The Looking Glass War is either a good book with serious flaws or a bad one with unusual virtues, and I don't think it matters much which side one takes on this zebra-and-its-stripes question. Either way the promise that John Le Carre displayed in The Spy Who Came In From the Cold is reaffirmed but not fulfilled by his second spy novel. It's uncharitable to suggest that money and lavish praise have hurt Le Carre artistically, but after the success of his last book he could have written the Doty Report and still have sold it to the movies.

As in The Spy, espionage here appears as an unromantic, ethically dubious business, transcated by people of limited talent and honesty. A vestigial branch of British intelligence, large and powerful during the war but fallen into genteel desuetide, receives a report that the Russians may be assembling a missile base in East Germany. A charter-plane pilot is induced to veer off-course to photograph the countryside and a middle-aged courier, sent to Finland to retrieve the film, is run down by an automobile on the way to his hotel. His death may mean that the Russians really are up to something; but, more important, it provides an excuse for reactivating the Department.

Near-Sure Miss

Cloaked as a training operation, preparations are made to send an agent to the suspected area. A house is rented near the East border, where a naturalized Pole who worked for the Department twenty years before is given refresher courses in radio operations and self-defense. But the equipment is obsolete, and the agent's wartime skills have not improved. From the beginning his capture seems certain, and the operation may--it is a point only hinted at--signal the Department's demise.

Le Carre is good at credibility and suspense; he is bad at effect and characterization. More than half the book follows the genesis and execution of the East German mission, and the technical details never seem false or obtrusive. One believes that such preparation would be sufficient for a real-life as well as a fictional undercover agent. Once in East Germany, the man's mistakes diminish our hopes that somehow he will succeed only to excite our curiosity as to precisely how he will fail.

But until the story gets underway, Le Carre seems to feel an obligation to make up for in atmosphere what he cannot supply in action. Sometimes he succeeds. At its best, as in the opening paragraphs (reprinted on the dust jacket), Le Carre's style has an undeniable gloomy resonance:

Snow covered the airfield.

It had come from the north, driven by the night wind, smelling of the sea. There it would stay all winter, threadbare on the gray earth, an icy, sharp dust; not thawing and freezing, but static like a year without seasons. The changing mist, like the smoke of war, would hang over it swallow up now a hanger, now the radar hut, now the machines; release them place by place, drained of color, black carrion on a white desert.

Although this is self-consciously fancy writing, it falls short, I think, of true purple prose.

Crash of Symbols

Le Carre's straining for effect becomes most obvious when he writes dialogue or describes the relations between people. The early scenes seem almost cinematically brief and selective, and in the manner of a bad movie director, Le Carre tries to end most of them with a significant detail: "The Minister did not look up as they came in." "He walked slowly, like an old athlete on an old track." The portentousness is obvious, even out of context. The Spy was refreshingly pessimistic and unglamorous, but in mining the same vein further, Le Carre only comes up with heavy irony.

If there is no central figure in The Looking Glass War--and far less a hero--great novels have been written without one. If there are no characters for whom we can feel more than a mild intellectual sympathy, well, good novels have lacked them. But some of the characters in The Looking Glass War seem to have no existence except as objects of Le Carre's pitiless gaze, and that is a sign of trouble.

Yet for most of its length, The Looking Glass War is extraordinarily gripping. With a tighter plot and less concern to demonstrate his maturity, Le Carr* could write the really fine novel that he's proved he has the talent for.