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. We all have our dreams.
Bánáti’s personal assistant, Susanna Gero, copes admirably with both emergencies. Like Bánáti, she’s a refugee from communist Hungary. She is soon talking to a familiar cast of characters from the Circus, Le Carré’s stand-in for MI6. Smiley, bitterly disillusioned after the events of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, has retired from the Service. He reluctantly agrees to debrief Susanna.
One thing leads to another. Smiley is rapidly embroiled in a murky, often brutal affair involving the Circus’s key Stasi asset, Mundt, as well as the search for Bánáti and the reason why the powerful Thirteenth Directorate of Moscow Centre so badly wants him dead.
From the start, Karla’s Choice feels as if it belongs in Le Carré’s universe. It’s not just the familiar people, slang and procedures; Harkaway channels his father’s oblique, allusive narrative technique, forcing the reader to strain to understand what’s happening. Best of all, Smiley and his colleagues feel authentic.
But does the novel work on its own terms, rather than as an effective pastiche? There were moments in the first 150-odd pages when I had my doubts. This was partly down to simple confusion: names bombard the reader from all directions – first names, surnames, cover names, nicknames. It can be hard to remember who’s who. Mini lectures and ruminations occasionally impede the smooth flow of the story like lumps in custard. And some of the passages between Smiley and Lady Ann, his wife, may make more cynical readers feel a little queasy.
But persevere. My doubts were entirely swept away in the second half of the book when the narrative moves abroad to East Germany, Austria, Hungary and Portugal. Harkaway shrugs off the weight of his father’s legacy and lets his story tell itself.
And what a story. It has the pace and drama of a very fine thriller as well as a moral dimension that harmonises perfectly with Le Carré’s own novels. It’s beautifully written, too. The Circus may be under new management but it’s in safe hands. Let’s hope we shall have more of it.
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