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 ...

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 ma...

The beginning of John le Carré's new book ["The Little Drummer Girl"] is, for a spy thriller, entirely orthodox: There is a bombing, a bombing by a terrorist. Where? Near Bonn, but the location does not matter. There have been so many others, in Zurich, in Leyden, here and there. It matters only that the victim was an Israeli. Although the reader spends time in Bonn and in Tel Aviv and in Vienna, Munich, Mykonos, London, it matters hardly at all, except that the ambiance of these...

[The Little Drummer Girl] is the third Le Carré novel which is exceedingly well-timed. The first was The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, which defined the Cold War with an intensity and adult perception which came as a relief after the lockjawed propaganda of the politicians and the comic-cuts cartoons of popular fiction. Then came Smiley who tinkered his honourable way through people in institutions so very like the institutions most of us have suffered through. Whether it was school, university, the...

[It] is not on being an excellent thriller-writer that John le Carré has gained the kind of superior acceptance that Marilyn Monroe has over Joan Blondell, but because he has come to count (as, say, Price, Gardner, Freeling, and Lyall have not) as a good writer, a writer worthy of more than inclusion in some forthcoming Best of British Thrillers list, a writer who can be read for vicariously authentic agony. So is The Little Drummer Girl a good book? It's hard to feel that this is a useful que...

[Le Carré's] new novel, which marks a sharp break away from the tortured world of George Smiley and his colleagues at the Circus, springs from the author's complete immersion in the stream of Middle-East terror and counterterror. They spill out into many of the European cities to which the action of The Little Drummer Girl takes us. Le Carré entered that grim world looking for a fresh plot for Smiley, but he soon discovered that the locale demands a cast of entirely new character...

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 …, le Carré m...

[In The Little Drummer Girl] Le Carré has moved right away from Smiley-land to the Middle East, from the Cold War to the passions of the Israeli-Arab conflict, from national security to national hate. Smiley himself is no great miss, still less his tiresome wife. The fascination of the Smiley books lay increasingly in what he did rather than what it did to him, and in Smiley's People we were given a splendid gala performance by the espionage circus, a sort of celebratory perhaps even valedicto...

Writing about Le Carré is chancy. Ever since 1962, when The Spy Who Came In from the Cold was published, he has been the standard by which other writers of the so-called international thriller are measured. A couple of years ago I got the garland "Le Carré of the Year." The next season it was passed to the succeeding pretender. Le Carré stayed the constant. With his new novel, The Little Drummer Girl, he remains ahead of us, dwelling at, exploring, the very end of espionag...

With The Little Drummer Girl, le Carré has abandoned the polite chess game of the Cold War. He has plunged instead into a very hot and current struggle of hand grenades and fragmentation bombs, the mutual campaign of terror waged by the Israelis and Palestinians…. [The central character,] Charlie, an idealistic young actress and a political innocent, has been chosen to lead an imaginative journey, one that parallels a personal journey of le Carré's: from initial sympathy for the ...