John le Carré was the supreme Cold War novelist, but history didn’t end with the collapse of the Soviet Bloc and he hasn’t had to beg for new plots. A Delicate Truth is a smartly sardonic chronicle of a covert mission gone wrong in a world where governments outsource special ops to transnational companies and the American evangelical right casts a shadow on global politics. Le Carre’s descriptions and dialogue are cinematic, but here’s hoping A Delicate Truth will provide material for a BBC mini-series, not a Hollywood thriller. The Brits are more likely to respect the novel’s intelligence.
