[Le Carré's] new novel, which marks a sharp break away from the tortured world of George Smiley and his colleagues at the Circus, springs from the author's complete immersion in the stream of Middle-East terror and counterterror. They spill out into many of the European cities to which the action of The Little Drummer Girl takes us. Le Carré entered that grim world looking for a fresh plot for Smiley, but he soon discovered that the locale demands a cast of entirely new characters. So he has given us Kurtz, Litwak, Ned Quilley, Tayeh, Salim, Khalil, the indomitable Joseph whose real name is Gadi Becker, together with a troop of subsidiary people, each drawn so as to be sharply remembered. Then, of course, there is Charmian, the girl, the drummer girl, known as "Charlie," or "Chas," or often "Charlie the Red," in deference to the color of her hair and her somewhat crazy radical stances.

Top Israeli intelligence people choose Charlie, a bright young actress from the stages of provincial England, to be their at first unwilling, then fully consenting, collaborator. This is where, for long pages of flawless tradecraft and endless attention to detail, our renowned author leads us through the thickets of an Israeli plan to ensnare and eliminate the most feared and elusive of Palestinian terrorists. As Kurtz, grizzled espionage genius who sets the plot in motion for the Israelis, explains with his "pirate's grin": "You want to catch the lion, first you tether the goat."

Frankly, it is here, where Charlie is inveigled into taking the goat's role in what her Israeli kidnappers and mentors keep telling her is a "theatre of the real," that credibility becomes definitely strained. Even this long-addicted reader of Mr. le Carré had to struggle over immense stretches of dreamlike narration, to maintain some measure of willing suspension of disbelief. To his great credit, the author won out, but it was a triumph of his writing over the implausibilities and arabesques of plot.

"Dreamlike" seems, on reflection, the best way to denominate the quality of that writing. The author has this confident, idiosyncratic way of moving from scene to scene with no sign of noting the sharp turns and yawning interstices that might, in a less fantastic setting, call for a few words of explanation. But that's the way dreams behave, don't they?

Let no one fail to see, however, that le Carré has added another worldful of unforgettable characters to the treasury of his literary imagination. But even more significant—at least, so it seems to one reader—is the powerful and assured way he has taken hold of the dilemmas faced by Israel in this dolorous year after the fateful 1982 incursion into Lebanon.

At the very end of this novel, Gadi Becker, alias Joseph, speaks out of his deep sorrow to an uncomprending Israeli official. Gadi asks a question, "a most offensive question," a question he claims he has culled from the writings of the late Arthur Koestler. "What are we to become, I wonder? A Jewish homeland or an ugly little Spartan state?" (pp. 264-66)