The Little Drummer Girl is a long book with a complex plot, many characters and subplots. It seems that le Carre has moved progressively from the stark simplicity of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963) to increasingly complicated stories. To some critics, this is an evolution; to others, an unnecessary complexity. The ambiguous question of Israeli responsibility in provoking terrorist attacks has brought Walter Laqueur to the conclusion that le Carre is not a person who does not like Jews; he simply does not like people.

One of the great assets of the book, other than the timeliness of its subject, is the role of description. Le Carre had visited the Middle East with the intention of writing a new Smiley book, but somehow he could not put his sedate, bored British Intelligence officer into the inflammatory Palestinian-Israeli conflict. It was just not his milieu. The...