Posted: Sunday, October 17, 2010 12:00 am

http://www.stltoday.com/entertainment/books-and-literature/reviews/article_6c063f76-6b89-5740-b4e1-171ac80429e0.html

"Our Kind of Traitor" brings back the dead letter boxes, cut-outs and safe houses that charmed readers of "The Spy Who Came in From the Cold" in 1963. But, like John le Carré's other books, it's no cozy read.

"The Constant Gardner" (2004) took on Big Pharmacy. "The Mission Song" (2006) showed the brutality driving Africa's mining industry. No less bravely, "Our Kind of Traitor" charts the ravages of money laundering.

"Traitor" has a big subject: the ease with which profits from extortion and illicit drugs have been funneled into Britain's banking system.

The book grabs our attention early. We wonder whose side we're on and whose story we're reading when Perry Makepiece, an Oxford tutor, and Gail Perkins, a young barrister, tumble into the web of high-stakes intrigue during a vacation in Antigua.

A Russian invites Perry to play tennis after watching him and Gail in a doubles match. Rarely are the bull-like Dima Krasnov's invitations declined. He runs the Arena Multi Global Trading Conglomerate, a firm that traffics in smuggling, insurance fraud and currency speculation.

And now the most powerful money launderer in the world wants to run his crooked empire from London. He wants a London beachhead to establish himself and his family as residents of "green and pleasant England," to him a sanctuary of fair play and honor.

Perry compares him to Rousseau's noble savage. But Dima stands closer to another big-time crook whose softer, gentler side also does him in: Jay Gatsby.

Dima's tormented back story makes him hard to judge. He has earned the right to be ruthless, having been sent as a teenager to a gulag for murdering the apparatchik who traded Dima's mother food for sex.

The book's epigraph from English poet-historian Samuel Daniel (1562-1619) reminds us that heads of state always disown the spies that do their dirty work. This acid truth stays in our minds as the book speeds to its finale. It also challenges us to name the title's "traitor."

The idealistic sportsman Perry, whom we identify with at the start and then fear for as he's drawn into the meat grinder of espionage, qualifies as the book's eponym. But don't forget the lifelong criminal Dima, whose sad fate is forecast at book's outset.

Le Carré serves up a brilliant novel about government networks that profit from "vulture capitalism" while smashing up families and homes in their march to the bank.

An English professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, Peter Wolfe wrote "Corridors of Deceit: The World of John le Carré."