From a master plotter come stories of cringe-making crudeness — none cruder than Absolute Friends, in which the CIA cynically stage-manages a shoot-out in order to exaggerate the threat from Islamist terrorists.

Millions have felt the same anger as le Carré at the conduct of American foreign policy under George W Bush. But a novelist should know how to channel his anger into fiction without rendering the fiction stillborn by resorting to wax-doll stereotypes. Graham Greene was as fiercely anti-American as le Carré, but he never made the same mistake; he was the truer, more dispassionate artist.

Anti-American sarcasm has crept into le Carré’s work like a cancer, eating away at its integrity. He has won plaudits for “reinventing himself” after the Cold War, finding new subjects to write about; but, in truth, le Carré Mark II, in the grip of virulent prejudice, is a pale shadow of le Carré Mark I, poet of betrayal, ­divided loyalties and moral ambiguity.

How long ago it seems that he gave us The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, that masterpiece of taut concision. It was his third novel, dashed off in five weeks, while he was working at the British embassy in Bonn, and it had a vigour which he has never recaptured. The more he has striven for complexity in his characterisation — and, at his best, achieved it — the further he has travelled from the ­imperatives of good storytelling. He is still an interesting writer. He has just ceased to thrill. And in the genre that he has chosen, that is fatal.