A Master Weaver at Work : THE TAILOR OF PANAMA.<i> By John le Carre (Alfred A. Knopf: $25, 340 pp.)</i>

Alpaca cloth, Mr. Harry Pendel tells us in the opening pages of John le Carre’s 16th novel, is the finest material extant for tropical-weight suits--”dyed in the thread, hence your . . . colour, hence your richness . . . pure, resilient, it breathes.”

Le Carre, then, has always spun the alpaca of espionage novels, stylish textured fictions of color, richness and purity. He is resilient, too, as any spy writer must be in these post-Cold War days.

But he isn’t any spy writer. He is the preeminent espionage writer of his generation--and inescapable as are the comparisons to Graham Greene and Eric Ambler, his elders and progenitors of the modern espionage thriller, so are they almost a disservice at this point in his career.

It is a point where the talents of mortal writers might reasonably be expected to ebb just a bit, but instead with “The Tailor of Panama,” le Carre has cut another masterpiece from the same bolt from whence came such classics as “The Spy Who Came In From the Cold,” “The Looking Glass War,” “The Little Drummer Girl” and “The Russia House.”

Mr. Pendel is the title character, a bubbling, extroverted snake-oil salesman whose most treasured asset is his “fluence,” his glib ability to convince anyone--his customers at his tailor’s shop, his devoted wife, even himself--of anything. His entire life, in fact, is a product of his fluence, a carefully woven cloth of deception.

His secrets, including a financial morass, and his self-inflated status as tailor to Panama’s elite, make Harry a ripe plum for Mr. Andrew Osnard, a back-channel British intelligence recruiter. In time-honored spymaster fashion, Osnard simultaneously destroys Pendel’s facade of security and offers him a way out of his self-made mess.

What follows is disaster, of course--at once satirical farce and horrifyingly believable. Pendel and Osnard are a fabulous pair of leading men in this drama, complex, exquisitely flawed and ultimately venal characters whose weaknesses each are compounded by the other’s.

Pushed by his self-importance and his greed for the bonuses Osnard dangles before him, Pendel plunges into his covert role with more enthusiasm than cleverness. Where his spying falters, his fluence takes over, and he tells Osnard exactly what he wants to hear.

With unconcealed contempt for what he terms the “espiocrats” of the intelligence world, those desk jockeys who operate far from the source of material, le Carre creates a twisted path of misinformation from Pendel through Osnard to the puppet-masters in Mayfair--”handy for the side entrance of Claridge’s, in a gated and guarded cul-de-sac with a lot of heavy hitters and diplomats and lobbyists.” Each step up the ladder, the truth becomes more ephemeral, the arrogance more overweening.

The silliness of Wormold in “Our Man in Havana” is muted by fearsome realism here, making the satire all the more effective. (Such comparisons to Greene are indeed inevitable--and even perhaps subtly solicited; the publisher’s blurb refers to “The Tailor of Panama” as an “entertainment,” Greene’s favored description for his thrillers and espionage novels.)

But the way this work resonates most eerily with Greene’s is in le Carre’s prodigious, detailed rendering of the complex Panamanian political landscape, pre- and post-Manuel Noriega. It is most reminiscent of Greene’s masterful portraits of Haiti and Paraguay. “The Tailor of Panama” reads like the master work of a novelist who had studied--nay, lived--the intricacies of Panama all his life. But David Cornwell, who writes pseudonymously as John le Carre, is merely a meticulous, intuitive researcher. This book is all the more impressive, somehow, because it was written from the outside in.

The death of illusion is a le Carre hallmark, a la “The Little Drummer Girl,” and he takes an almost sadistic pleasure in removing the blinkers from all of his characters’ eyes here: For example, as Pendel’s wife, Louisa, witnesses his self-destruction she turns from a prim socially adept helpmate into an angry drunken adulteress bent on revenge and the infliction of pain upon the man she loves.

Somehow in all this grim gray alpaca, le Carre weaves in a riotous stripe of humor. Some of the most stark scenes are calculated to amuse--Pendel fitting the president of Panama in the palace; the avuncular British ambassador getting his instructions from the espiocrats on financing a coup d’etat with gold bars; Louisa, looped on vodka, cantering about town in a see-through nightie.

Indeed, the supporting players are all finely drawn, their motivations interlocking nicely, evoking logical responses without being stereotypical--a tall order for any novelist and one not often filled, even by some of the best.

Speaking of tall orders, le Carre manages, as usual, to convey detail and complexity without sacrificing suspense. There is something of chaos theory here, of the way things happen in real life, follies and weaknesses magnified by coincidence into a reality far more menacing than the sum of its parts. In that sense, it is a very moral book; there is a little of Harry Pendel, a little of Andrew Osnard, in almost everyone. “The Tailor of Panama” is a riveting novel that reveals much to us about what happens when men are trapped into betrayal by their own fear and greed.

Graham Greene would have loved it.

“The Tailor of Panama” is also available, abridged, on four audiocassettes from Random House for $25.95.