The Little Drummer Girl, John le Carré: Review
This story was written in and set in 1982, just before the Israeli-Lebanese war of the same year. In it, a Palestinian bomb maker goes to Europe to murder high-profile and not-so-high-profile Jewish people to promote his cause beyond the Middle East. The Israeli spies recruit an English actress to play various roles of Palestinian sympathy that might allow her to infiltrate the bomber’s network.
Le Carré’s style is perfect for the Middle East because they are both so complex and confusing. Knowing who is supporting who is a luxury afforded to anyone attempting to read into, read ahead or go back and re-read the story both here and in the real history. I was struck by the choice of the weaponisation of acting, a profession which requires empathy and the ability to put oneself in another’s shoes, an idea that vacated the tragic arena of the Middle East a long time ago.
Amid the dozens of sides of the conflict, as a reader, you may feel empathy for all of them, if not all of the characters. Spending time to understand this complexity would do us no harm. Judgements of Good Versus Evil appear nowhere in the book nor any of le Carré I have read. Real politics, however, at least since the 1980, has no time to stop and consider the Middle East’s problems as interconnecting at the very least.
The heroic Israeli spies were motivated to stop the bombing of Jews in Europe and also to prevent their political bosses from strafing Southern Lebanon and its camps of Palestinians. Le Carré writes books about spies, not books about how political solutions for peace. But he takes time out from his magnetic writing to plant a handful of jarring political statements that have aged well: specifically that there was a missed opportunity for peace and a two-state solution following the 1973 Yom Kippur War to 1982.
The international networks of Palestinian sympathy are entirely revolutionary-Marxist of the Baader Meinhof Group flavour. Rooted in the desperate angst of the children of the Nazis not to be like their parents they still find themselves killing Jews despite how much they abolish the family and monogamy. At no point in the book is it suggested that the Palestinians are motivated by their religion. The word ‘martyr’ does not appear, and suicide bombing as a weapon of the masses would be invented a year after the book’s publication.
Amid the complexity, on more than one occasion a character uses a car’s central locking system to impress another character. So in that sense, it was a simpler time to which we can never return.
