What Le Carre has always done better than anyone -- using his eye like a burning glass and his pen like a scalpel to strip bare the shoddy, silly secrets of the spy's trade -- is on glittering display in his new book. Why should the British intelligence service care what happens in Panama? "Panama is a backwater, young Mr. Osnard," says an old spy to his new assistant. "Panama is two men and a dog and let's all go out and have a good lunch!" Osnard goes to Panama to recruit an agent -- Harry Pendel, former Cockney ex-con and now tailor to the rich and famous -- and the ensuing romp and final tragedy owe much to Graham Greene's Our Man In Havana, as Le Carre acknowledges in an afterward.

John le Carré, the greatest spy novelist of the Cold War era, continues his post-Cold War quest to define the genre he helped perfect. The classic spy novel was essentially a story of good (England, the United States) vs. evil (Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union), in which good more or less prevailed. The Tailor of Panama is something else entirely: a spy novel with no spies in which the bad guys reap most of the rewards. It is also a viciously funny satire. The novel is set in Panama, where a plot is in place to make void the Panama Treaty, which would return control of the Panama Canal to the Panamanians in 1999. At the center of events is Harry Pendel, the tailor of the title. Coerced into working for British Intelligence, he concocts out of whole cloth a left-wing movement with the goal of luring the American military to do the dirty work--invade Panama à la 1989 and nullify the treaty. From the characters to the setting, le Carré has succeeded in setting new parameters for an old genre.