Blood is thicker than water - and twice as messy

There have been a dozen books since The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, and still John le Carré seems like a butterfly escaped from the chrysalis of the genre novel but afraid to spread his wings, more than half regretting the old constricted certainties. His new novel, Single & Single, is lightly researched and well plotted, but a little sombre for those who want escapist action, and a little formulaic for more demanding readers.

Tiger Single is a London-based venture capitalist who profits from the opportunities and the temptations offered by the melting of the Soviet bloc. He becomes involved in more and more ambitious projects, the first one being to take blood given freely in Russian and transport it for sale in America.

The attempted coup of 1991 puts paid to this bit of visionary plasma-broking, and afterwards Tiger Single is drawn into the more humdrum viciousness of the drug trade. The other Single of the title is his son and business partner Oliver, who before the action of the book begins has already told Customs everything he knows, and is living under another name in a seaside town. As Tiger's empire in its turn begins to unravel, Oliver is drawn back into its workings, looking for his father to bring him to justice and also, whether he knows it or not, to ask for forgiveness.

The theme of blood for sale may be superseded in plot terms, but it doesn't lose its wider resonance. What, after all, is Oliver doing by blowing the whistle on his father except shopping his own flesh and blood? Tiger Single was doing deals with gangsters who trusted nobody's business partners unless they were family, but over and above his usefulness in this area Oliver was Tiger's one weak point, the son he wanted to impress and seduce, not merely control. He gave Oliver enough rope to hang not himself but his father.

John le Carré's approach has been to strip away the spurious excitement from the world of spies and agents, revealing it to be a labyrinth of bureaucratic betrayals, in which most cover tactivity amounts to playing chess in a deep freeze in the dark, and then to invest that with a certain stoical romanticism. He reveals the tarnish and then gives it just a little gloss.

In this combination of cynicism and a muted idealism, he resembles a more consistent stylist, Raymond Chandler, whose manner casts its shadow on an early passage of Single & Single, where the words fall in the softest of tough-guy cadences: 'The sun went out, he saw the night and felt his head nestled against a friendly rock and knew that a piece of time had gone missing from his consciousness and it was not a piece he wanted back.' The secondary hero of the book is Oliver's handler, Nat Brock of HM Customs and Excise. Here are concentrated the le Carré virtues of imperturbability and patience. The real test of character is not action, though action there must finally be, but the ability to survive the waiting game.

In a novel that alternates domestic and exotic locations, it is the exotic ones that are atmospherically rendered, while modern Britain is an oddly remote place, with its seaside landladies and its gossipy, Women's Institute-frequenting wives. History marches on in the wider world, but at home the clocks seem to have stopped.

It comes as a shock to the reader when Oliver visits his mother, since he had shown no previous sign of having such a thing. Perhaps le Carré is showing that Oliver sees his own struggle for identity as fought with his father exclusively, but it's inspired. There's no more preparation for the disclosure, beyond the halfway point of the book, that Oliver has always been haunted by a sense of inadequacy, and the knowledge that his father preferred an older brother who died young.

Oliver begins to recover from this ancient injury even before he falls mutually in love with one of his minders, 'a pebble-chinned girl with broad, clear eyes and a scruffy blonde mane'. Le Carré can write convincing accounts of the byzantine workings of money-laundering and can convey how it would feel to be lost in Tbilisi, but he can't make this romance seem anything but wishful thinking.

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