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Appendix · Dramatis Personae1 Abraxas, Mickie (The Tailor of Panama). As the best friend of Harry Pendel, Mickie helped Harry find a doctor for Marta after she was badly beaten by Nor- iega’s police for having participated in a protest demonstration.As a result, Mickie was imprisoned, tortured, and raped repeatedly.After this traumatic experience, he became a broken drunk. Pendel makes him the courageous leader of a fictitious de- mocratic Silent Opposition to the regime. Consequently, Mickie is again hounded by the police and ends up committing suicide. Harry feels enormous remorse yet uses Mickie’s death to make a martyr of him—just the excuse the Americans need to launch their invasion of Panama. Alleline, Percy (Tinker,Tailor, Soldier, Spy).The Scottish son of a Presbyterian min- ister, Percy has had a problematic relationship with Control since Percy was his stu- dent at Cambridge. Hired by the Circus and mentored by Maston, he cultivates political support in the Conservative party. Alleline becomes head of the Circus after Control’s resignation in 1972. Smiley’s exposure of Bill Haydon, for whom Alleline has been an unwitting tool, ends his career. Alexis, Dr.(The Little Drummer Girl). Investigator for the German Ministry of In- terior,Alexis is the son of a father who resisted Hitler. He is considered erratic and philosemitic by his colleagues. On the losing end of a power struggle in his de- partment, Alexis is recruited by Israeli intelligence, who provide him with invalu- able information about the terrorist bombings he is in charge of investigating.This intelligence enables him to reverse his fortunes and advance his career. When he balks during one phase of their collaboration, Kurtz (head of the Israeli operation) threatens to reveal to his boss that Alexis has pocketed the funds he was supposed to be giving to his fictitious Palestinian informant (to account for the information he received from the Israelis).Alexis immediately cooperates. Avery, John (The Looking Glass War).After graduating from Oxford, where he ma- jored in German, he briefly works in publishing before joining the Department (military intelligence).Within four years he becomes aide to the director, Leclerc. Father of a son in a loveless marriage to Sarah, who despises him, Avery develops a close relationship with his agent, Fred Leiser. In the last scene of the novel,Avery sobs when Leiser is abandoned to certain death in East Germany. His disillusion- ment with the secret world is traumatic. 216 The Spy Novels of John le Carré Becker, Gadi (a.k.a. Joseph) (The Little Drummer Girl). A complex and para- doxical character, Gadi shares with George Smiley important character traits as a moral agent. Officer in an elite Israeli military unit, Gadi bears physical and psy- chological scars from three wars. During his service in the Mossad (Israeli intelli- gence), he operates in Arab countries. After resigning, he is called back by Kurtz for a special antiterrorist assignment. Gadi successfully recruits and trains Charlie to penetrate a Palestinian terrorist cell and lead the Israeli team to their leader. As he falls in love with Charlie, Gadi engages in anguished soul searching. His trou- bled conscience and his increasing political consciousness contribute to his moral and ideological development. Gadi’s recognition of the humanity and legitimate claims of the Palestinians and final commitment to his psychologically damaged agent/lover show a character who has evolved more in a novel than any other cre- ated by le Carré. Blair, Bartholomew (Barley) Scott (The Russia House). The son of an aristo- cratic press baron, Barley read history at Trinity College, Cambridge. He is a saxo- phone-playing jazz buff who drinks to excess and runs the family publishing house. Described as “a many-sided soul” (51), he is said to “hear a whole self-ac- cusing chorus” (68) inside him that drove him crazy.After gaining the confidence of Goethe, a dissident Russian physicist, he becomes embroiled in efforts to have Goethe’s exposé of the flaws in the telemetry of Soviet ballistic missiles published in the West. Caught between warring factions in British intelligence who recruit him and the CIA who take over the operation (leading to the death of Goethe), Barley trades the list of questions the CIA has given him to ask Goethe for the lives and promised freedom of Barley’s Russian lover and her family. Bland, Roy (Tinker,Tailor, Soldier, Spy and The Honourable Schoolboy). A docker’s son, Bland becomes a don at St. Anthony’s College before being recruited to the Circus by Smiley.Bland serves nine years in Eastern Europe. Upon returning in the early 1970s, he allies himself with the Alleline-Haydon faction, which fires his mentor, Smiley, for having loyally supported Control and because he constitutes a threat to Haydon. Bland is dismissed after Smiley exposes Haydon. Bradfield, Rawley (A Small Town in Germany). Head of Chancery (political sec- tion) of the British embassy in Bonn, Bradfield’s wife Hazel has had an affair with Leo Harting. Bradfield elevates hypocrisy to a uniquely English form of salvation. He serves the “appearance” of things. He serves the weak and corrupt English without expectations. He prefers futile power plays to the impotence of neutrality. Along with his assistant, de Lisle, he articulates the despair of the upper class and the bankruptcy of British policy. Bradshaw, Sir Anthony Joyston (The Secret Pilgrim, The Night Manager). Re- cruited by Alleline, Bradshaw is an unscrupulous freelance arms salesman who makes a fortune supplying arms to the highest bidders in the Balkans and Central Africa. Ned’s last assignment before retiring is to try to persuade the cynical Brad- shaw to stop blackmailing Her Majesty’s Government. Ned is unsuccessful in doing so. In the second novel, Bradshaw is described as an “occasional satrap of Dramatis Personae 217 Darker’s so-called Procurement Studies Group” (50). In other words, he acts as an unofficial (deniable) arms agent for British intelligence which, in turn, frequently acts on behalf of the CIA. He is an associate of Roper (the main villain in The Night Manager). Brotherhood, Jack (A Perfect Spy). Brotherhood is a British intelligence officer in the Firm, who recruits Magnus Pym, mentors him, and acts as his controller and surrogate father. He is of country stock, whose “forebears were gypsies and clergy- men, gamekeepers and poachers and pirates” (160). Jack is godfather to the Pym’s son and is very close to him. Although the discovery of Pym’s treachery makes a mockery of his career in intelligence, Brotherhood seems more hurt and con- cerned by his personal betrayal than by Pym’s treason against his country.There are indications that his disillusionment may lead to greater self-awareness. However, Jack’s incipient skepticism is not as well developed as that of Mary Pym, with whom he had an affair before she marries Pym (with Brotherhood’s blessing). Burr, Leonard (The Secret Pilgrim, The Night Manager). Described as “Smiley’s Crown Prince,”Burr replaced Clive as deputy director of the Service in The Secret Pilgrim (266). As the head of a new drug and arms enforcement agency, with his Fabian conscience he is the moral center of The Night Manager. Fighting the com- bined forces of his corrupt former boss in intelligence and his counterpart in the CIA, Burr recruits and successfully penetrates an agent (Pine) in the heart of the circle of his nemesis Roper, a major dealer in illegal arms and drugs.Although the operation is taken over by British and American intelligence, which leads to its fail- ure, Burr manages to save Pine’s life. Burr, a Yorkshire man, artist, and rebel, displays many of the qualities of character (skeptical balance) associated with his mentor, Smiley. Cavendish, Geoffrey (Boom-boom) (The Tailor of Panama).A large, tweedy,out- doors Englishman, Cavendish had the voice of an upper-class cricket commenta- tor. Freelance arms and oil dealer with an office in Saudi Arabia, he chairs the Planning and Application Committee, which oversees the British covert operation in Panama. He is the creature of Ben Hatry, who is the real leader of the commit- tee. Cavendish is an influence peddler, defense lobbyist, and self-styled statesman’s friend. He struck the deal with Luxmore to launch the operation in Panama, en- couraged him, bolstered his budget and his ego, and lobbied parliamentarians and bankers. Using Hatry’s influence in the media, he drummed up support for Hatry’s trans-Atlantic interventionist politics. Charmian (Charlie) (The Little Drummer Girl). Charlie is le Carré’s first female title character and the one (of three central characters) around whom the novel turns. She is a twenty-six-year-old English actress recruited by Israeli intelligence (Mossad) to penetrate a cell of Palestinian terrorists operating against Israelis and Jews in Europe. Charlie, the privately educated daughter of a stockbroker, is a fan- tasist with a chameleon-like personality. She falls in love with Gadi Becker, whom she nicknames Joseph when she sees him on a beach before she meets him, and finds in the Mossad team a substitute family and a cause. She is also “converted” to 218 The Spy Novels of John le Carré the Palestinian cause by Gadi (playing the role of her fictive Palestinian lover) and by the Palestinians she meets in the refugee camps in Lebanon. Although severely emotionally damaged by her starring role in the “theatre of the real,” in the final scene she walks off to an uncertain future with Gadi. Le Carré’s deliberately am- biguous ending is highly significant. Clive (The Russia House, mentioned in The Night Manager).
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