BOOK REVIEW: Le Carré’s legacy appears safe in his son’s hands

It seems appropriate. The cover tells the reader that this is a John le Carré novel, but all is not what it seems.

Le Carré died in December 2020, and this book is not by the great man himself, but by his son, Nick Harkaway.

Karla’s Choice is set in 1963, slotting comfortably into the 10-year gap between two of Le Carré’s masterpieces — The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy’. 

Fans of the masterful writer of atmospheric spy novels will share my delight that this new novel from the Le Carré dynasty features the legendary George Smiley, that flawed but brilliant character, so unlike James Bond but working for the same outfit, once again identified as “The Circus”.

At its head is the all-powerful figure of Control, and the team includes a welcome array of familiar names: Connie Sachs, Bill Haydon, Toby Esterhase — and, of course, Smiley’s wife Ann, whose infidelity once again features in this book, as it did in earlier Le Carré novels.

The big challenge for anyone brave enough to step into the biggest boots in spy fiction is to provide a new, absorbing tale, moving at a fast but intelligent pace, its protagonist displaying ruthlessness, cynicism and inventiveness, against a backdrop of Cold War terror.

Defying the odds Harkaway has done his dad proud, piling on the atmosphere and effortlessly echoing the skilful writing style of Smiley’s creator.

Here is a new character’s impression of George Smiley: “A figure she took to be a doorman or a janitor: a stout, hurried little man with pouchy cheeks and thick-framed spectacles who opened her door and put out his hand to lift her up out of the car. She judged he was wearing a second-hand suit. It was well made but not for him.”

Or how about this description of Berlin, in the days when the Wall was still up, spying was the game, and the stakes were deadly? 

“The Western zone was almost garish: consciously or otherwise, the inhabitants accented their business clothes with shocks of scarlet and azure; they talked loudly and professed forceful opinions as if to make the point to the others behind the Wall. By comparison, East Berlin was a muted city. Even if you could find bright colours, you might choose something quieter. It was part of the landscape that standing out was unwelcome: you knew you were observed, but that didn’t mean it was wise to court attention.”

Or, as a final example of the sure-handedness with which the son has adopted the writing style of the father, there is this moment in the plot when Smiley realises he is being followed: “The moment of change was silent, and Smiley could not have said how he knew. He just did, the way he sometimes had before, in a half-dozen cities throughout a long and nervous career. His eye fell on three men idling on the far side of the road, then moved away. A car went past, and another in the opposite direction. Nothing was wrong, and yet something was.” 

You cannot have good writing without a good yarn, and this plot is gripping.

A Russian assassin arrives in London to kill a Hungarian émigré who is working as a publisher. Instead, he confesses all to the publisher’s assistant and a chain of events is triggered that will take the reader to Berlin, Vienna and Budapest — all the Cold War hunting grounds of spies and villains.

True to form, this isn’t the easiest of reads, and there were times when I wasn’t immediately up to speed with developments, but that was also the case with all the better Le Carré novels, and with complexity comes richness of plot. 

It was a gamble to take on the characters, the world, of a masterful writer, and to do so in the knowledge that it is so easy to be condemned for it. 

However, for me, the gamble has paid off, and most reviews following the launch of this novel seem to concur that Le Carré’s legacy is safe in his son’s very capable hands. 

We see in a foreword to the book Harkaway’s confident understanding of his father’s work: “Smiley stories are not in the end about spying. Smiley’s Circus was the depiction of intelligence work, which for a lot of people — whether they know it or not — framed the Cold War. His was the grim, unrelenting and unacknowledged theatre of espionage, bounded by the threat of nuclear annihilation, fought through a mosaic of countries shoehorned into a binary international conflict, and ultimately unwinnable because victory of any real meaning lay in another arena entirely.

“The novels were both a snapshot of the moment and a window on the soul. Success, tacitly, meant something else: finding humanity in the deadlocked shadows, making the world better rather than worse as you go along, looking for a way to be kind in a context which favoured the cruel.” 

Welcome back, George Smiley. I eagerly await your next adventure.