The Little Drummer Girl Book

When spy novelist John le Carré broke off from George Smiley's complex world long enough to pen this terrifying thriller in 1979, it announced a New World of Terror.

So said The Guardian in October of 2018: they pronounced this the one book that best predicted our present paranoia.

Be that as it may, for me it was the stimulus that drove me to bury myself safely in a grey world of existential psychology.

For 'the world (was) too much with (me)!'

Yes, with this novel the insularity of my little world was vanishing, and, like Wordsworth the real world suddenly lay too heavily on my shoulders.

But my concurrent reading suggested there was another escape - the subterranean thinking of an Underground Man - Dostoyevsky's so-often-misunderstood modern Everyman.

Or Sartre, in whose densely abstruse circumlocutions I began to take refuge.

For though I was now an affluent home owner, I was uncomfortable in this too-in-your-face world of breaking news. But never as off-balance as this book now made me feel, cause it hit home.

I remember a long, bitter ride home on the crowded commuter bus into our new suburb.

The faces of all the strangers around me were as wrapped up as I was in the private anxieties of their office crises, the daily papers, or thrillers mirroring exactly the faceless dread of a new world of terror which this novel, which I was holding, was describing.

I read enough to squirm noticeably and VERY uncomfortably in my bus seat, and discarded it half-way through (I give it the four stars it surely merits, though!)

If existential burrowing into human psychology was to be my next big reading escape from reality, it was not the last.

But bestselling suspense novels were now on hold.

Political thrillers, like THIS one, had now, on that day, become like the Nazi dentist in Marathon Man, drilling right into my nerves.

Goodbye to all that!

So I said back then - but in reality I was just covering up my problem. You see, my real problem was my need for escape from life's ever-variable anxiety.

And THAT was Symptomatic of a MUCH deeper problem... common to so many of us.

The workplace was driving me to near-despair.

As a junior manager, I was finding myself constantly HOUNDED - badgered and berated by privileged senior executives.

I felt cornered.

And isn't this the same for us ALL, even if your job is not exactly like mine was? Office bullying is the name of the game - and a part of its power.

And there are Always Bigger Fish in the Sea of Life than us!

You know, God's word and Man's Law are essentially immutable and there seems to be no respite for so many of us so-called victims - unless Grace and Mercy rules your world.

But our moods and emotions are like quicksilver chameleons...

We're so easily caught out over a detail - and then dead to rights. Easy prey for trickier people than us.

T.S. Eliot says it is a case of the Boarhound hounding the Boar - it's all over the world, and there are fewer and fewer escapes.

But then, God speaks to us, us hopeless victims, in a still, quiet voice...

Forgive them ALL.

As many times as it takes. Over and over again. So often He says it...

Why, In the name of all that's right?

So... that when the day finally dawns when we find the strength to FORGIVE ALL our oppressors, the whole Master/Slave dichotomy will COLLAPSE.

Just like that - at least in OUR OWN SOULS - where it Counts.

And we'll see the Big Picture. Has it happened to you yet?

It's something I just discovered recently, in my old age - and it has helped me enormously.

For if God is immutable - and doesn't play favourites - who are WE to judge? We have to forgive. Our whining little case can't help but collapse.

And can you believe this - it's a GREAT feeling!

For at last we can talk about a 'level playing field.'

THIS is true freedom.

The END of anxiety.

May it happen for you, too...

For on the day when that Freedom dawns, you'll hear

...upon the sodden floor
Below, the Boarhound and the Boar
Pursue their pattern as before
But RECONCILED among the stars!