THE TAILOR OF PANAMA

By John le Carré, Knopf, 332 pages.

"When Andrew Osnard barged into Harry Pendel's shop asking to be measured for a suit," begins John le Carré's 16th novel, "Pendel was one person. By the time he barged out again Pendel was another." With that, we're off to the races -- 332 pages of nuanced drama and tragicomic wit from one of the masters of modern storytelling. If anyone thought that le Carré was tiring, or still casting around for his role now that the Cold War is over, "The Tailor of Panama" will quickly set all and sundry straight.

An orphan brought by up his Jewish uncle in London's East End, Harry learned his sewing skills while doing time for arson. He later perfected them as the Pendel in the house of Pendel & Braithwaite Co. Limitada, tailors to royalty, formerly of Savile Row, and now of Panama City. The trouble is, there never was a Braithwaite, or royal appointments, or even Savile Row. Pendel simply has an extraordinary talent -- a "fluence" -- for making things up. "It was improving on people. It was cutting and shaping them until they became understandable members of his internal universe."

The one true thing about Harry is that he is indeed the tailor to Panama's rich and famous. This fact makes him an ideal "joe" for Osnard, a young, amoral operative on the make -- a Nick Leeson of the MI6 -- and for the moribund British secret service, which has persuaded itself that running a covert operation to reassert Western control of the Panama Canal is just the thing to get it back into America's good graces.

Harry, a '90s version of "Our Man in Havana," gives the idiot Brits what they want to hear, even though it is almost 100 percent confabulation. As in Graham Greene's classic novel, the fantasies rebound, and le Carré's ebullient satire suddenly becomes the stuff of deep tragedy. We are not entirely surprised; interleaved with le Carré's hilarious descriptions of fat English bums struggling to emerge from Panamanian taxis, there are ever-present hints of darkness, from the "dead eyes" of the spoiled children of the Panamanian rich, with their plump necks and gold chains, to the mutilated face of Pendel's Panamanian assistant, beaten mercilessly by Noriega's Dignity Battalions prior to Operation Just Cause.

Le Carré's major post-Cold War concern, the nexus of drugs, guns and adrift intelligence agencies (addressed more directly in "The Night Manager"), is evident here. He also lays into decaying, corrupt institutions, like the British Conservative party, manipulative press barons on both sides of the Atlantic and the thoughtless manner in which the United States applies military force. But in "The Tailor of Panama," unlike his more recent books, le Carré writes from the inside out. His characters emerge in all their folly, grandeur and ambivalence. And the author's shrewd ear for the vernacular is worth the price of admission alone. At 65, le Carré is still, as he remarked a couple of years ago, "fizzing with fiction." His fans, and English literature, are the better for it.

-- Andrew Ross

Andrew Ross is the managing editor of Salon.

---