The Secret Sharers
With The Little Drummer Girl, John le Carré has thrown off his winter cloak and let his limbs flex. Unlike the Smiley novels, which have a burrowing, circumspect determination, The Little Drummer Girl doesn't read as if it were written with mittens. The book feels as if it were dashed off with the zealous haste of a reporter filing for a deadline. Once the dread Karla had been flushed from his lair like a sick, shivering animal at the close of Smiley's People …, le Carré must have sensed it was time to strike down the tents of the Circus and push on to a larger, more turbulent arena—the Middle East.
Yet this novel is far from a severe break from le Carré's previous preoccupations…. With its secret sharers and frequent stresses on terrorism as the theater of the real, The Little Drummer Girl is a rugged elaboration on that moment when Smiley and Karla met as mirrors. Newsy as the novel is, it's also le Carré's go at writing a meditative adventure saga in the tradition of Joseph Conrad, and it's hardly a fluke that one of the characters here is named Joseph; another, Kurtz. A concealed bomb is this book's heart of darkness.
Not that le Carré succumbs to Conradian mystifications. The Little Drummer Girl is very bold colored, very pop; it pares away the brooding ruminations of a Conrad adventure to reach instead the sinews of heroic romance….
Like all of le Carré's novels, The Little Drummer Girl abounds in well-choreographed set pieces; a description of a bomb explosion knocking flowers out of vases, and vases against the wall; an account of how the bearings of a prisoner are psychologically stripped by Israeli intelligence through the use of time distortion, white light, forged documents, and sound effects (screams, gunfire, chain rattles, even the forlorn tootle of funeral bagpipes); a tour of a Palestinian guerrilla camp, where the stone battlements suggest a set for a remake of Beau Geste and the figures for target practice are "brutish man-sized effigies of American marines, with painted grimaces and fixed bayonets…." But the gut of the novel is the recruitment, auditioning, and rehearsing of Charlie in her new role as counterinsurgent lure—the applying of her blinkers. And it takes an awfully long time to get a secure fit. (p. 19)
For all its waywardness, The Little Drummer Girl carries an exhilaration because it's le Carré's firmest and most searching exploration of the dynamics of need, and how neediness is used, perverted. Love of his daughter toppled Karla, and love here is betrayal and submission, crippler and crutch. And the absence of love, le Carré seems to be saying in the novel's fade, is not hate but exhaustion. I'm dead, I'm dead. As in the best Smiley novels, le Carré poeticizes exhaustion in The Little Drummer Girl, and leaves you feeling that there are embers in the ashes of fatigue which will spark new obsessions, new betrayals. Hungry for reckoning, his burnt-out cases never find true rest. (p. 21)
James Wolcott, "The Secret Sharers," in The New York Review of Books (reprinted with permission from The New York Review of Books; copyright © 1983 Nyrev, Inc.), Vol. XXX, No. 6, April 14, 1983, pp. 19-21.
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