The wall itself runs like a beloved line of narrative through le Carré’s fiction for almost three decades. The fall of the Berlin Wall may have been one of the happiest events of John le Carré’s lifetime, but it was a cruel deprivation for him as a novelist. The elaborate construction of a credible lie is the essential process of a le Carré novel In this most traditionally masculine of genres (another former spook, Stella Rimington, has been one of the few to break the gender cartel), this felt like a significant experiment for the novelist. And it was the first, and remains the only, le Carré novel with a female protagonist.
It focuses not on the cold war spy game between west and east, but instead on the consequences for western Europe of the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.
The Little Drummer Girl was the novel that le Carré wrote immediately after Smiley’s People, in which his owlish British intelligence officer George Smiley had finally defeated his opposite number in Soviet intelligence, Karla. We are in the world before the collapse of communism. The Little Drummer Girl takes us back to 1979 and stays there. The protagonist’s scalding experiences undercover in Ireland were turned into traumatic memories of missions in Iraq. The BBC’s previous le Carré adaptation, The Night Manager, was updated from its original setting in the early 1990s to something like the present. He is Khalil, an accomplished and highly intelligent bomb-maker, dedicated to the murder of prominent Jews in western Europe at the end of the 1970s. The target of all the machinations of his 1983 novel The Little Drummer Girl, now made into a glossy BBC six-part adaptation, is certainly as ingenious and elusive as any of his previous masterminds. If spooks were to be like the apparent blunderers of the GRU, le Carré’s entire oeuvre would be doomed.
It is also because his every novel takes it as axiomatic that those with covert purposes (Russian spies, British spies, terrorists) have to be brilliantly cunning at hiding themselves. This is not just because he is an old secret service hand himself, with some professional appreciation of the skill at avoiding surveillance that any decent agent must develop. He was surely shaking his head in dismay as he watched their later avowals of their touristic interest in Salisbury Cathedral on Russian TV. D avid Cornwell, or John le Carré, as we usually call him, must have been wincing as he viewed the CCTV stills of those two Russian visitors to Salisbury.
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