Le Carry's Middle East (a review)
Rosenberg, Joel
LE CARRE'S MIDDLE EAST A REVIEW JOEL ROSENBERG The Little Drummer Girl by John Le Carri. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1983. $15.95. John Le Carry's "Smiley" novels, the best-known of which is...
...Our doctors would not give up their smart clinics, the lawyers their corrupt practices, our academics their comfortable universities...
...Tayeh, my friend, we Palestinians are very lazy people in our exile...
...One thinks of analogous works by Le Carry's compatriots in the genre—Marathon Man, Black Sunday, The Boys from Brazil: Let the Jew and the antijew have at each other in mortal combat on a world stage...
...Is it because of this that we have to use bombs and machine guns?' . . . "You know what we should do...
...She calls him Joseph because he reminds her of the biblical Joseph, Joel Rosenberg teaches Hebrew literature at Tufts University...
...another named Joseph...
...Planes...
...Israel, moreover, is shown, quite accurately, as a country internally divided on the Arab question, whereas the Palestinians, for all their denials of anti-Semitism, are shown—erroneously—as wholly united on the Zionist question...
...the fanaticism and ruthlessness of the terrorists are not denied...
...Why are we without enterprise...
...But it is Charlie, in fact, who is to star, Kurtz to produce and Joseph to direct...
...Kurtz is old-world in language and manner...
...Yet I'm inclined to think that Le Carry's novel is not the plea for the Palestinians it's been cracked up to be...
...The most damning words in the book, at any rate, are spoken by Khalil against his own people, even as Le Carrd allows him to serve as mouthpiece for a particularly nasty and pernicious version of the myth of Jewish power: "You know what I told to Tayeh once...
...But it is precisely here that Le Carrd abandons his sense of the conflict as one of tragic dimensions in favor of a view of it as farce, here that he seems to retreat from the cause of "the silent Palestinian" in favor of a pox-on-both-your-houses kind of cynicism that is, in some sense, endemic to the thriller...
...Only Joseph, her chief mentor and protector, entertains doubts, and, as the novel proceeds, this otherwise precision instrument is seen to nurse what James Joyce called the "agenbite of inwit": the fierce gnawings of conscience and pangs of hesitation that seem somehow connected to the fact that his family life and business career have been on the slide for some time...
...The West, after all, is not Charlie, Israel is not Kurtz nor Joseph, and Palestine, at least so far, simply is not...
...Kurtz treats Charlie with impeccable courtesy and fatherly solicitousness...
...But, whopping good tale that it is, The Little Drummer Girl is pulp comics and melodramatic folderol...
...If anything, he winds up being terribly patronizing toward Palestinians, who appear in this book as an absurdly romantic and nihilistic lot, reminiscent of the Polish nationalists and Russian anarchists on whom Joseph Conrad once cast his baleful eye...
...The analogy is curiously inverse: Here, Kurtz invents Joseph, rather than the reverse...
...The Conrad connection has been noted by reviewers of Drummer Girl—a character named Kurtz...
...Paul Alexis, whom he meets periodically for lunch and hushed gossip, contrary to the express order of the Rook...
...Kurtz's mission, whatever combatant blood is shed, is to save lives...
...He turns out, in fact, to be Israeli, a war hero, whose real name (unknown to Charlie throughout the novel) is Gadi Becker—the last name being "the German version of the Hebrew version of his German family name...
...As long as the myth of two separate and bitterly irreconcilable peoples is perpetuated in fiction and the media, the world will fail to see clearly the interdependence of Jew and Arab, and the growing constituency at the juncture of three continents whose common need for peace, compromise and coexistence is, like Le Carre's eclipsed and despairing Palestinian, still struggling to be heard...
...Once she is recruited, Charlie and Joseph rehearse every moment of her nonexistent affair with Michel: the flowers he had sent to her stage dressing room during a tour of Shaw's Saint Joan, the expensive gold bracelet that she switches from hand to hand, the sheets of their passion, strewn across a variety of nighttime lodgings, the lobster they ate in their room at a hotel in Salzburg, the gun he made her swear by with a kiss on its barrel, the awkward target practice he made her perform, and the unpredictable, painful absences, and their steamy love letters, swearing unity in the revolution of the Palestinian displaced against the Zionist usurper...
...With such abstract and starkly emblematic characters, Le Carre' is obviously "saying" something, and that something would appear to be akin to the views he has expressed in recent editorials against the Israeli invasion of Lebanon—the invasion, in fact, is alluded to in the last pages of the novel...
...The little drummer girl, in all her vulnerability and credulous-ness, enacts, one presumes, "the West...
...From the United States, from Australia, Paris, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon—from everywhere in the world where there are Palestinians...
...Le Carre's eye for the portentous word or gesture, for a claustrophobic ambience, for institutional contradiction and historical moment, places him among the best and most serious of English writers, and within a tradition of storytellers preoccupied with the intersection of private morality and affairs of state...
...Kurtz knows she will not pass up the greatest role of her acting career, and Charlie, in turn, knows that she can't resist Joseph/ Michel/Khalil as they take turns running her life...
...He grudgingly approves funds, and struggles to keep the more bellicose elements in his country's government at bay, while Kurtz must repeatedly short-leash a Maccabean hothead of his own, his young aide Shimon Litvak, whom Charlie knows as "Mike...
...They would never come...
...The three men merge in her mind into one, whom we might, in a more allegorical vein, dub "the Middle East...
...This scheme is called, once too often in this book, "the theatre of the real," a bizarre but minutely-planned decoy set for the hidden brains behind the bombings, Michel/Selim's brother Khalil...
...What she doesn't know is that Joseph has had his eye on her for some time, even before her stay in Mykonos...
...We live through her protean and egoless exchanges of names and masks, which she endures by assigning domesticating nicknames to her various exploiters (Jose, Babs, Helg, Marty), and by a blindered fixation on her own creature discomforts: hunger, horniness, nausea, urgings of the bladder, tension headaches, fatigue...
...and wields a network of terrorists reaching into Germany's and Italy's Red underground, which includes a number of distinguished and well-placed fronters...
...It can't be taken seriously as a portrait of the problems in the Mideast...
...Why are we not making Hollywood movies about our great struggle, getting ourselves elected Mayor of New York, head of the Supreme Court...
...Meanwhile, the Palestinians (all the Palestinians, one is led to think) and their desperado allies are outmaneuvered and bamboozled by Kurtz's deft scam, their operatives picked off in a succession of elegantly surgical kills, whose exquisitely choreographed timing inevitably comes to seem like overkill...
...Millions of us...
...You know why not...
...What is wrong with us, Tayeh...
...Kurtz will lure out Khalil by painstakingly grafting Charlie into the life of the absent Michel, and by following her drifting movements among her terrorist hosts...
...Kurtz has problems of his own...
...His fiction, at its best (as it is, in places, in this novel), is not editorial...
...Charlie, short for Charmian, no last name, a young English stage actress of vaguely leftish leanings, bohemian lifestyle and libertine habits, meets Joseph on a summertime beach in Mykonos, and is immediately drawn to his thin, hard, scarred Levantine body and his ascetic temperament...
...Kurtz skillfully deflects those who want to remove the kid gloves against pre-1982 Beirut by planning a different use of the kid: "To uncover the lion, you must first tether the goat," he is fond of saying...
...Why do we have no Palestinians in the Pentagon...
...The Palestinian Arab Khalil is friend of no one...
...Charlie is apprised of the purpose of this labyrinthine pretense by Kurtz, also known as Schulmann, and sometimes as Gold, the Israeli intelligence field chief, who assumes identities and names the way Charlie assumes stage roles...
...Why are we not yet running the New York Times, Wall Street, the CIA...
...Curiously, his concession that the majority of his well-heeled brethren would not abandon their perks and pillows forthe more spartan rigors of their beloved homeland is the identical complaint often registered by Israelis toward American Jews...
...Our rich would not be able to sustain their social-economic drop in life-style...
...These words are part of a lengthy monologue addressed to Charlie as she dutifully assists him in assembling one of his homemade bombs...
...Then all together, we march into our homeland, we claim our houses and our farms and our villages, even if we have to knock down their towns and settlements and kibbutzim in order to find them...
...His essays and poetry have appeared frequently in these pages...
...But it is precisely here that Le Carry's true reservations about Israel rest: the Israelis' most damning traits are their successes, their cunning, their apparent invincibility, their airtight case...
...With The Little Drummer Girl, Le Carre continues this preoccupation, but he returns us to an earlier mode of his, somewhat wistfully missed by some readers, myself included, since The Spy Who Came in from the Cold: the pop thriller, the ballet of cloak-and-dagger, of uncanny disguise and multiple reversal, told mostly from the point of view of the agent—or agent's agent— in the field...
...But he behaves toward her with such maddening nonchalance, unflappable correctness and respectful unobtru-siveness that she can't resist him...
...El Khalil means "the friend" in Arabic, and alludes to the biblical Abraham, Hebron's most illustrious settler, who was known by the Arabs as the friend of God...
...He comes bearing a curious mock-Arab scenario: one in which he will stand as temporary surrogate for a Palestinian lover Charlie has never known, a boy named Selim or Michel, who, prior to his kidnapping by Joseph's teammates, had recruited his young women bed companions to transport his homemade bombs and place them against Jewish targets in Bad Godesburg, Ley den and Zurich...
...Le Carre has described himself as a longtime sympathizer with Israel who has been led in recent years to a deeper understanding of at least the partial justice of the Palestinian cause—or, to use a name he coins for the radical Palestinian splinter group that claims responsibility for the Bad Godesburg bombing, "the Agony of Palestine...
...covers his movements by an elaborate system of decoys...
...After 35 years, he is still uncomfortable talking Hebrew, and his favorite companion throughout the book is his comparably courtly and melancholy German counterpart Dr...
...The latter is named for the West Bank town of El-Khalil, which Israelis and Westerners call Hebron...
...March...
...With so much in hand, they more or less confidently and systematically jeopardize the privacy, human rights and bodily safety of their debauched innocent, who takes her cues from them with a sullen and conflicted obedience...
...All of us...
...We take ships to the borders...
...The mood in Jerusalem grows increasingly acidic...
...It wouldn't work...
...His own chief, Mischa Gavron (whose last name means "rook" in Hebrew), is becoming restless about the operation...
...Before they destroy us for ever...
...In the State Department...
...and Kurtz and Joseph arouse admiration, if only for the daring and brilliance of their groundwork and the reassuring ubiquity of their monitoring...
...Our merchants would not leave their banks and shops and offices...
...The lore of Palestinian oppression and the lore of improvised explosives twine and mingle as if inevitable bedfellows, yet Khalil envisages the unattainable ultimate weapon to resemble an act of Ghandian resolve...
...But Le Carre's Kurtz, like Conrad's, is an "excellent man," who, in the end, if the analogy holds, speaks and acts from the heart of darkness...
...but a reader attuned to Le Carre flip-flops anticipates for him an Arab identity...
...Maybe (especially in Le Carry's work) we'll leam something about ourselves in the process...
...He never sleeps twice in the same location...
...Traces of Le Carry's more recent position surface here and there in the novel (when Litvak proposes a massive roadblock and dragnet around Freiburg to trap Khalil, Kurtz tells him with avuncular patience: "Shimon, Freiburg is not the West Bank"), but in general Le Carr6 goes out of his way to stack the deck in seeming favor of Israel: the horror and arbitrariness of Arab terrorism are judiciously noted...
...As does Le Carry's "admiration" of the Israelis...
...As for Charlie, she is as moldable and as placeable as the explosive plastics she transports "for Michel" (in more ways than one) from Greece part-way toward Munich...
...It's grand spectacle for our demoralized Roman tastes, and rich in apocalyptic foreboding...
...Still, this sabra has the bullets and idioms of the Arab burned into his flesh and words...
...Like a great tide which nobody can turn back...
...John Le Carry's "Smiley" novels, the best-known of which is Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, have shown him to be a master of a kind of bureaucratic baroque, a superb orchestrator of opaque, elliptical conversations and murky shenanigans at high echelons of the national security sectors of Her Majesty's government...
...There is no contest between her juvenile and intellectually benighted companions and this quiet young man of smoldering good looks who sits all day on the beach with his water bottle, monkishly reading a book by Regis Debray...
...Le Carry's fascination with mirrors, doubles and secret sharers is nowhere better expressed than in this pinpointing of the dirty little secret shared by the two diasporas...
Vol. 8 • July 1984 • No. 7
