THE GREAT GAME GONE.(Legends: A Novel of Dissimulation)(Book Review)

The spy thriller still pines for the Soviet Union. No post-Iron Curtain intrigue, no replay of the British Empire's Great Game in Afghanistan or its intrusions into the Middle East, no elaborate "security measures," no double-double cross in the murk of C.I.A.-F.B.I. rivalry can match, for heart-stoppingly high geopolitical stakes, the good old days when, in terms of John le Carre's fiction, M.I.6's Smiley matched wits with the K.G.B.'s Karla on the global chessboard. There was an intelligibility if not a friendly intimacy in the old contest, one between two large, idealistic, rough-mannered nations seeking to maintain their spheres of influence short of tripping nuclear ...