Apart from the rare scathing review, The Little Drummer Girl has won well-nigh universal praise. In some respects the praise is deserved, for the novel moves at a brisker pace than most Le Carré novels while retaining their characteristic virtues: it is carefully plotted, well written, has a strong sense of place, and offers a credible portrait of the mechanisms of clandestine intelligence struggle….

[However, the] novel suffers from Le Carré's weakness in characterization. He makes elaborate efforts with Charlie, his first female protagonist, but the end result is a mass of contradictions. (p. 24)

But The Little Drummer Girl is interesting principally because in it Le Carré carries forward—and moves beyond—the themes of his previous novels. Le Carré's protagonists are usually British and Soviet (or East European) agents and spymasters, whose similarity of methods and perspectives make them into mirror images of one another...