I don't listen to the radio very much, but sometimes when I'm making the ten-mile drive into town and don't want to bother picking out music to play from my phone, I press one of three presets on the radio. The three stations are: the one that claims to be "alternative," but doesn't really go very far in that direction; the Classic Raahhhk station; and the local classical+NPR station. It doesn't usually work out very well, partly because I switch away from the first two whenever a commercial or a song I don't like comes on, which is frequently, only to find that the grass is just as brown. And whatever's playing on the classical station is either already in progress or, if I catch the beginning, won't be finished before I get where I'm going. Or maybe I won't get either the beginning or the end. And then after 3pm the annoying ladies of NPR take over.

One day a few weeks ago I jumped to the classical station and found a piano concerto in progress. "That's one of the Mozart concertos," I thought, though I had no idea which one; to tell you the truth, they...well, I'd better not say they all sound the same, but most of them are quite similar, unless you're comparing a very early to a later one. But then it took a turn which of course I can't describe but which seemed rather off the beaten Mozartian path.

I was very curious about its identity, but when I got to where I was going the piece was still in progress. Happily the station posts its log on the web, so when I got back home I was able to find out what it was: Beethoven's first piano concerto.

Well, that was intriguing, and now I wanted to hear the whole thing. Moreover, I decided that the time had come for me to get to know all five of the concertos. I'm not sure I had ever before heard the first three, and it has been many years since I heard the fourth and fifth. I've had for years, but never listened to, a set of the five played by Alfred Brendel with the Chicago Symphony conducted by James Levine. Where it ranks in the opinion of connoisseurs I don't know, but I thought surely it must be at least respectable.

So. I enjoyed this work but it isn't going to be a great favorite. The first movement begins with the martial or processional Beethoven which is the Beethoven I am not very fond of. In general I found the entire first movement continually interesting, especially the exciting cadenza, but not deeply engaging. The second movement is slow and pretty, as expected, but didn't strike me as especially memorable. But the third--oh man. It's a joyful blaze. It has an instantly memorable tune which I sort of want to call a riff, and is almost treated that way, recurring frequently. I don't know how often I'll go back to the entire work, but a few days after hearing the entire work several times I went back and listened to the third movement alone--twice. It's that much fun. 

I also revisited the second movement, and found that hearing it in isolation instead of as a lull after the lengthy and vigorous first made it more appealing. It's really quite beautiful. It was like meeting a quiet and mild-mannered person in a crowd and not getting a very strong impression of...well, I was going to say "him or her," but really in that figure I'm envisioning a woman, if only because the movement is pretty and graceful, and men are not pretty and graceful. So, her--and later on conversing with her alone and finding that she's more charming and interesting than you had thought from that first impression. (I think I've used that analogy before, but I can't remember where. I'll attribute that to old age.) 

But about my initial idea that what I was hearing on the radio was Mozart: I can't figure it out now. I don't know which part of the concerto I heard that day in the truck, but in general it doesn't sound much like Mozart to me, though it was written only four years after Mozart's last piano concerto, #27 (1795 and 1791 respectively). In hope of getting some notion of what I might have been hearing, I listened to #27, and I don't hear much resemblance to the Beethoven. So...I don't know. 

On to the second concerto. Which by the way was written before the first. 

Peter Hitchens, writing in The Lamp a year or two ago, asserts that le Carré was "Britain’s greatest novelist of the late twentieth century." (I would provide a link to the piece, which is a review of a volume of le Carré's letters, but I'm pretty sure it's subscriber-only). I have too little acquaintance with contemporary fiction to have a respectable opinion on the matter, but Hitchens's view strikes me as entirely plausible.

I am, however, qualified to say that le Carré is a very, very good novelist, and one I've admired for a long time. I think my enthusiasm began with Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy in the early 1970s. But I was aware of his reputation before that: my father subscribed to a long-defunct men's magazine called True--or maybe TRUE--and a condensed version of le Carré's first big success, The Spy Who Came In From the Cold appeared there in 1964. I do remember noticing it, but as far as I recall I didn't read it, or if I did sample it I didn't get very far: I was sixteen and mainly read science fiction.

Tinker was a rare experience: an intricate and powerful page-turner of a narrative with subtle and profound exploration of character and theme. Moreover, for me and apparently many thousands of others, the "secret world," as le Carré refers to the people and practices of espionage, is in itself fascinating and even alluring--perhaps not a healthy thing. I read his earlier books, and over the next fifteen or twenty years others that followed Tinker. They were all worth reading, and they all had as both practical and metaphorical foundation the Cold War. With the fall of the Soviet Union there was reason to wonder whether le Carré's work would continue to fascinate.

He continued to publish novels right up until his death in 2020. But the last one I bought, picked up secondhand years after its 1995 publication, was Our Game. And it sat unread on a shelf until a couple of weeks ago, when I found myself looking at that bookcase with an eye toward freeing some space, asking myself if I really needed all those le Carré titles--nine of them--and what the chances were that I would ever re-read any except two or three of them. Specifically, shouldn't I just go ahead and put Our Game in the stack of things to donate to the Friends of the Library? But why not read it first? It's not very long, compared to some of his books.

To the book, then: the first thing an Anglophone Christian reader notices--the first thing I noticed, anyway--is that the narrator is named Timothy Cranmer. As le Carré's work is often religion-conscious (though not religious in any sense), that choice of last name seems unlikely to be insignificant: Archbishop Thomas Cranmer (1489-1556) was one of the leaders of the English schism under Henry VIII and Edward VI. This Cranmer is a former member of the English espionage establishment, forced into retirement at the end of the Cold War because his career as an anti-Soviet spymaster constitutes a body of knowledge and a set of skills now "surplus to requirements," as the English say, for the role of the secret services in the new order. He is well-situated, having inherited a very nice country house and vineyard, supplemented by a goodly amount of money which we are given to understand is an under-the-table pension, or perhaps a theft, from the service--"the Office," as Cranmer calls it. And though he is surely at least fifty years old he has acquired a young, beautiful lover, Emma, who lives with him. Both she and Cranmer are somewhat familiar types in le Carré's world: the aging or aged and world-weary spy is almost a stock character, and a young, beautiful, and rather lost woman appears often.

Cranmer has spent much of his career "running" a double agent, Lawrence ("Larry") Pettifer. As  all readers of spy fiction know, with double agents there is always uneasiness, at minimum, about who the agent is really working for. Pettifer is a charismatic fellow, and he and Cranmer are close, in an almost romantic sort of way. They have remained close since their release from the Office into the everyday world, to which Pettifer is having trouble adjusting, and Pettifer is a frequent visitor, with obvious designs on Emma.

As the story opens, Emma has recently, and with little explanation, left Cranmer. And now Pettifer has disappeared. On a rainy Sunday night, when Pettifer has not been heard from for over a week, Cranmer receives a visit from two policemen who are pretty sure Cranmer must know something about Pettifer's disappearance, and suspect he may have had some hand in it. The Office is worried, too, and more than worried: Pettifer seems to have been involved with the theft of thirty-seven million pounds from the Russians.

This may all be connected to Ingushetia, which is a very small country in the Caucasus, located between South Ossetia to the west and Chechnya to the east, and the home of the Ingush people. I'm only mildly embarrassed to say that as far as I can recall I had never before heard of it. We all know of Chechnya, thanks to the Boston Marathon bombing and other events newsworthy in the West, and I had at least heard the names of North and South Ossetia. Like those, Ingushetia is part of the northernmost reach of the Islamic lands. With the end of the Soviet Union, and the consequent freedom of ancient enemies to go to war with each other, Ingushetia is (in the novel--I don't know about real life) under attack by Chechnya and Ossetia, with the permission and sometimes assistance of Russia. 

Pettifer's Soviet handler, Konstantin Checheyev (Cranmer's opposite on the Soviet side), who of course believes that Pettifer is his agent spying on the British, is not ethnically Russian, but Ingush. Ingushetia has just recently (the year is 1994) been half-freed from Russian/Soviet control, and Checheyev, like Cranmer and Pettifer, is not sure what he should be doing now. He has long resented a sort of glass ceiling for his ethnicity in the Soviet government, and doesn't think he has much of a place in Russia. And his native land is in trouble. It appears that he may be behind the theft of the thirty-seven million pounds, and that Pettifer is probably involved.

Does Pettifer's disappearance have something to do with the theft, with Checheyev, with the Ingush? Is he alive or dead? If dead, did Cranmer kill him? Cranmer has reason to think he may have--their relationship is difficult. If alive, where is he, and is Emma with him? 

Cranmer needs to know the answers, and in the process of seeking them finds himself pursued by the British police and by the Office. And the story of detective work, spycraft, and intrigue that follows is a good one, but a smaller one than many of his earlier works. It's smaller in word count, and it carries less resonance with the big questions: questions peculiar to our time, to the decayed and corrupt condition of the West, especially of England; to the Cold War and the moral dilemmas and psychological pressures involved in fighting it; and to the broader and more universal philosophical principles to which those point. The Cold War novels treat all those in more depth and with more power than does Our Game. And if le Carré is indeed a major novelist, which I'm inclined to think he is, it is those that most strongly make the case for him. But none of that means that this isn't a good story.

It follows that if you don't know le Carré's work, this is not the best place to start. For that purpose I would suggest either The Spy Who Came In From the Cold or Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. The first is shorter, with a sharp dagger of a plot; the second is more expansive and more character-driven. I'm restraining the impulse to say more, in fact to say a great deal, about those and the related books. But aside from the fact that my topic here is only the one book, there's much too much to say in a brief review--there's material for a lengthy article, perhaps even a book, which very likely someone has written. 

What about that Cranmer business that I mentioned? Well, it strikes me that this new Cranmer resembles the old one in that he is in the process of making his exit from an institution which has defined his life and his world. What will become of him? Of it? What will take its place in his life? And what will be his place within that? Old Cranmer died for a new faith (though of course he insisted that it was the old one made pure). What will become of New Cranmer? It would be bad manners for me to say; you'll have to read the book to find out.

And should I keep my copy of Our Game? Well, I probably won't read it again, and I could make use of that shelf space for something more permanent. Probably it should go to the Friends of the Library. It would be a happy find for someone.