Word: smiley
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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There is bravado everywhere. At the air bases, troops scrawl messages on the bombs: ALL ABOARD; GET OUT SADDAM; SAY CHEESE; HAVE A NICE DAY, with a smiley face, are written on a Maverick AGM-65 air-to-ground missile. When General Colin Powell and Defense Secretary Dick Cheney visited a Stealth fighter squadron, they inscribed a 2,000-lb., laser-guided bomb. TO SADDAM, WITH AFFECTION, wrote Cheney. YOU DIDN'T MOVE IT, SO NOW YOU LOSE IT, Powell wrote...
...SECRET PILGRIM by John le Carre (Knopf; $21.95). So what if these related tales seem like outtakes from a story that has already been told? They are exciting reminders of Le Carre's fictional saga of postwar British intelligence, and best of all, they include the reappearance of George Smiley...
...Russia House (1989). That fiasco was not Ned's fault, to be sure, but he has been punished by his Service superiors anyhow, unplugged from the power loop and farmed out to teach spycraft to young recruits. On an inspired whim, Ned manages to lure his old mentor, George Smiley, out of retirement to spend an evening talking with these students. As the legendary Smiley reminisces aloud about the past history of the Service, Ned finds himself privately doing the same...
Another of the book's blessings is the reappearance of George Smiley, who has not been seen in Le Carre's fiction since Smiley's People (1980). In what is basically a walk-on or, in this case, a sit-down role, Smiley retains his enigmatic, nondescript power. At the after-dinner session, introduced by Ned as a "legend of the Service," Smiley tells the expectant students, "Oh, I don't think I'm a legend at all. I think I'm just a rather fat old man wedged between the pudding and the port." Not true. Ned paraphrases...
Good reasons exist for hoping that Smiley is wrong, although writers and readers of espionage thrillers may confess to mixed emotions on the matter. In the meantime, The Secret Pilgrim bridges a gap between the recent past and the unforeseeable future. No longer able, because of the innate honesty that has characterized his storytelling career, to offer a full-blown cold war drama, Le Carre pops out some discrete and satisfactorily chilling ice cubes...