler, the writer is tempted to make his wartime heroes and villains out of cardboard. Follet has resisted the temptation….

In 1937 German intelligence—which was more zealous than expert—slipped a super-agent into Britain, a man known...