[It] is not on being an excellent thriller-writer that John le Carré has gained the kind of superior acceptance that Marilyn Monroe has over Joan Blondell, but because he has come to count (as, say, Price, Gardner, Freeling, and Lyall have not) as a good writer, a writer worthy of more than inclusion in some forthcoming Best of British Thrillers list, a writer who can be read for vicariously authentic agony. So is The Little Drummer Girl a good book? It's hard to feel that this is a useful question as compared with the far more interesting, Is this a good thriller? And yes, it is, though with interesting flaws.

The most trying of these is a flaw that is becoming endemic in the better thriller-writers, those who are confident that they have made a world which has become an overlap with our own reality. The flaw is...