It’s a tumultuous decade or so since The Night Manager burst onto our television screens and a while longer since the novel appeared with the slightly odd quality of seeming to evoke some near future (though nothing quite like the magnificently realised TV screener which took the book as its pretext and performed wonders). Le Carré works towards the condition of dramatisation. That’s why Martin Ritt’s 1965 film of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold with Richard Burton as Leamus, Claire Bloom as his companion-in-arms and Oskar Werner as the Jewish East German intelligence man is a marvel. Le Carré was onto Smiley’s People when he realised that Sir Alec’s persona and personality were shaping the characterisation. Smiley is the apotheosis of Guinness who Peter Sellers sent up as Sir Eric Goodness and George Lucas made into the knightly Obi Wan Kenobi. All this is a far cry from his Fagin for David Lean or his mad colonel in Bridge On the River Kwai.

Le Carré delights in how the actor translates and transfigures the character. He has a few kindly words to say about Gary Oldman in the remake of Tinker, Tailor but you can tell that Guinness was the moment when he took the hand of the ghost of his creation. You can tell too when he dislikes his interpreters. He sends Guinness an appalled note about the very well done A Perfect Spy with T.P. McKenna as the father – it’s as if anyone short of Laurence Olivier won’t satisfy him.

You also get this process in reverse with the lead essay in The Pigeon Tunnel in which he usurps any potential biographers like the very fine but discreet Adam Sisman.

But David Cornwell was a master interpreter of the shadow of himself and in his latter days he would stare down the gaze in the mirror and say to his interviewer that people considered him disingenuous.

But the television Night Manager dazzled and satiated him. The story of the gun-running gentleman-gangster Richard Roper played by Hugh Laurie was a magnificent piece of malevolence and le Carré was absolutely captivated by the dragon of dissipated Englishness that had been created from his novelistic outline. He is set against the honourable secret servant Tom Hiddleston (then at the height of his Marvel allure) and there is a magnificent barrel of Dickensian wickedness from the counterpointing figure of Tom Hollander, not to mention the dazzling presence of Elizabeth Debicki and the sane salty warmth of Olivia Colman.

John le Carré was the friend of Philippe Sands, the human rights lawyer who in 38 Londres Street juxtaposes Pinochet (whom various parties want to extradite) with a one-time Nazi stalking Chile. With the original Night Manager, le Carré had the extraordinary dream adaptation where every jot and tittle was compatible with the story he sketched into being but made his trashmeister franchise look – as it always had at its dramatised best – Shakespearean in its ambit, its intensity and sense of colour and creepiness.

Much of this works so superbly in The Night Manager because David Farr the theatre director and sometime script writer of Spooks did such a brilliant job of elaborating and re-inventing the storyline of The Night Manager. And it is a tremendous asset to Season 3 (and presumably 4 and 5) that David Farr is continuing to write The Night Manager because he is an adaptor of genius. His representation of villainy never loses a human face and Hugh Laurie never loses his mesmerising charm.

Consider the first half of the new series. Tom Hiddleston is there, impeccably correct as a camouflaged gent in a gun-running Colombian setting, his face lined as befits someone who’s been at this game for the longest time and must now be kicking 50. On the sidelines there are shadows of iniquity. Indira Varma has been playing Lady Macbeth to Ralph Fiennes’ Thane and we start to wonder what failure and success would mean to her MI6 chief. We wonder with all these characters. There’s Douglas Hodge, immense in his Britishness – is he dodgy? What about the bald opera-loving guy who’s disappointed by the ‘Figaro’ at the Garden: is this meant to indicate he’s gay? Then there’s the extraordinarily attractive Colombian girl (Camilla Morrone), sensuously beautiful to the point of seeming a radiant source of the very fluid of life.

At one point we see Tom Hiddleston doing it with her standing up, both unable to stop themselves. Is she – as she suggests – a figure beyond good and evil? And what are we to make of Teddy (Diego Calva), the son of the gentleman gun-runner Roper, with his ambiguous sexuality and who engages in self-harm. He feels the strongest kind of pull towards Hiddleston and he provides an access of turbulent male beauty as well as the ache of fealty to his dead dad Hugh Laurie and is imprisoned in the deathliness which encircles him.

This is the domain of the spoiler alert but people attracted to The Night Manager are likely to have gulped down the initial three episodes and will now be into the one episode a week feed.

We hear the immemorial voice as it sings in flawless Gilbert and Sullivan-style that lunatic song from HMS Pinafore ‘For he is an Englishman… but in spite of all temptations to belong to other nations’. It’s magnificently done and the re-animated ghost of Hugh Laurie gives the new season of The Night Manager a tremendous histrionic authority. We see him with one of his cronies, Alistair Petrie, as Lord Langbourne, Roper’s financial backer, familiar from the first series.

He is plainly evil but the cloak of iniquity is done with absolute understated style. Roper offers Hiddleston 50 million dollars to go away and performs his every move like a great master on a deadly chess board. It is, like the first season, a breathtaking piece of television. Teddy’s heart belongs to daddy but we know – as Hiddleston does – that there is a boy at boarding school in England who is the one object of Laurie’s love.

Everything becomes slippery and absolutely unpredictable. The last twist is terrible and we gasp at the human cost. The new season of The Night Manager is superbly directed by Georgi Banks-Davies and it is superbly paced at the sharp edge of being humanly credible.