80
PARTISAN REVIEW
firsthand research in Israel, Sidon, Beirut, and the Palestinian train–
ing camps at Rashidiyeh and Nabatiyeh . The novel concerns a
young English actress , Charmian (probably after Jack London's
famous wife, but also alluding to "chameleon") , or "Charlie." She is a
good actress precisely because she has a weak sense of self. The
stories that she tells about herself are pure inventions of her sense of
theatrical appropriateness . She allies her own history with the major
fictions of her time - she has played at being "a militant pacifist, a
sufist , a nuclear marcher , an anti-vivisectionist, and ... a cham–
pion of campaigns to eliminate tobacco from the underground."
An
acquaintance of hers says: "Actors don't have
opinions,
my dear chap,
still less do actresses . They have moods . Fads. Poses. Twenty-four
hour passions .. . . Actors are absolute suckers for dramatic solu–
tions. For all I know, by the time you get her out there, she'll be
Born Again!" He went further and showed how actors "were pursued
by 'an absolute
horror
of unreality.' How on stage they acted out all
the agonies of man , and off stage were hollow vessels waiting to be
filled ."
An Israeli special forces anti-terrorist team recruits Charlie
with the special goal of filling her emptiness with a new role . Their
aim is to locate and kill a wily Palestinian terrorist. For Charlie they
construct an elaborate drama in which she "becomes" the girl friend
of the terrorist's brother; the special forces team compose a history of
their love affair , complete with love letters between them. She is
"filled up" with a complete set of political advocacies, acquaintances,
a lover, and a mission . As Kurtz , the head of the Israeli team, tells
her, she is being given a role in "the theater of the real." She takes in
her new fictive identifications so readily that they do indeed become
part of her identity- they
are
her identity, she becomes her fictions,
for they are as real as anything else in her life has been.
Near the end of the novel, having passed all the tests by which
the Palestinians confirm for themselves that her fictive identity is
real, she makes contact with the terrorist, Khalil. "He was every–
thing she had imagined when she was trying to turn him into some–
body she was looking forward to meeting." Together they assemble a
bomb , which she is scheduled to use in an assassination.
"You are nervous?" Khalil asks .
"Yes ."
"It's natural. I too am nervous . Are you nervous
III
the
theater?"
