For aficionados of spy novels and the like, for the last four decades the English-language standard-bearer has been John Le Carre. Le Carre is a master novelist of the Cold War spy genre that explores the emotional psyches of his heroes (The Spy Who Came In from the Cold; Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; Smiley's People; and a dozen more). Since the Cold War's end, he's written a series of additional novels, featuring various intelligence agency protagonists coping with their personal histories and a with new global landscape.

Le Carre's politics has always been subsumed to his prodigious writing and storytelling skills; he's very much a literary cut above the genre, but the framework has generally been standard Cold War political fare, with an arc in recent years toward critiquing the evils of global corporations. But not even his anti-corporate work prepares readers for Le Carre's newest novel, Absolute Friends, a novel written, and set, after the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

For Le Carre himself, the buildup to that war was something of a political coming out party; he used his 40 years of bestselling celebrity to scathing effect in widely published public criticisms of the war and of America's foreign policy, sensibilities most readers wouldn't have guessed from Le Carre's past fiction.

Now, he's put those sentiments in a book. His eponymous friends are traced from the late '60s - when they are fellow radicals in a West Berlin student squat scene that will ring bells with any veteran of any protest movement anywhere - through a shared history as spies in the Cold War, a history that, though they both retired with the Berlin Wall's fall, can never quite escape them. In their life histories, they're polar opposites: the German Sasha, a lifelong radical, firebrand, and seeker, and Englishman Ted Mundy, a man who, after flirting with art and protest as a youth, settles into a politically disengaged life but is aroused to a 55-year-old's fury in opposition to the Iraq invasion. They in many ways are representatives for the wide range of boomers whose sense of humanity hasn't evaporated over the course of long and complex lives, and who became anti-war activists -- like Le Carre himself -- when confronted with new and ever more heinous abuses of power.

Le Carre is after big questions here: What, exactly, are we up against? What can we do to stop it? Beyond the stylized prose, globe-hopping plot, and novelist's eye for detail, much of the experience of reading Friends is in wondering where Le Carre is going with all this -- and while the journey itself is lovely, his payoff is stunning: it's a ferocious conclusion, one as elegant in its depiction of the realities of a unipolar, War On Terror world as any nonfiction could be.

Le Carre makes his case with the tools he has learned over a lifetime of acclaimed fiction. Absolute Friends is entertaining, but in the end, it is anything but escapist fiction. Read it and think. And act. Highly recommended.