Excerpt:
So how does John le Carré -- the Einstein of ambiguity, the Wallenda of the moral tightrope, the Caravaggio of spy-world light and shadow -- depict the War on Terror? He chooses for his main character a Muslim illegal immigrant and possible jihadist. He brands the intelligence agents fighting potential terror plots as brutes or criminals or something worse -- Americans. And he fashions a complicated story in which Islamophobia is a much bigger problem than militant Islamic radicalism.
In "A Most Wanted Man," Issa -- the son of a Russian military officer and an unwilling Chechen woman -- illegally makes his way to Hamburg, Germany, in search of his inheritance: a pile of laundered loot held in the vaults of a morally exhausted 60-year-old British banker whose father did shady business with the British secret service and Issa's father. The German officials tracking Issa suppose him to be a radical Islamist, in part because he was a Chechen "freedom fighter." The reader of "A Most Wanted Man" is told that Issa merely wants to become a doctor. Without much subtlety, Mr. le Carré presents Issa's fate -- and that of a few key people around him -- as an emblem of the West's war- on-terror duplicity and hysteria.