In a small town in Germany

So what did you do for German Unity Day on Saturday? Eat, drink, walk, talk, sing, dance, sleep? I read a book. Actually, I re-read it. John le Carré wrote A Small Town in Germany in 1968 and I first read it some 20 years ago. It's one of his finest thrillers, and it is very useful for understanding how some people feel about what we now call "Europe".

The action takes place in the late 1960s. Britain is bankrupt and desperately wants to join what was then called the Common Market and which has since become the European Union. The French don't want the British to be members of the club, so Germany's attitude is critical. But there are two big problems:

1. A new German political movement made up of left-wing students and nationalist middle-class types, led by a sinister scientist, who hates the British and wants closer ties with Moscow, is growing in power. "The Road West has failed. Let us open the Road East" is its slogan.

2. A top British diplomat has disappeared from the then West German capital, Bonn, with a bag of secret documents.

Along with being an ingenious thriller, A Small Town in Germany is a very political book in that it compares the glory of Britain's Second World War victory with the demoralization that followed shortly after. By the mid-60s, Britain is so weak that it feels it has to join the Common Market, but the British elite, brilliantly portrayed by le Carré, who once worked in Her Majesty's embassy in Bonn, are not very enthusiastic about the idea. In their bones, they feel that German reunification will come someday, and with it a change in European direction that might not be in their interest.

I read A Small Town in Germany on the day after the people of Ireland had been asked to say "yes" to the Lisbon Treaty, and I read it on the eve of the Conservative Party's conference in Manchester, where the topic of Europe threatens to divide the party once again.

"Perhaps our relations with Europe would actually improve if we stopped pretending to be Europeans," wrote William Rees Mogg in The Times yesterday. It sounds very like what some of the characters in A Small Town in Germany were saying 40 years ago.