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John le Carré

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[In The Little Drummer Girl] Le Carré has moved right away from Smiley-land to the Middle East, from the Cold War to the passions of the Israeli-Arab conflict, from national security to national hate. Smiley himself is no great miss, still less his tiresome wife. The fascination of the Smiley books lay increasingly in what he did rather than what it did to him, and in Smiley's People we were given a splendid gala performance by the espionage circus, a sort of celebratory perhaps even valedictory climax to a life of deception and make-believe. The skill was breathtaking but you didn't lie awake afterwards wondering what the performers did when they went home. We'd come a long way from the focal humanity of The Spy Who Came In From The Cold.

Now in The Little Drummer Girl the human dimension tops the bill once more, though happily not at the expense of those special effects, those shifts of shade and light, those transformation scenes, those trompe l'oeil backcloths, those gods out of machines, which make Le Carré's stagings of the drama of subversion so memorable. The theatrical metaphor is apt. The little drummer girl herself is an actress called Charlie. Why not? Karla, after all, was a chap. Names are where we start to know each other and in Le Carré's world, knowledge is the beginning of deceit. Who else would have called a constitutional melancholic Smiley? And the Smiley-figure here, the puppet-master, the planner, the director, the producer, but more skilful than Smiley, thinking bigger, moving further afield and faster, who spots, auditions and casts Charlie, is an Israeli first appearing as Schulmann whose real name is Kurtz, "though he used it so seldom, he might have been forgiven if one day he forgot it altogether."

Charlie is also known as 'Charlie the Red', not just for the colour of her hair. It is her unfocussed but passionately held radical beliefs that make her perfect for the part Kurtz has in mind. On the firm foundation of her known and documented sympathies with the Palestinian cause (as with every other antiestablishment capitalist/bourgeois/reactionary/Fascist cause) he can build for her an activist role which will eventually lead to a billing with Khalil, the superstar of Arab terrorism. But Charlie must accept the part willingly. It is a role too complex and too demanding to be maintained by someone simply coerced into it by threat, blackmail or bribery. It requires a twofold commitment which may tear her in half. For her to agree to it, she must be made to feel like an Israeli; for her to succeed in doing it, she must be made to feel like a Palestinian. And for the novel to succeed as a work of art, the reader must be persuaded that this is possible.

Le Carré does not belong to the with-one-mighty-leap school. He glosses over nothing in the long slow process of persuasion and preparation. And in the end we are thoroughly convinced.

Reginald Hill, "Buy It," in Books and Bookmen (© copyright Brevet Publishing Ltd. 1983; reprinted with permission of the publisher), No. 331, April, 1983, p. 30.

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