Next week, a new novel comes out featuring George Smiley, John le Carré’s meek, mild, fiercely intelligent Cold War spymaster.
Karla’s Choice will be the tenth book where Smiley plays a central role, yet this time there is a difference. It isn’t le Carré, who died in 2020, telling us the story, but his son Nicholas Cornwell (under his usual pen name of Nick Harkaway).
Harkaway, determined to continue and build on le Carré’s legacy, said earlier this month that his father had given him permission to ‘write into this world.’ Following Silverview (a le Carré novel Harkaway finished for his father after the author’s death), Karla’s Choice, we’re told, is set in the period between The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. It’s the time, in other words, of Swinging London and the crushed Prague Spring, of Harold Wilson, Edward Heath and, in the Kremlin, the bushy-browed Leonid Brezhnev.
Smiley speaks for the repressed and quietly desperate, those who can do the Times crossword in 20 minutes but receive a C-minus in bed
The notion of one writer carrying on the work of another is nothing new. Jane Austen’s truncated Sanditon has been completed in at least half a dozen ways by various authors. Alexander Dumas’s The Last Cavalier wasn’t published until 2005, when specialist Claude Schopp, having sleuthed round Europe for as many fragments of the book as he could lay his hands on, finally wrote its conclusion. Jack London’s The Assassination Bureau, Ltd, begun in 1910 and still incomplete at the time of his death, wouldn’t be published till 1963, developed and rounded off by the mystery writer Robert L. Fish. So common is the situation in literature, there’s even a special word for those who complete a deceased writer’s book or add sequels or prequels to their work, ‘continuators’. Given so many famous authors have died mid-sentence – Dickens with his Mystery of Edwin Drood, Robert Louis Stevenson and Weir of Hermiston, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s failure to outlive The Last Tycoon – you can understand why the job exists.
Yet Harkaway is a brave man to play continuator to his father: le Carré was one of the last literary superstars in the UK. In many ways he took over smoothly from Graham Greene, following his death in 1991, as Britain’s politically engaged Grand Old Man of Letters.
Smiley too is someone readers are possessive about – bookish men of a certain age often see themselves in the character, finding redemption in the very idea of him as a hero. Smiley speaks for the repressed and quietly desperate, those whose still waters run deep, who long to dominate social gatherings but end up quietly observing, who can do the Times crossword in 20 minutes but receive a C-minus in bed. These readers, among others, are protective, even proprietorial about him. Can anyone except le Carré himself – who, before turning to writing, worked for MI6 – credibly recreate that world?
Certainly, in the case of Ian Fleming – creator of the only British spy more famous than Smiley – the continuators have mostly done him proud. More Bond books have been written by other authors than were set down on paper by Fleming himself. Former Marine Commando John Gardner published 14 of them, starting with Licence Revoked. Raymond Benson wrote nine Bond novels (three of them film novelisations), and several short stories about 007. One of them intriguingly was set – before #MeToo, of course – in Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansion. Kingsley Amis, William Boyd, Jeffery Deaver, Anthony Horowitz and Sebastian Faulks have all thrown their hats into the ring (or at least, at Moneypenny’s hatstand).
Some have hit the target – Faulks, with his Devil May Care, is reputedly the uncrowned king of Fleming continuators – while others have botched the shot. Niall Gooch’s lethal hatchet job on comedian and ‘Young Bond’ author Charlie Higson’s first foray into adult 007 – ‘cringeworthy… preposterous… didactic… underpowered, hectoring’ – appeared in this very magazine.
The trick, Faulks suggested, was to immerse yourself utterly not only in the world of Bond but also Fleming himself. The original author only took six weeks to write a Bond novel, so Faulks did the same. ‘You don’t have those long moments where you ponder for about an hour: “What is he thinking now?” Bond doesn’t feel anything.’
Yet this, le Carré fans may say, is exactly the problem with recreating Smiley: he is all thought, all feeling. Can Harkaway pull it off? His earlier completion of his father’s novel – ‘will you finish something if I left it undone?’ le Carré reportedly asked him – was published to decidedly mixed reviews. Time magazine used words like ‘sketched out’ and ‘thinly drawn’ about the novel, adding, ironically, that it felt ‘unfinished.’ But in the case of Karla’s Choice, an original work, the signs are more promising.
As well as being le Carré’s son and growing up steeped in a certain sensibility, Harkaway is a writer known for literary mashups, for taking on the flavour of a particular author and simply sprinting with it. His 2013 book Angelmaker, reviewed in the Telegraph, was described as ‘an intricate and brilliant piece of escapism, tipping its hat to the twisting plots of John Buchan and H Rider Haggard… the labyrinthine secret Londons of Peter Ackroyd and Iain Sinclair, while maintaining an originality, humour and verve all its author’s own.’
Harkaway both looks and sounds eerily like his father. But can he write like him? Certainly, he himself is more than aware of the pitfalls of taking up the story of his father’s famous spy and the ropey intelligence centre, the ‘Circus’, where he worked.
‘I veer between confidence and existential terror’ the author told me by email:
‘Usually – with my more speculative writing – the question I’m asking at this point is “will people get the idea and follow me?” This is almost the opposite fear. Everyone has a sense of Smiley, so the question is whether I can deliver the character they love, even if he’s slightly different for each person. I think I have – but now’s when I find out.’
So will we all, this week, when Karla’s Choice is published.
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