Books: In the Theater of Deeds

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 Carré's disturbing new thriller. The book promises to raise both hair and hackles. Le Carré 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 Carré. 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 Carré'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 Carré 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 attaché 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.