LONDON – George Smiley, the subtle fictional spymaster navigating treacherous Cold War currents, is back.
And so, somewhat surprisingly, is his creator, John le Carré.
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Four years after the spy writer’s death at the age of 89, comes a new thriller, “Karla’s Choice.” Billed as “a John le Carré novel,” it was written by Nick Harkaway, whose qualifications for the job include seven published novels, a lifetime of reading le Carré — and the fact he is the late author’s son.
After decades avoiding his famous father’s shadow, like Smiley trying to leave the intelligence agency known as the Circus, he was drawn back in.
Apprehensive author
Le Carré left a note asking his family, as custodians of his estate, to help his works live on and find new readers. They took that as permission to write new books. But Harkaway, who made his name with sci-fi thrillers including “The Gone-Away World,” “Angelmaker” and “Titanium Noir,” was apprehensive about being the one to do it.
“I would go so far as to say terrified,” said 51-year-old Harkaway, whose real name is Nicholas Cornwell. Le Carré was the pen name of his father, David Cornwell.
“It’s this piece of 20th-century literature that defines a genre and potentially a historical period. This body of work is immense. And it’s my father’s universe,” he said. “There’s every reason for people to be skeptical.”
Sitting in his spacious north London home — in the “very uncomfortable” writing chair that once belonged to his father – Harkaway has relaxed a bit now that the book has been published (by Viking) to largely glowing reviews. The Daily Telegraph said Harkaway’s “recreation of the Smiley milieu is note-perfect,” while The Guardian declared the novel “a treat.”
“Karla’s Choice” is set in 1963, months after the end of le Carré’s breakthrough novel, “The Spy Who Came in From the Cold.” It opens with a hitman, dispatched by Moscow to assassinate a Hungarian publisher in London, having a last-minute crisis of conscience.
A recently retired Smiley is pulled in for one last job. He’s assured it will be short and simple. Famous last words.
The peril-filled saga that follows fleshes out the early relationship between Smiley and the Soviet spymaster Karla, who becomes his nemesis in later works like “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” and “Smiley’s People.”
Childhood memories
Harkaway says that once he got over his terror, capturing Smiley’s voice came easily — he had literally grown up with it. Some of his earliest memories involve his father reading aloud draft pages of his works in progress.
“The formative moment in my life where I was actually learning to speak, was learning to use language, I was getting 90 minutes or more of George Smiley in my ear every day,” he said. “And so when I came to sit down to do this, I found that I did not have to turn the dial very far to find a voice that is absolutely my own, but which reads to people as being sufficiently of the le Carré mood.”
That mood is often dark. Le Carré had been a real-life Cold War intelligence agent, and his thrillers are steeped in the moral murk of the spy world. But bespectacled, understated Smiley – antithesis of that other famous fictional spy, James Bond — offers decency and hope.
Harkaway sees Smiley as “this compassionate, anonymous little everyman who can turn up and see the broken pieces of life on the floor and put them back together.”
There is a bit more humor in “Karla’s Choice” than in many of his father’s books, and female characters, including Smiley's wife Ann, get more space and voice.
“I had a flat-out ambition that the Circus and the Circus universe should not just be elderly, straight white men,” Harkaway said.
He acknowledges that women were often on the sidelines in his father’s work — a reflection of the male-dominated era, and of a complicated life. David Cornwell’s mother left when he was 5 years old, leaving him with his father, a charismatic conman. He didn’t see her again until he was 21. As an adult he had two long marriages — the second to Harkaway’s mother, Valerie Jane Eustace — and multiple affairs.
“On a fundamental level for him, his relationships with women were about absence and pain,” Harkaway said. “That got better over time. But when he was writing Smiley, that’s what came through. And that’s not my life.”
Grief and joy
Harkaway says working on the book didn’t bring “an Obi Wan Kenobi moment” in which an apparition of his father appeared to offer writing advice. But he found the experience “very moving.”
“Despite the fact that it’s … slightly a project that has grief attached to it, it’s still a joyful process,” he said.
It seems inevitable that more le Carré thrillers will follow. Harkaway also plans to continue writing under his own name and in his own style, with a sequel to “Titanium Noir” due to be published in April.
“Karla’s Choice” carries a double dedication: To David John Moore Cornwell, “father, husband, brother, son,” and to “John le Carré, novelist.”
“John le Carré was, among other things, a shield that my father created, because he was quite a shy guy,” Harkaway said. “John le Carré was kind of the suit that he put on to be able to do it all. And then David Cornwell was my dad. He was a terrible cook, he was a ping pong player of enormous aggression and flair … he was the person I lived with.
“I wanted with that dedication to thank them both. And also just to remind everybody, he was an awful lot of things to a lot of people.”