The Tailor of Panama

John le Carré doesn't try to hide the fact he modeled this 1996 effort after one of spy fiction's most celebrated satires, Graham Greene's "Our Man In Havana". It's too bad he didn't try more than a hollow retread that plays up many of le Carré's pet peeves and tropes.

Like other le Carré protagonists, Harry Pendel has deep father issues and conflicted loyalties between loving wife and loving mistress. He meets British spy Andy Osnard, whom the mistress warns him against right away because le Carré heroines are always blessed with such pronosticatory powers so as to be tragically ignored. Much moralizing ensues, along with lamenting of British impotence and American materialism. There's betrayal; sudden death; and the kind of bleak, nihilistic ending le Carré seems unwilling to break away from in his sunset years.

The comedy, which involves Pendel's passing off made-up information he claims to pick up as tailor to high-end Panama City clientele, is watered-down Greene. Instead of employing vacuum-cleaner blueprints, Pendel simply makes up conversations using the same talent for fabrication, his "fluence" and "rock of eye", that go into his suits.

Pendel then recedes into the background for the second half while Osnard works his malevolent magic in the British chancery. A vulture's circle of Americans and their British Tory-ite enablers plot to take back the Panama Canal before its 1999 handover to Panama, using Pendel's fiction as rationale. Its heavy-handed satire that never really connects, since Pendel's tale of a Japanese conspiracy is too far-fetched and its complete acceptance by the powers-that-be beggars belief. It seems like le Carré just wanted to use this as a way of revisiting the 1991 U.S. invasion as a demonstration of Uncle Sam's age-old murderous stupidity. Greene had his left-wing sympathies, too; he just didn't bang on them so much.

There may be amusement to be found in this book for others. For me, I found the humor, much of it centered around a horny ambassador and an aging Scottish spy chief who can't think past the Falklands, to be tinny. Osnard is the cheerful central figure much of the time, and maybe his callousness is amusing (asked what his country means to him, he says "England's where I keep my toothbrush", overstating it if anything), but it only coarsens an already too-bleak tale.

What's left to like? Here, it's le Carré's ability to write powerful descriptive passages about a corner of the world he obviously spent some time researching. Hilltops tinged with mauve that overlook two oceans. The rowdy bustle of the Via Espana on a sunny afternoon. A lewd pushbutton establishment where rooms are equipped with all-porn TV and French-letter gift baskets. He does setting so well, you just wish he had a story to put in it.

Even le Carré's usual deft shuffling of narrative, of not knowing who or what is coming or going, comes a-cropper with too many cards in play, both real and phony. Being confused by le Carré is normally one of his virtues; here it's just another of the many frustrations.