Publishing is a business. Authors are its brands and books its products. When, as sometimes happens, one of the bigger brands inconveniently dies or retires, there’s an understandable desire to keep the brand going and to attach its lucrative name to new products.
And why not? If it’s done well, everyone benefits – publishers, readers and authors’ estates. In the past 60 years, there have been few bigger brands than the late John le Carré, so it’s no surprise to find a posthumous outing with the words ‘A John le Carré novel’ plastered over the cover. Its author, Le Carré’s youngest son Nick Harkaway, is a well-established novelist in his own right, albeit in a different genre. He served his apprenticeship by completing his father’s last book, Silverview (2021).
Karla’s Choice stakes out its ground from the start. It’s another outing for George Smiley, one of 20th-century fiction’s best-known figures, and it deals with his long-running battle with his Russian counterpart, Karla, the yin to Smiley’s yang.
Harkaway tells us in a preliminary note that his father always intended that there should be more books in the nine-volume Smiley sequence. Karla’s Choice fills a small part of the ten-year gap in the fictional chronology between The Spy Who Came in From the Cold and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Set in 1963, the story opens with the arrest of a beautiful boy in East Germany and moves swiftly to the disappearance of László Bánáti, a London literary agent, from his office in Primrose Hill. Shortly afterwards, a Soviet assassin arrives. He’s had a change of heart and wants to defect to the West and act in a film with Peter Sellers.
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