Espionage After George Smiley

...The possible feminist thesis differs from that of our young revolutionaries in the '60s who blamed the world's disastrous state on the elder generation, in that the contrivers of le Carre's unforgivable deeds are all very specifically men...

...The biggest part you ever had in your life," she is told, "the most demanding, the most difficult, surely the most dangerous, and surely the most important...

...They behave like small boys who have been given license for their natural outlawry, who have been able to refine their clubhouse clannishness to adult sycophancy and treachery, and who have gleeful access to grown-up technology...

...She begins to understand that this is "the theater of the real" when Kurtz, Irgun veteran and chief of the mission, goes on: "Charlie, there are people out there who will never get to watch the play, never know it's running, yet who will owe you for as long as they live...

...He muses that they could not know "they were speaking into the void of his own soul...

...She must report him, naturally, for counterrevolutionary beliefs...

...That is vintage le Carre...

...Le Carre is a good writer, sometimes extraordinary, but he occasionally lets sentimentality break through...

...In any case, with The Little Drummer Girl le Carre might seem to weaken the feminist position by making a female character important for the first time...

...Engaging, almost believable, Charlie is at the very center of the stage-appropriately, for she is an actress...

...In fact, one long scene at the beginning of her "audition" is specifically devoted to making her expose all her half-digested, jargon-filled views so that they can be analyzed with patient male superiority, then eliminated and replaced...

...Le Carry's new plot is as intricately fashioned as any fan could ask, with tension built securely into its structure...

...Reviewed by Hope Hale Davis Author, "The Dark Way to the Plaza" A feminist reading John le Carre's spy stories might reasonably conclude: "If that's how things are, the world has been run by men too long...

...Innocent people...

...In that novel a landscape "was like a bad watercolor, the dark things drawn too heavy, the sky gray and soiled in the dusk, the paint too worked...

...Those poor sods you shot up on the West Bank...

...Note, though, that she is acting under the direction of men, that she is totally dominated by means of emotional involvement...

...In his spy stories it showed itself in his description of male bonding, in the use of love for recruiting and for winning loyalty...

...Or the ones you bomb in Lebanon...

...George Smiley, the dim, shy, "incongruous" British secret agent, sadly convinced us that covert illegal operations were carried on by every country, involving and corrupting many human beings, and that the most respectable men were performing unspeakable acts...

...Another question Charlie asks at her indoctrination complements the first: "Who needs to die...

...But in general the mood and style of Drummer Girl are new...

...In fact, it astounds with more than the usual awesome number of le Carrel details...

...The proof of le Carre's credibility is the serious attention he is given as a novelist...

...Smiley's thoughts express the heavy spirit of the whole series: "There were times when he confronted his own image as a man confronts an empty valley, and the vision propelled him forward again to experience, as despair compels us to extinction...

...I'll tell you: It is whatever you can still betray...

...This is done well, and may be educational for some of the post-'60s remnant Leftists...

...For this opening up of a difficult, momentous quandary, making it real as only fiction, paradoxically, can manage, even feminists will have to forgive le Carre his heroine's lack of autonomy and join in the general gratitude...

...In everything that follows from here on, you have to keep that notion before you in your head, or you will lose us and you will lose yourself, no question...

...When Charlie is undergoing commando training in adesertPLO camp, she meets an American Vietnam veteran who has drifted there and stayed too long...

...He is reviewed by critics on the level of V.S...

...Pritchett and Malcolm Muggeridge, who are allotted 1,700 words in the New York Times Book Review...

...If they are, then something must be done...

...Lawrence, is one of many that celebrate the irresistible attractions of the male form...

...Thousands of people suddenly began to believe that this is indeed how things are when they read The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, back in the mid-'60s...

...She is encountered here as part of a ragtag theatrical troupe of pseudorevolutionaries resting between engagements on a Greek island beach...

...When Charlie finally goes to bed with her Svengali, "He laughed and, rolling away from her, moved back the electric fire...

...One character says to another, "Do you know what love is...

...The plot of Drummer Girl is more than just a plot...

...The ones you've always cared about, tried to speak for, march for, help...

...Le Carre seems to have given his usual care in research to studying the current generation with first-hand affection...

...And in all her loving she had never seen anything as beautiful as his body stooped over the red glow, the fire brightest where his own body burned...

...He is desperate enough to confide his doubts: "I kind of forgot the reasoning about how every dead baby is a step toward world peace...

...The problem with the feminist reaction is that it raises the question of whether female power would make things better...

...Certainly almost any woman I know would reject out of hand the le Carre kind of scheming as too riskily complex, with too many details that could go wrong-and even if successful, likely to do more harm than good...

...If his books are not based on fact, he is guilty of deceptively damaging public morale...

...Of course, she is easy to answer...

...In Drummer Girl, like other authors who provide the obligatory sexual encounters demanded by the trade, le Carrecan beembarrassing...

...Because of the striking abilities they see in her, a group of Israeli secret operatives on the hunt for the leader of a PLO terrorist gang seduces Charlie into playing a role for them...

...Le Carre expressed his worries about this as early as 1962 in his second novel, A Murder of Quality (concerned with the death of a faculty wife at a snobbish English public school), when he stated directly: "It was a peculiarity of Smil-ey's character that throughout the whole of his clandestine work he had never managed to reconcile the means to the end...

...Le Carre even has his hero (love of whom holds Charlie in thrall) make a nostalgic visit to his old kibbutz, where he is questioned about Israel's present actions by idealistic comrades from his youth...

...Charlie is obviously developed from Angie, the "foul-mouthed goddess," secretary and night-time charmer to Al-do Cassidy in le Carre's only non-thriller, The Naive and Sentimental Lover...

...it is a brilliant, ingenious metaphor for the ambivalence and conflicts that le Carre, and all thoughtful people, are at present feeling about the Israel-Palestine problem and the violence exploding from it everywhere...

...Her ideas, such as they are, like those few given by le Carre to earlier female characters, are shown as absurd...

...Without the consistent comedy of The Naive and Sentimental Lover that dismayed some critics and delighted others, there is a crispness and wit about the language that was lacking in, say, The Looking Glass War...

...In this book, more than in previous ones, he lets his characters come out with his own feelings...

...In the course of the story we have a chance, with Charlie, to become passionately partisan on one side and then the other, and also-with less risk to the psyche than Charlie suffers-both sides at once...

...But women both in high places and in terrorist gangs have tended to compete with the males, even in heartless aggression...

...Which is a drag, when you happen to have killed a few...

...Kurtz is able to overwhelm her with his eloquence, yet the question remains essentially unanswered to the end?which, lost and entangled as le Carre's premises often are in the details and excitement of the chase, is precisely his point...

...Vulnerable captive that she is, Charlie is still able to protest: "Who the hell are you to say who's innocent...

...Perhaps we have been under men's influence too long...

...When Charlie must take some explosives across the border in a car supposedly owned by her purported lover, it is equipped-among other meticulously planned props-with an old comb bearing some of his hairs, redolent with his favorite lotion...

...This scene, recalling D.H...

...It's time for a change...