John le Carre’s son resurrects George Smiley

Anyone reading this review will know a few fundamentals of the Smileyverse: spymaster George Smiley is podgy, spectacled, middle-aged, soft-spoken, wears ill-fitting clothes, can vanish in a crowd and is routinely cuckolded by his wife over the course of all “his” novels.

Thanks to the success of John le Carré’s novels about him, the Smiley canon is now (we might assume) unchangeable: so, making a virtue of necessity, novelist Nick Harkaway has gone back to his Golden Age. Karla’s Choice opens in 1963, the year after the Cuban Missile Crisis, the era when the Berlin Wall went up, the aftermath of Suez, the “candle-end days” of Empire. In East Berlin, a charismatic young man is carted away by the Stasi.

Shortly afterwards, twenty-three-year-old Hungarian émigrée Susanna Gero is crossing London’s Primrose Hill en route to work at the less than stellar literary agency of Bánáti & Clay — whereupon several strange things happen in quick succession. Mr. Bánáti (there is no Clay) is found to be not in; a Russian assassin arrives at the door, announcing that he was sent to murder Bánáti, but has now changed his mind, and Susanna dashes to Bánáti’s home, looks for any sign of where he might have gone, and scoops up one (and only one) bundle of letters, basically on instinct.

It is on these often scarcely explicable human hinges that most of John le Carré’s books depend, far more than on any evil (or good) masterplan. But now Susanna, a “rank amateur,” is up to her neck in matters of considerable consequence, and trip- ping wires from here to Moscow Centre’s metastasizing Thirteenth Directorate. And who better to puzzle out all this mess…? You guessed it.

Except George Smiley doesn’t work for the Circus any longer. He’s retired (surprise!) — and against the wishes of Control, at that. The death of fellow agent Alec Leamas (he who never quite made it in from the Cold) has not sat well with Smiley, so he resigned, six months ago, to spend time making up for his long secret career, with the “freshly besotted” Lady Ann.

Anyone who has ever read a Smiley book before will guess how this is going to end. And to Harkaway’s credit I found I was still somewhat upset by the prospect.

Anyway, the Circus sends an underling to borrow Smiley for just One Last Gig and before you know it they’re getting the band back together — Peter Guillam, Oliver Mendel, Bill Haydon, Connie Sachs, Jim Prideaux and Toby Esterhase (even Leamas’s nemesis, the revolting, multiplicitous survivor Hans-Dieter Mundt) — and ticking off the usual fleshpots: Bonn, Budapest, Lisbon, Istanbul, Hong Kong, Vienna, Paris, Vientiane…

But wait. Against whom are these formidable ranks assembled? Well, there are rumors of “a new broom in the Soviet cup- board: a cold, sophisticated mind drawing together the disparate lineages of the Kremlin’s spies…” I don’t need to tell you what he looks like, that “little man whose quiet had upended [Smiley’s] own” back in a sweltering Delhi prison cell in 1955.

Self-respecting Circus-watchers should by now have sussed Nick Harkaway is John le Carré’s son (the fact that they’re both known under pseudonyms could, I grant you, be confusing, but the author-photo eyebrows are a total giveaway). Furthermore, Harkaway is an acclaimed, established writer — of thrillers, no less (of a punked-up, hypermodern Graham Greene vibe, with tech and pop-culture references to match) — who grew up living and breathing Smiley: he was born, he reflects, in 1972, “around the time Control died.”

Still, given the ardent fanbase for le Carré’s oeuvre, sliding a Karla origin story into the gap between his two most famous books might be considered bold, even for one so unimprovably credentialed.

Since “the Cold War as it was is over” — opinions may vary — Harkaway opts to maintain “a tonal rule of continuity.” No mean feat, considering his father’s tone was nigh-on faultless. But happily Harkaway shares le Carré’s world-class gift for sketching human strengths and — more often — weaknesses with patent sympathy, from families and their extensive baggage (László Bánáti’s notably louche literary existence might sound familiar to those who have read recent exposés of le Carré’s messy private life) to the nested dolls of Soviet paranoia — or, in the British case, presumably, “Circular” thinking.

He also appears to have inherited his father’s social conscience (Eric Hobsbawm gets a mention), post-imperial politics and general skepticism about institutions. Ineptly handled, any one of these essential elements could be a number on a Bad Spoof John le Carré bingo card — but for the most part Karla’s Choice is thoroughly successful.

Harkaway makes the reader work for the payoffs, mediating them through Smiley’s own typically cautious, probing progress. The eponymous villain isn’t even named until about two-thirds of the way through the book. Till then we’re back among the decidedly moth-eaten Circus folk, looking back ever-more-wistfully on the heroic clarity of World War Two, with fleeting callbacks (or -forwards) to spycraft training as recounted in, say, The Secret Pilgrim, and a good smattering of little red flags that Bill Haydon might prefer it if Smiley just stayed out of office politics for good.

There’s enough Edwardian parlor vocabulary (“to eat a breakfast,” “to make a marriage”), as well as cricket references, daddy issues and hang-ups about the private school system, to make it seem like old John is still the one doing the writing. Allied with the occasional bit of historical furniture, touches of mordant humor, stiletto-thrust character creation and/or evisceration, and wonderful grace notes of snobbery (if nothing quite in the class of St. Antony’s, Oxford, being “redbrick”), the son’s pastiche comes pleasingly close to his father’s genius.

Almost as important is what’s not there. Le Carré’s camper lexical flourishes (“My ear for contemporary English is shaky,” he had Guillam confess in 2017); his abiding interest in Baroque German literature; the unshakeable reference to “the telephone,” as though it had just been invented.

And the codes have shifted. Rebarbative ethnic slurs and un-background-checked schoolteachers out; strong women in cohabiting arrangements in. There are no sissies (though there is “a Swiss”). By sleight of hand, it’s both an early-Sixties novel and, carefully, not one.

More substantial difficulties are shrugged off with an open appeal to artistic license — but while readers of this sort of literature would be wise to accept that what seem like slip-ups could be nothing of the sort (“an unforgivable lapse…” Haydon opines sinuously, “quite alien to clever George — but which, if you accept it as deliberate…”), I do feel some of them approach the realm of the Homeric nod.

Clunky historical explainers, brand-name bloopers and geographical waywardness here and there mar the style (you can’t pour Scotch into the City of London’s grass from Parliament Hill), and a few legit le Carré words are overused (“fleshy”; “Mitteleuropa”), while “squirrelly,” I’d guess, should not be used at all, or at least not between a pair of Stasi officers.

I can’t say I buy the notoriously portly George outpacing an ex-SBS scalphunter in extremis, nor am I sure there’s evidence that Smiley and Leamas were close enough for Leamas to come back to cordially haunt him. And while it’s only to be expected that Harkaway’s female characters have noticeably more “agency” than OG le Carré’s, George was already planning to divorce Ann in the year he first met Karla, so the idea that in 1963 they’re settling in for some new, late, cozy romance is pretty unrealistic, to say nothing of the unworkably right-on idea that it was all his fault because he had a job.

In any case, the main prize here is Karla. Old Fifth-Floor types will have fun combing through the backstory and trying to remember who knew what and when, and I rather imagine that if Connie got her hands on these sheets she might say it didn’t quite add up (Guillam, for one, will be surprised to have it all explained to him again 200 pages into Tinker, Tailor) but Harkaway smoothly reminds us that Smiley’s own legend (in both senses) was not built in a day, but retrofitted, frequently, in volumes like A Legacy of Spies.

Karla’s Choice plays out as a clever, loving, sporadically tongue-in-cheek addition to the very best of John le Carré’s work, with a conclusion that fans will not just accept in terms of canonical narrative, but enjoy as a satisfying pre-echo from the far, far end of what I suppose we should now view as “the Karla quadrilogy.”

Smiley still has his work cut out — and Harkaway may too. He teases that the story should “leave you wanting more,” and there are sufficient breadcrumbs for a good half-dozen spin-off stories here (“Bánáti” seems promisingly proximate to the “Bernati” who crops up in Smiley’s People), so long as they don’t trespass on Smiley’s next appearance, in the (poorly-received) 1965 The Looking Glass War.

Given that there are three big fat Karla books to come, I don’t think it’s much of a spoiler to reveal that in the course of trying to be the bigger man, in conscious defense and illustration of our Western values, Smiley decides to try something of a “Hail Mary” and it goes wrong, again.

He needs to be a bit more careful, does our George. Much more of this and he might find himself back in retirement.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s December 2024 World edition.