John le Carre’s new novel is critical of United States policy.

By SARAH LYALL

LONDON - The novelist John le Carre was recalling an encounter from a decade or so ago, as the cold war was receding into history, giving way to a new system of shadowy threats and uneasy alliances. Sir David Spedding, ill and retiring as head of the Secret Intelligence Service, or M.I. 6, had come to visit him at his house in Cornwall, and they were talking about the changed realities of spying. “He told me, ‘You can’t imagine how disgusting our world has become,’ ” Mr. le Carre said. “And I accept that. It is a disgusting world.”
At 76, Mr. le Carre is white-haired, droll and courtly, speaking in perfect paragraphs and exuding the air of quiet privilege and distinguished manner of a retired statesman. If he chose to, he could still be producing crowd-pleasing books about his most famous spy, George Smiley, late of M.I. 6, or easing into a gracious old age of playing with his grandchildren and lunching at his club.
But he is still sharp, still fizzing with ideas, and fueled by a new righteous fury. He has become, if not exactly radicalized, then at least clearer about his political views and more willing to articulate them. His latest book, “A Most Wanted Man,” speaks to one of his preoccupations: the excesses, as Mr. le Carre sees it, of American foreign policy and the immoral nature of the intelligence practices that underpin it.
The message in the book, his 21st, is embedded, as always, in an absorbing tale: of spies and maybe-spies, of divided loyalties, of corrupted innocence. The title character is a young Muslim refugee named Issa, who suddenly and illegally surfaces in Hamburg and falls under the care of an idealistic young female lawyer. But then he becomes the object of a nasty tug of war among feuding factions of several Western intelligence agencies, which cannot agree on whether he is a broken man or a dangerous terrorist, or perhaps a bit of both.
There are no scenes of torture in “A Most Wanted Man,” but Issa, its once and perhaps future victim, lives perpetually under its shadow. The degradation of torture and the horror of practices like extraordinary rendition were themes that Mr. le Carre returned to again and again in a recent conversation.
“I know about interrogation,” he said, alluding to his days as a British spy in the 1950s. “I’ve done interrogations, and I can tell you this: By extracting information under torture, you make a fool of yourself. You obtain information that isn’t true. You receive names of people who are supposedly guilty and aren’t. You land yourself with a wild goose chase, and you miss what is being handed to you on a plate, and that is the possibility of bonding with someone and engaging with them and talking to them reasonably.”
Mr. le Carre was recruited as a spy while still a college student. Working for the British Foreign Office as a diplomat who was really a secret agent, he began writing thrillers under a pseudonym. (His real name is David Cornwell.)
“The Spy Who Came In From the Cold,” the 1963 work that made Mr. le Carre famous, upended the traditional spy thriller by portraying East and West as equally cynical and equally corrupt . Mr. le Carre set “A Most Wanted Man” in Germany because of its explosive ethnic and religious mix, its strained debates over immigration and the disarray of its intelligence services. The book is full of fathers whose misdeeds echo down the generations. His own father was a con man who was either riding high with gangsters and starlets or running to escape from creditors and the law; his mother walked out on the family when young David was still a boy.
“I have a very strong memory of what was done to me as a child,” he said. “I know what it’s like to come out from under a maverick, fascinating, overlarge father, what it’s like to feel, as Issa did, motherless. ”
Mr. le Carre said he doesn’t mind being introduced as the author of the 45-year-old “Spy Who Came In From the Cold .” But his famous spy would now be more than 100 years old, Mr. le Carre said.
“He belonged to his time, and his time is over.”
Not Mr. le Carre’s, though. He has no plans yet for a new novel, but there is the memoir he has long talked of producing. But sustained self-revelation presents a complicated prospect for Mr. le Carre, who has worked so hard to control the narrative of his own life .
As he thinks about an autobiography, he said, “I’m already constructing the lies I’m going to tell.”