Charmian Ross (Charlie)

Florence Pugh, The Little Drummer Girl 2018

Charmian Ross is The Little Drummer Girl in John le Carre novel of 1983. Recruited from a group of itinerant English actors, she has been involved in leftist politics. But these activities are chaotic and superficial compared to the disciplined Israelis who tell her they have a more important part for her in “the theater of the real.” “It will save innocent lives,” Kurtz, their leader, tells her. “Your talents are being wasted.” They do not tell her much else.

Joseph, to whom she is attracted, confuses her by acting romantic and then never following through. He takes her to elegant dinners and then to the Acropolis. He begins to explain the elaborate fiction in which Charlie, as she is called, is wooed by a young man named Michel, the brother of Khalil, a Palestinian terrorist who has been planting bombs all over Europe. Joseph impersonates this brother, using silk shirts, a red jacket and Mercedes. Letters, hotel and restaurant receipts, clothes for Charlie and a beautiful bracelet all contribute to a fake love affair they build up between them. Joseph tells her she can leave if she wants to, but Charlie is falling in love with Joseph, who is a legendary Israeli fighter, a hero of the battle for the Golan Heights. He asks her if she can drive the Mercedes up through Yugoslavia into Austria. It is full of explosives.

Charlie does this. In Munich, she is taken to see the brother Michel who is captive and drugged. She then goes back to England, to acting. She is contacted by the Palestinians, however, and is able to convincingly act her unhappiness at the death of Michel, who has been blown up in the red Mercedes. She is sent to Beirut where the Palestinians have their headquarters. She meets Michel’s sister Fatmeh. They want to know more about Michel, which Charlie tells them. She loves the “restless, dangerous urgency” of Beirut, weapons everywhere, boys with machine guns, nights in the desert. She finds the Palestinians “easy to love,” as Joseph told her she would. She is treated with great courtesy. The muezzin sounds every morning. “In the unreason around her, in this unlooked for truce for meditation, she found at last a cradle for her own irrationality and since no paradox was too great to bear amidst such chaos, she found a place in it for Joseph too, for her love for him.”

In a Palestinian camp, she makes friends with the children and joins a demonstration. She is also sent to a training camp, where she learns to use weapons. She hates it, but what begins as “an effort of will, became a habit of mind and body.” She is disciplined, becoming a leader. She is asked to deliver a bomb at a lecture in Freiburg, Germany. She flies under a fake passport, a dowdy student with her hair chopped off.

As Charlie gets in deeper, Israeli operatives monitor her progress, keeping in contact with bits of heather, cigarette packs. Some of them think she has gone over to the Palestinians. “What does it matter who she works for,” says Kurtz, “as long as she shows us the way.” Joseph is nervous, but all of them have to wait.

Charlie is taken to Khalil, who makes a bomb with his one good hand. Charlie delivers it. The Israelis, with the help of the German police, detonate the bomb, pretending the professor has been killed. Charlie goes back to Khalil, who prepares a dinner for her in a lovely house in the woods. They make love, but in the morning, Khalil does not hear cows, as he usually does. “Who do you work for, Charlie?” he asks. The Israelis storm the house and Khalil is shot. Charlie has a breakdown and is taken to a hospital in Tel Aviv.

Months later, the Israelis return Charlie to England. She acts in plays, but serious parts are too much for her, too irrelevant. Scenes of the Palestinians come before her eyes. Joseph has gone back to his life too, but he scares Kurtz: “What are we to become?” Joseph (the one-time freedom fighter known as Gadi Becker) asks. “A Jewish homeland or an ugly Spartan state?” One night Joseph comes to see a play in which Charlie is clearly losing it. Afterwards she tells him, “I’m dead, Joseph.” But it seems he wants her, dead or alive.

John le Carre modeled the “little drummer girl” on his left-leaning sister. As he writes in his memoir, The Pigeon Tunnel [2016], the young, idealistic character Charlie was right there with him as he traveled in Israel and Lebanon in the early 1980’s. He portrays both sides with great sympathy, his writing transcending the spy/thriller genre. In 2018, the BBC did an acclaimed six-part mini-series based on the book directed by Park Chan-wook.