In the Theater of Deeds

By Paul Gray

THE LITTLE DRUMMER GIRL;

by John le Carre; Knopf; 430 pages; $15.95

Terrorist bombings have become familiar events to everyone but survivors near by. For them, something in reality irrevocably snaps in the explosion: "All they could speak of, if they could speak at all, was the road tipping, or a chimney stack silently lifting off the roof across the way, or the gale ripping through their houses, how it stretched their skin, thumped them, knocked them down, blew the flowers out of the vases and the vases against the wall. They remembered the tinkling of falling glass all right, and the timid brushing noise of the young foliage hitting the road. And the mewing of people too frightened to scream."

This account certainly feels factual, but it is fiction, the opening scene of Author John le Carre's disturbing new thriller. The book promises to raise both hair and hackles. Le Carre has plunged directly into one of the most anguished and impassioned conflicts on earth. His characters are invented, to be sure, but they are Israelis and Palestinians, locked in a struggle that produces daily headlines, committed to opposing causes that can make otherwise civilized people murderous. Expropriating the contemporary Middle East into a novel is literally asking for trouble. What writer could keep such demons, once unleashed, from tearing a made-up story apart?

The answer turns out to be Le Carre. The Little Drummer Girl (its title an oblique allusion to a Christmas song set in the Holy Land) is both a daring departure from his earlier work and a triumph of narrative control. The long duel between George Smiley of British intelligence and Karla, his opposite number in the Soviet Union, came to an end in Smiley's People (1980), with Karla crossing over from East Berlin into Western arms. Le Carre's emphasis throughout the Smiley sagas was on the abstract detachment of his hero, his intellectual moves in a global game of chess. Smiley and Karla had the time to outwait and outthink each other. What little bloodshed both could cause was accidental, a messy byproduct of otherwise elegant planning. The Middle East, as it is and as Le Carre portrays it, offers no such leisure. The distance between theory and the front lines is a missed step, an incautious gesture. Watches tick, recording each second as a preamble to destruction.

The bomb that explodes in the house of an Israeli labor attache near Bonn draws the attention not only of West German authorities but also of intelligence agents from Tel Aviv, led by a man named Kurtz (a.k.a. Schulmann, Raphael, Spielberg). He knows who is responsible for the blast: a shadowy Palestinian called Khalil who has terrorized Western Europe with apparent impunity. Kurtz pays his hidden adversary a supreme compliment: "There's a brain at work." Kurtz has also located Khalil's younger brother and collaborator, currently living in Munich, and has a team of agents in place performing round-the-clock surveillance. When an Israeli colleague wonders impatiently why they do not just kill the brother and be done with him, Kurtz replies that "he doesn't lead anywhere." Little brother becomes expendable only when a trap has been set for Khalil.

The bait in Kurtz's plan is Charmian (called Charlie), an English actress whose haphazardly radical political involvements qualify her (a la Vanessa Redgrave) for the role Kurtz wants her to play. She is the rebellious middle-class type who could very well be swept away by a sensual young Palestinian and his burning desire to regain his homeland. Kurtz assigns Becker, an aging but still handsome Israeli war hero, to recruit Charlie and then teach her how to act in "the theater of deeds." A fictitious love affair must be fabricated between Charlie and the younger brother, whom the Israelis have captured. When he is killed, as the plan now requires that he must be, Charlie will become an ostensibly bereaved and vengeful survivor. Kurtz wagers a number of lives, including his own, that the older brother and master terrorist will be curious enough about Charlie to summon her (and the Israelis) to him.

This plot is not simple even in design, and its execution proves fiendishly complex. Charlie is an unknown quantity with uncertain loyalties. To be made plausible to the Palestinians, she must be coached by Becker in the rhetoric of the dispossessed. He impersonates her imagined lover: "You know how the Zionists described my country before they seized it? 'A land without a people for a people without land.' We did not exist! In their minds, the Zionists had already committed genocide; all that remained for them was the fact. And you, the British, were the architects of this great vision. You know how Israel was born? A European power made a present of an Arab territory to a Jewish lobby."

Charlie shows signs of taking such lessons too much to heart. During a fierce argument with Becker, she calls his colleagues "bastards" and ridicules him for hypocrisy: "One minute our bleeding heart, the next our red-toothed warrior. Whereas all you really are--when it comes down to it--is a bloodthirsty, land-grabbing little Jew." He steps back into his own character long enough to slap her, twice and very hard. Shuttling between Palestinian enclaves in Lebanon, Charlie realizes that hostile aircraft have become new facts in her life: "It had not occurred to her, in her ignorance, that the Palestinians might possess no planes, or that the Israeli air force might take exception to fervent claims to their territory made within walking distance of their border."

Le Carre presents Charlie's education as an accretion of details, to be overseen by the reader as well. The author's mastery of atmosphere has never served him better than here. He wrings suspense not only from the urgency of his plot but from the complex texture of individual scenes. His characters must pursue moral absolutes in a dangerous world mined with ambiguities. Kurtz attempts to explain his crusade and his chosen victims to his new recruit: "Only those who break completely the human bond, Charlie. They deserve to die." Kurtz means terrorists, but he himself must face the necessity of ordering death for someone who has committed no crime except being too stupid or unlucky to stay out of his way.

The Little Drummer Girl is the rattling good entertainment that Le Carre's millions of readers have come to expect. It is also controversial in a way that his earlier novels did not have to be. The battle between Smiley and Karla was, emotionally and philosophically, no contest. The moral balance always tipped, however slightly, in Smiley's favor. Loyalties could grow muddled, colleagues might awake one morning and find it difficult to tell their side from the enemy's. Smiley labored on, knowing that compared with Karla he was the freer man. Le Carre gives neither side in this novel such a clear advantage. Kurtz and his cohort are the main characters, and it is difficult to follow their exploits without rooting for their success. But they strongly resemble the terrorists they oppose. Zionists and Palestinian sympathizers will find much to dislike here: heroes hell-bent on antiheroics, ideals sullied by vengeance and blood. Even the identities of victory and defeat recede before Le Carre's panoramic display of brutal human endeavor. He is the bearer of bad news, disguised in a good book: life, after all the speeches and battles, is essentially a losing proposition.

-- By Paul Gray

David Cornwell (alias John le Carre) first thought of setting a novel in the Middle East in 1977. He had finished The Honourable Schoolboy, which uses Hong Kong as its primary locale, and still experienced some narrative wanderlust. "I roamed about the Middle East a bit," he remembers. "It was just before the first Israeli invasion of Lebanon that went up to the Litani River. I thought that I might construct a novel around this impending attack. I went to southern Lebanon, I met the Palestinians, and I was in Beirut. In that same visit I also drove to Damascus and Amman and then went to the north of Israel and looked at preparations for the attack."

Back home in Britain, the author soon ran into difficulties. His plan to employ the Middle East as another staging area for the struggle between Smiley and Karla was not working: "I decided that I couldn't handle a British-Soviet intrigue in that sense. I tried and I got tissue rejections, which means the plot was too gothic, too unreal, too unnatural for what I had seen. I thought, 'Put it away for a while, put it on the back burner and get rid of Smiley.' " Smiley's People did nothing quite that drastic, but it provided a logical stopping point in the character's history: his triumph at long last over Karla.

This accomplished, Le Carre "went back to the Middle East novel with far greater depth of freedom than I had before because I didn't have this traveling circus with me." He devoted four months to intensive research on his new subject, including three more trips to the Middle East. He talked to members of the Israeli intelligence fraternity, spent two evenings with Yasser Arafat and considerable time at the Beirut headquarters of the Palestine Liberation Organization. "That makes you look over your shoulder a bit," he says, alluding to the potential for violence that permeates the region. Le Carre was lucky: "In all my visits to south Lebanon and Beirut, I have never been near a firefight or a bombing, not so near as to make me feel my life was in danger."

Le Carre suspects that the publication of The Little Drummer Girl may make him a target for other kinds of attacks: "I'm pretty sure that I am going to attract a great deal of flak, particularly in the States, for even suggesting there is anything to put in the Palestinian balance. But I would wish to have it remembered of me, before they claw me apart, that in the nine novels that preceded this book, I think in six of them I wrote with unqualified sympathy about Jews. And if any non-Jew has the right to suggest that Israel is getting out of hand, I propose that I have earned that right."

The Israeli Kurtz is the most admirable and sympathetic character in the novel, and Le Carre may not be done with him: "I've thought of him as likely to be the hero of more books, but the chances, as far as I know at the moment, are nil." George Smiley exists in a similar limbo. Says the author: "We are simply not on terms at the moment. He's hung up his boots." One of the problems, paradoxically, between Le Carre and his character is the television exposure that Smiley received in adaptations of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and Smiley's People: "I loved Alec Guinness's performance, but he gave Smiley a very definite character, and it was in this form that the public thought of him, and, inevitably, he was not my chap any more." Still, the author, 51, adds an escape clause with reference to his sixtyish hero: "I might do a book on Smiley when I catch up with him in age."

Excerpt

"The second bomb fell and it seemed farther away, or perhaps she was less impressionable: it could fall anywhere it liked except in these packed alleys, with their columns of patient children waiting like tiny, doomed sentries for the lava to roll down the mountain. The band struck up, much louder than before; the processions started, twice as brilliant. The band was playing a marching song and the crowd was clapping to it. Unfreezing her hands, Charlie set down her little girl and started to clap too. . . and now it was the turn of the fishermen's union, represented by a sedate yellow van decked in pictures of Arafat, with a giant paper fish, painted red, white and black, on its roof... The planes disappeared. Palestine had won another victory." This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.