If Ian Fleming has been denigrated as a mere thriller writer, John le Carré has suffered a subtly different fate. He is widely credited with having taken the ­traditional English spy thriller and raised it to the level of literary fiction: a medium in which serious issues could be addressed in a sophisticated way. The trouble is that, by that benchmark, he falls short, and by some distance.

The issues with which he has grappled could hardly be more serious: they concern not just the sort of Britain we want to live in, but the sort of world we want to live in. But his dissection of that world, particularly in recent novels, can scarcely be called sophisticated. The plotlines have a cartoonish simplicity, with Uncle Sam cast as the villain, Britain as the duplicitous stooge and multinational companies as the Devil incarnate.