IN between his more serious novels, Graham Greene liked to write what he called "entertainments", books that were lighter in tone and in some ways were almost pastiches of his mainstream fictions. One such is his Our Man in Havana, in which a rather timid salesman is taken for a spy, gets to like the misapprehension and begins fabricating information to send back to headquarters.

Now le Carre - long since raised into the pantheon of authors who go only by their surnames - has come up with a somewhat similar plot device, his man being the eponymous tailor dwelling in the eponymous Panama. Harry Pen del by name, he is one half of Pendel & Braithwaite Co., Limitada, Tailors to Royalty, formerly of Saville Row, London and presently of the Via Fspana, Panama City.

Married to American Louise, with a daughter, Hannah, and a son, Mark, Harry is all effusiveness and wishgoplease on the surface, but things are not all they seem. In fact, our protagonist is living a lie: instead of being a poor Cockney who was taken in and nurtured by master tailor Braithwaite a figment of Harry's imagination - Harry is, in fact, an ex con, who learned his tailoring in prison.

Allied to this shady past is the present circumstance of a rice firm, bought with his wife's money, the water to which has been cut off by an on the make land speculator. Obvious, then, that Harry is tertite ground - unlike the rice farm - for a British spook called Osnard to hoe when he takes it into his head to sign up an informant.

Osnard - picture Orson Welles in The Third Man - is only one in a long line of le Carre's charming if somewhat seedy villains, although I feel he makes a mistake in filling in his background; much better to have furnished him with an elaborate facade for a life to fit in with the general air of myth making that develops when Harry begins concocting his web of conspiracy and deceit.

And of course the environment is ideally suited to such machinations: "Rainbow washing appears amid the darkness of the rickety tenements of the narrow streets he must negotiate. The faces on the pavement are African, Indian, Chinese and every mixture in between."

The fact that the canal, one of the world's great trade passageways, is to be turned over to an inept Panamanian government in 1999 is a sore that itches a number of the great powers. How the Americans, the Japanese, the British would love to get their hands on it.

To satisfy Osnard, Harry constructs an imaginary opposition, led by his suicidal friend Mickie Abraxas, whose credentials are right because of his imprisonment and torture by the former Noriega government. As his second in command, Harry gives him his own platonic mistress and helper in the tailoring business, the disfigured yet oddly beautiful Marta.

As my dear mother used say, laughing eventually turns to crying, and in the end Harry is hoist by his own petard, the imaginary becomes virtual reality, the gunships fly in and the poor and the young become the usual cannon fodder. Moral: don't stick your hand in the beehive and not expect to be stung.

The Tailor of Panama is an unusual book for le Carre, in that it mocks and makes fun of many of the themes he has dealt with in former fictions. And the jokey tone sits uneasily at times - strange to have the creator of Smiley making the following observation about a man about town: ". . . the gossip said he had given up underpants in order to improve his time and motion ratio."

However, I found the book a jolly romp, and in among the general carry on there are a number of acute observations on the art of collusion and intrigue as it is practised by the intelligence units of various countries. And the implication that quite a few of the moles and schemers who yearn for the good old times of the Cold War are still active is very well sustained. As easy as ever, it seems, to make a sow's ear out of a silk purse.