PROFILE

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The Ambiguities
Of John Le Carre

An incredibly deft and subtle novelist whose real name is David
Cornwell, the author uses espionage as a metaphor for life.

ELSA A. SOLENDER

Special to The Jewish News

George Will called him a conduit of the
anti-Israeli propaganda grinder. Arabs
berated him as a Zionist agent.
The Soviet Gazette branded him a red-
toothed agent of imperialism. The British
press accused him of subverting traditional
values.
Author of the bestselling spy thrillers A
Perfect Spy, The Spy Who Came in From
The Cold, The Looking Glass War, Tinker,
Tailor, Soldier, Spy and — of most interest
to Jews — The Little Drummer Girl, David
Cornwell, a/k/a John Le Carre, revels in am-
biguity. He likes to quote F. Scott Fitz-
gerald: "The trick is to hold opposing opin-
ions and still function."
In a recent chat, the novelist — hand-
some in middle age, with white hair,
ruddy complexion, bright brown eyes, im-
peccable British tailoring and an Ox-
bridge accent — proved himself comforta-
ble in his fictional ambivalence but un-
equivocal in his personal loyalties: Our
side is much better," he answered without
an instant of hesitation when asked
whether he extends his "looking glass
war" image of the East/West espionage
establishments to the Eastern and West-
ern bloc styles of government and ways of
life.

Even so, espionage works as a metaphor
for life in Le Carre's work. His unsettled
and unsettling heroes and heroines ex-
amine the complex tangle of international
politics and intelligence-gathering in the
troubling light of public and private
morality. The focus is on predicaments, not
solutions.
Nowhere is this trait more apparent than
in The Little Drummer Girl, Le Carre's
novel of the Middle East, which was made
into a film starring Diane Keaton. The pro-
tagonist, Charlie, is an actress of radical

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Friday, July 4, 1986

THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS

political bent and unstable emotions.
Israeli intelligence recruits her for an anti-
terrorist scheme, but she wavers in her
loyalties, alternating between Israeli and
Palestinian lovers and camps. The novel
enraged critics on both sides of the Israeli-
Arab conflict (some of whom may not have
read it carefully). Israeli President Chaim
Herzog, however, said that Le Carre "got
it about right."
Le Carre confesses that his sympathies
"went back and forth between the two
sides" as he researched The Little Drum-
mer Girl. This was partly because he was
projecting himself into the mind of his
heroine, whom he describes as "a very im-
pressionable woman." In establishing a
credible point of view for her, he says he
"found it necessary to tilt with each wind."
But he was personally affected as well by
his personal contacts with individual peo-
ple, particularly young people, on both
sides of the Arab Israeli struggle.
Le Carre admires Israel as an open,
democratic society, but believes Israelis
need to recognize that there have been
"fearful casualties" in the making of "their
great experiment." His compassion was
aroused during his time in Israel by Israeli
kids in the northern settlements who lived
under the threat of kathusa rockets fired
in on them by Palestinians from Lebanon.
Some of them saw their friends blown up
by such barrages.
But he also hated seeing Arab kids of 18
or 19 "dragged into terror groups" because
they saw it as "the only way" to salvage
their national and family honor. Of the Pal-
estinians generally, Le Carre said, "you
cannot forget that in moral terms, they

Author John Le Carre: his focus is
on predicaments, not solutions.