John le Carré’s most famous creation, the British spy George Smiley, was conceived as a complete antithesis to James Bond – being unsexy, middle-aged, overweight, cerebral, cuckolded – though, like Bond, he does not age through the decades, being forever in his fifties; and, like Bond, he has outlived his creator. Numerous writers have contributed fresh novels to the Bond franchise; in Karla’s Choice, Nick Harkaway, one of le Carré’s sons and an accomplished novelist in his own right, has continued the Smiley story with the blessing of the rest of the family.
Le Carré himself, although he wasn’t (in Harkaway’s words) “building a franchise”, did return, slightly opportunistically, to his most famous creation later in life, in the substandard A Legacy of Spies (2017), in which Smiley’s former protégé Peter Guillam was, in his eighties, under investigation for a lifetime of sexual misdemeanours by a modern-day MI6 inquiry. (Whether consciously or not, le Carré was surely channeling his experience of being similarly investigated by his tenacious biographer, Adam Sisman.) What Harkaway has done, and brilliantly, is return to the 1960s, between the events of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963) and the magnificent “Karla” trilogy – Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974), The Honourable Schoolboy (1977) and Smiley’s People (1979).
I first started reading le Carré over thirty years ago, oddly inspired to do so by Tom Paulin’s poem “Waftage: An irregular ode” (1984; “Most every day / she’d paint / in the loft above the stables / while I wandered / right through le Carré – / Murder of Quality / was where I started”), and read everything – even, in bored disappointment, The Naive and Sentimental Lover (1971) – later buying each new release the moment it was published. A few I read only once, and several only twice, but my Smiley novels are all falling apart now, and Tinker Tailor is just a collection of loose leaves held together by a rubber band. So I was apprehensive about this new act of pastiche, and prepared to be hypercritical – to search, like one of the interrogators in Smiley’s People, “for the tiny flaws and the chance discrepancies and the omissions and the change of emphasis” that constitute betrayal. Nonetheless, I was completely seduced. The style is indistinguishable from that of the originals: the discriminating wit in every description; the knowingness of the characters, expert in people-watching and tradecraft; the idioms and accents. The atmosphere, decor and detail of the 1960s are rendered entirely convincingly, even though, unlike le Carré, Harkaway does not have the advantage of first-hand experience of this milieu.
The plot is also typical le Carré. A Hungarian émigré in London, László Bánáti, is targeted by a Russian assassin and goes on the run; London and Moscow race to find him first. The protagonist is a young Hungarian refugee, Susanna Gero, Bánáti’s former assistant, who brings the matter to the attention of the British and subsequently assists with the perilous mission under Smiley’s direction. There are plenty of twists along the way: Bánáti is in fact a former Soviet spy named Róka, lying low in the genteel world of British publishing until his love for his troubled son makes him break cover, with terrible consequences for a number of people. But the spy plot, as always, is in some ways secondary to the pleasures of the writing and the way the characters size each other up. In Gero, resourceful, brave and sharp of eye and judgement, it is fair to say that Harkaway has delivered one of the more richly developed female characters in the series.
At its heart this is a novel about a father’s love for a wayward boy. But at the same time it is arguably the opposite: an act of filial devotion to a wayward father. Nick Harkaway has honoured John le Carré with a work of real attention and affection, as good as most of his father’s books, and better than several. It is heartening to know that there might be more.