TWILIGHT FOR SPIES

Don't get your hopes up, Smiley fans. Yes, it's true that John le Carre dedicates this new book to Alec Guinness, who so perfectly played George Smiley of British Intelligence in the TV versions of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and Smiley's People. It's also true that ''old George,'' that quietly charismatic spymaster, does show up-now and again -in the new book. But Smiley, unfortunately, is just a supporting actor this time, a figure in the background. The ''secret pilgrim'' is a rather faceless fellow named Ned, a veteran intelligence officer near retirement now teaching at Sarratt, England's training school for spies. And, though described as a novel, The Secret Pilgrim (Knopf, $21.95) is more accurately a collection of related short stories. Ned, you see, has invited Smiley for a long after-dinner chat with the school's most recent graduating class of soon-to-be secret agents. So, in each of the book's chapters, some Smiley comment or word of advice to the students triggers Ned's memory of an episode in his own espionage career. For Le Carre, spy fiction's master architect, this is a surprisingly clunky device. Still, the individual tales, shrewdly varied in locale and tone, have all the storytelling finesse that Le Carre readers have come to expect. From Ned's early days at ''the Circus'' (British Intelligence) there are droll, rueful stories of misplaced zeal and lost innocence. He unintentionally betrays his best chum from training school, who's on the run after making a ghastly mistake during a mission to East Berlin. Some years later, while in Hamburg to oversee the nautical exploits of a band of volatile Latvian patriots, Ned discovers grand passion, but he soon suspects his Baltic bombshell (unfairly, as it turns out) of being a Soviet double agent. And the book's standout comic scene, set in Munich, explains how a useless Hungarian emigre conned both the Circus and the CIA into taking him seriously as a spy. Then, as Ned's reminiscences move into the 1970s, when his growing disillusionment stirred ''the slumbering subversive in me,'' the stories become grimmer. On a trip to the Mideast he's disturbed by the ravings of a ''bomb- shocked peace-seeker'' in Beirut, by the weirdly serene rhetoric of a gorgeous German terrorist in an Israeli prison. In Bangkok he meets a renegade British agent who's in a rage about the U.S. bombing of Cambodia but equally fed up with the Khmer Rouge. Finally, back in England in the 1980s, Ned is assigned the job of interrogating-and mercilessly exposing-pathetic Cyril Frewin, a Foreign Office cipher clerk driven to treason by sheer loneliness. What ties these and a half dozen other vignettes together? Certainly not plot: The threads of story line never hook up. Neither do the pieces of Ned's * character. His fragmentary memoir has none of the depth or psychological drama of Le Carre's A Perfect Spy (a similar, far better book), and you end up feeling next to nothing for him. All that truly connects the episodes here, in fact, is Le Carre's familiar theme: the meaninglessness of the Cold War, the futility of all the spying and killing and betraying. This time that theme, laid on with an uncharacteristically heavy hand, often seems tired. But, page by page, Le Carre remains enough of a dazzler-the scorching dialogue, the fascinating details, the wry and seductive narration-to make The Secret Pilgrim a richly diverting disappointment. B+

AN EXCERPT: SMILEY SUMS UP

I'll not bother you with the finer points of Smiley's introductory tour of the globe. He gave them the Middle East, which was obviously on his mind, and he explored the limits of colonial power in supposedly post-colonial times. He gave them the Third World and the Fourth World and posited a Fifth World, and pondered aloud whether human despair and poverty were the serious concern of any wealthy nation. He seemed pretty confident they weren't. He scoffed at the idea that spying was a dying profession now that the Cold War had ended: with each new nation that came out of the ice, he said, with each new alignment, each rediscovery of old identities and passions, with each erosion of the old status quo, the spies would be working round the clock. He spoke, I discovered afterwards, for twice the customary length, but I didn't hear a chair creak or a glass clink-not even when they dragged him to the library and sat him in the throne of honour before the fire for more of the same, more heresy, more subversion. My children, hardened cases all of them, in love with George! I didn't hear a sound beyond the confident flow of Smiley's voice and the eager burst of laughter at some unexpected self-irony or confession of failure. You're only old once, I thought, as I listened with them, sharing their excitement.

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