John Le Carré's thrillers have conveyed, as few others, the urgency of the struggle waged between East and West, between totalitarianism and democracy. The struggle is openly about human values, and its outcome will affect the lives of virtually everyone. Some aspects of it nevertheless are largely invisible, or at least concealed from public inspection, and it is upon them that Le Carré has focused. In order to depict the East-West struggle in fictional terms, he has blurred its moral outlines, to show that both sides use comparable means to advance their very different ends. The intensity and drive of his thrillers have derived from the ambiguity at their center, whereby good men often do evil for reasons of state.

The Little Drummer Girl is constructed upon the fraught issue of the Palestinians and the Israelis, a microcosm of the East-West struggle, to be sure, but more...