Volume 30, Number 6 · April 14, 1983
The Secret Sharers
By James Wolcott
The Little Drummer Girl
by John le Carré
Knopf, 429 pp., $15.95
With The Little Drummer Girl, John le Carré has thrown off his winter cloak and let his limbs flex. Unlike the Smiley novels, which have a burrowing, circumspect determination, The Little Drummer Girl doesn't read as if it were written with mittens. The book feels as if it were dashed off with the zealous haste of a reporter filing for a deadline. Once the dread Karla had been flushed from his lair like a sick, shivering animal at the close of Smiley's People ('...in the halo Smiley saw his face, aged and weary and travelled, the short hair turned to white by a sprinkling of snow'), le Carré must have sensed it was time to strike down the tents of the Circus and push on to a larger, more turbulent arena—the Middle East.
Review, 1938 words
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