Eamonn Fitzgerald's Rainy Day

We are inclined to think that the end of the Cold War was a time of beginnings. Certainly, it was the beginning of liberty for the millions freed from communist oppression; it was also, famously, the beginning of the end of history. Or so some thought, anyway. But the collapse of the Berlin Wall also ushered in a lot of finales. For gangster states like East Germany, tyrants such as Nicolae Ceausescu and for the functionaries of Radio Free Europe, then housed luxuriously in Munich's Englischer Garten, the party was over once the Iron Curtain came down on the whole sordid show.

Ditto, John le Carré. Since socialism fell apart, the master of Cold War fiction has been looking for a hook upon which to hang his world view, but whether it be Kenya, Pakistan, Panama or Turkey, nothing and nowhere is as fertile as the grim East-West battleground of ideas once was. In A Most Wanted Man, his latest novel, he has reached the end of a road that began for him in 1989. The book totters through its first forty pages in an attempt to create an interesting character, and then topples over when it fails to make itself credible. The central figure of Issa is laughable. And just as ludicrous are le Carré's efforts to turn Hamburg into some kind of crossroads of international terrorism and its opposing agencies. Hamburg is an important port city, but it is not the axis of anti-evil.

Le Carré should have written this novel in 2002. The deeds of Mohamed Atta were fresh in everyone's mind then and somewhere between the ruins of the World Trade Center, the incompetence of Germany's "intelligence" services and Hamburg's accommodation of anti-American fanatics were the components of a novel that needed to be written.

Instead, we get a farrago of half-baked beliefs about Islamism and the West that belong more in the Guardian than in a thriller. A Most Wanted Man is an unworthy end to John le Carré's writing career.