Charlie Is My Darling
The Little Drummer Girl, 43 Years Later
The Little Drummer Girl (1983) is my favorite John le Carre novel. I don’t say “best” about novels, movies or even restaurants anymore because I think it’s a meaningless accolade unless I’m God trapped in Edmund Wilson’s skin, disguising Myself as Andrew Sarris because the kid always wanted to go to Cannes – “You wouldn’t even let me see Jesus Christ Superstar, and it won a Golden Globe” – or holed up inside Anthony Bourdain’s nose. Say nothing but good of the dead, and the guy had hella taste in cocaine.
I think favorite is a more trustworthy and useful recommendation. That’s because it’ll intrigue you if our sensibilities are simpatico and be appropriately meaningless if they aren’t. Nobody’s ever asked who died and made me me.
So why is The Little Drummer Girl my favorite John Le Carre novel? My guess is that lots of smart fans of the late David Cornwell would plump for Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy instead, because George Smiley is George Smiley is George Smiley and Ace Ventura, Pet Detective, isn’t. Or maybe A Perfect Spy, lauded (it’s a great life once you get to laud) by Philip Roth as “the best English novel since the war.”
That can only mean he’d read every last one published since 11:01 P.M. (London time) on May 8, 1945, from A Clockwork Orange to Brian Aldiss’s The Hand-Reared Boy to all 723 – honest, I checked – of Barbara Cartland’s bodice-rippers. I desperately want to believe Philip Roth didn’t arrive at his judgments lightly.
Cold War sentimentalists, of which I am one, may have an M &M spot – hard shell, gooey center – for The Spy Who Came In From The Cold. I’d have an equally soft spot for the movie if Richard Burton didn’t spend it overacting so relentlessly that the scenery in totally unrelated movies he didn’t even appear in still bear identifiably Burton-sized gnash marks in the expanded director’s-cut Blu-rays. My favorite of those is anything starring Klaus Kinski.
The Little Drummer Girl caught readers unawares in 1983 because Le Carre was so reliably – heck, next door to monotonously – identified as bestsellerdom’s go-to guy for morally murky, machete-dense M.C. Escher treatments of Cold War hijinks. In a tenth-anniversary introduction to TLDG, Le Carre made no bones about feeling fed up with that rep, although he wasn’t mad enough to drag in 1971’s The Naïve And Sentimental Lover as evidence he was more versatile than we knew. That indigestible title alone made me put it back in the paperback rack at what was then People’s Drug before shoplifting Myra Breckinridge instead, and I’ve never regretted it.
As deliberate shape-shifting goes, sinking his teeth (not Burton’s) into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was audacious. No wonder some thought it foolhardy. Back then, Israel was tenaciously clinging to its rep in First World eyes as the Plucky Little Israel of one-eyed Moshe Dayan Time covers. Awareness of “the Palestinian cause” barely existed north of Tripoli or west of Casablanca except as gruesomely advertised by the 11 Israeli athletes killed at the 1972 Munich Olympics by terrorist PLO offshoot Black September.
Besides being all but unprecedented in Western popular culture, le Carre’s striving for an even-handed treatment of the conflict was researched in depth, animated by face-to-face meetings with combatants on both sides, and – with some whopping qualifiers, for which see below – mostly successful. If the book jars oddly today with people’s perceptions of Mucky Greater Israel, keep in mind le Carre wrote it when Benjamin Netanyahu was a 34-year-old government flack with an alarmingly smooth American accent, best known for defending Israel’s Lebanon war on ABC’s Nightline. He was shrunk by the memory of his big brother Jonathan, who’d been killed in Israel’s widely praised – those were the days – 1976 commando raid on Entebbe airport.
When I was a Foreign Service brat in the 1970s, out-of-date State Department cables from our foreign embassies used to be tersely marked Overtaken by events. If that handy formula identifies The Little Drummer Girl as a relic, it’s nonetheless too good a novel to be a mere curio. Plot: a young and susceptibly radical British actress nicknamed Charlie (as in Charmian; she’s got a last name, but it’s so exiguous I had to look it up to make sure) gets recruited by Israeli intelligence to pose as the heretofore unsuspected lover of a dead Palestinian terrorist who’s met a bad end at the same outfit’s hands. Her invented back story and the cred bestowed by her role in a thwarted – whew! – Palestinian bomb plot have been devised to lead her, with infinite pains, to the dead man’s sibling: Khalid, the terrorist Orca to his kid brother’s guppy.
One measure of the scheme’s ingenuity is that no real-world spy agency known to me or man could rig up such a triumph or even risk trying a gambit this packed with treacherous variables. As was his latter-day wont, Le Carre spent oodles of time with espionage mavens to get authentic details, but documentarians usually leave it at that instead of deciding their footage really needs some good songs. I fondly recall what a fellow District gummint spawn said to me as we watched the climactic 52-card monte of the TV adaptation of le Carre’s Smiley’s People fall into place: “You know what the CIA, MI6, and the KGB have in common? They’re all watching this thinking they’d give their left ball to pull this sucker off.”
TLDG readers don’t think the same because the plot machinations are a pretext for headier stuff: high-flying depictions of complicity and alienation, mixed motives and hedged cravings, that recall the words of a novelist le Carre likely never read: “We are who we pretend to be, so we must be careful who we pretend to be.” (That’s Kurt Vonnnegut, kids. Mother Night. Darn good book.) The novel’s big achievement is to turn the hall-of mirrors foofaraw in play into, first and foremost, a believable human situation.
Thank Charlie for that. Like many a prestigious male novelist before him – I don’t know about male novelists after him, because I stopped paying attention -- Le Carre made Mickey Spillane look like Henry James when it came to creating convincing women. The few exceptions, wotta surprise, are females he can’t imagine any man wanting to go to bed with while positioning himself at the head of the shuddering non-queue. Connie Sachs of the Smiley books is the best of them, and she’s really just a dear old duck, isn’t she?
Charlie’s the exception. Her creator may be a mite too preoccupied by his gal’s (mostly offstage, but posited until you want him to hit himself upside the head with the nearest thesaurus) promiscuity. But otherwise, she’s not just convincingly flawed. Her flaws are where she’s most alive, and that’s because brainy perceptions -- she has those to burn -- are fun and stimulating for her right up until she attempts to translate them into coherent behavior.
She doesn’t really like coherence, and the aversion shows. She’s a scattershot personality who makes the most of every flung pellet. That’s why, to moving effect, she’s so believably young: incomplete, constantly trying to locate herself in landscapes others have painted for her. She’s as imprecise in her headlong mimicry of adult emotions as a newly hatched condor.
Unless you’ve got a weekend to kill in a stuck elevator, the reasons George Roy Hill’s movie of TLDG hit the screen like a suicidal pinata in 1984 aren’t worth listing. The most visible one, sadly, is Diane Keaton – and it isn’t her fault, unless failing to divine she’d look and feel less miscast playing Gertrude Stein in Pepe LePew: The Left Bank Years is no great vote in favor of her acumen. And no way around it – that’s just what it is.
She’s too old, too American, and too privileged, in the sense that we know we’re watching a highly pampered movie star toy with situations she couldn’t (and didn’t) begin to feel empathy for in real life. The part Hill’s to blame for is encouraging her to go generically Keatony-cute whenever he doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing directing material this wrong for him. It happens often.
Park Chan-Wook’s 2018 miniseries was miles better, with Florence Pugh doing Charlie as if the actress had actually met, liked, envied and been driven crazy by that kind of woman more than once. The mini also has a much more energetic and specific awareness of subject, milieu, and tempo. Gee, remember tempo? Park does. Makes a bit of a fetish of it, in fact.
Where both adaptations err is in being faithful to le Carre’s conception of the novel’s hero. He’s the same stick of gum made of wood and hoping he’s chewable in all three. In other words, a guy Timothy Dalton was born to play, lousing up Dalton’s trademark proficiency at playing guys other actors were born to play – and often had, from Rhett Butler to Heathcliff.
A friend told me recently that Charlie’s plight(s) never moved her like delightful Otto Leipzig’s death in Smiley’s People. With some asperity, because I’m good at that and it’s not like I have idle talents to chuck hither and yon like freaking confetti, I said le Carre worked like a dog to make Otto Leipzig delightful and suddenly killing a character readers think they can’t get enough of – whoops, wrong again! --is Authorial Manipulativeness 101.
From Charlie on down, no major character in The Little Drummer Girl is simply delightful, meant to charm and seduce us at a level le Carre can bring off anytime. That doesn’t explain why Gadi Becker a/k/a Joseph, Charlie’s veteran (sigh), secretly troubled (double sigh) agent runner, is a stick of gum who smells faintly of stale but pricey caviar.
He’s the one who, as isn’t the case with Charlie, le Carre does romanticize – by making him charismatically unromantic, of course, a/k/a Authorial Manipulativeness 102. He’s hard-bitten and tormented because a dude needs hobbies, but he can also discourse incisively about Shaw’s St. Joan and Rosalind in As You Like It, knows the ideal drink to order in the crummiest roadside taverna, and gives Charlie a guided tour of the Acropolis so expert you figure he must’ve lived in it when he was young. tuxedoed, and homeless.
He’s European travel porn at a level suggestive of le Carre’s posh life as a rightly rewarded bestselling author, not a hard-bitten tormented etc. etc. At his worst, Gadi/Joseph is like a master magician-cum-nuclear scientist who also plays the piano. That he’s also held up as le Carre’s ideal of a tough but civilized man gets at the major imbalance of the novel’s superficially balanced Israeli/Palestinian seesaw. (A rigged seesaw – now there’s a concept overdue for hi-tech refurbishing in Trump-era playgrounds.)
Even at the time, countless readers noticed with amusement that the sharpest, most biting arguments in favor of justice for Palestine are made by Joseph when he’s impersonating an Arab for Charlie’s instruction. He’s their enemy, but he can run rings around them when it comes to talking in eloquent circles.
More generally, a European sensibility – including that of European Jews for whom Israel amounts to a diaspora by other means and who are much more in le Carre’s comfort zone than tradition-free sabras – firmly remains the book’s ethical fulcrum, open to challenge but invulnerable to demotion. On top of that, the author’s unquestionably genuine indignation at Israel’s violence against Palestinians seems quaint now that the IDF is using the entire West Bank and Gaza for wholesale target practice.
Nobody thought the 1982 Lebanon war was a great moment in Israel’s moral development, but nobody called it genocide either. Now mainstream op-edders toss the word around almost daily in the ye-gods New York Times without losing sleep (they shouldn’t), reputation (they would have once), or hobnobbing social lives (always too corrupt by nature to bear situational criticism anyway).
So what redeems The Little Drummer Girl in 2026? You must know the answer by now: Charlie, Charlie, Charlie. Everything’s changed except for people like her – impetuous, confused, self-contradictory, never sure if their heart’s in the right place or just a transitory resident at whichever chic address is in vogue. She’s the live wire as eternal flame.