The spy novel is silly, when it isn’t claustrophobic; urgent, but with an urgency severed from any link to the various impending geopolitical alarms — German invasion, Soviet infiltration, Chinese technological advancement, terrorist havoc — that the genre’s history continually sounds. There is something in the condition of existence in these novels, the presuppositions of their world, in other words, that seems, finally, to be at once illness and cure.