Review of "The Little Drummer Girl" by John Le Carre

I really enjoyed this but it wasn't quite my favourite Le Carre. As with the Cold War ones, he's good at exploring the moral ambivalence of the sides...but perhaps because of the subject matter, Israel and Palestine, I find it more difficult. He tries to have it both ways, with sympathy for both the Israelis and the Palestinians, but I am not sure he really succeeds.

The plot is quite simple (if implausible - Israeli intelligence recruits a young English actress to infiltrate pro-Palestinian networks in Europe) but as with other Le Carre, he's good at providing the detail, of atmosphere and interiors and characters. 

It was a good lesson for me in the secondary importance of plot...I sometimes got a bit confused, and I don't really think that this would have happened (though I was rather reminded of the scene in Spielberg's Munich where the two competing groups of Palestinians and Israelis are staying in the same safe house in Athens), but it didn't detract from my enjoyment.

I'm also aware that this is a novel about a double agent/infiltrator, and that here as in real life the cultivation of a successful infiltrator personality results in a lot of inner emotional turmoil. Being convincing as an infiltrator means that you have to develop friendships and connections with the members of the group that you are targeting, while partitioning off the "real" you that is reporting back to your own side. I think I'd like to look at other books that deal with this, both fiction and non-fiction...I'm aware of the story about a Shin Bet infiltrator of left groups in Israel in the 1970s, who went native, and also of Philip K Dick's "A Scanner Darkly". But there must be lots of others, surely?