Karla’s Choice by Nick Harkaway: 5-star review

One of the most valuable things John le Carré left to his family upon his death four years ago was something that did not exist: the missing years in George Smiley’s career. As Britain’s most brilliant spy, Smiley can hardly have been idle during the key years of the Cold War between his role in Operation Windfall in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963) and his triumphant unmasking of the Circus Mole in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1963). 1974). Finally, with a new Smiley novel, Nick Harkaway, Le Carré’s youngest son, fills some of the void.

Harkaway is not the first son to pastiche a prominent father: see, for example, Adrian Conan Doyle’s The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes (1954). It is noted, however, that that book was published a quarter of a century after Sir Arthur’s death. To my jaded mind, Karla’s Choice feels like part of a stream of books and other projects intended to prevent the Le Carré brand from suffering the decline in reader interest that usually follows the death of a writer.

Whatever the motive, Karla’s Choice, Harkaway’s new recreation of the Smiley milieu, is absolutely perfect. We begin in 1963, when our hero resigned from the Circus in disgust at the sacrifice of his colleague Alec Leamas for the sake of completing Windfall. Harkaway does something his father never did: he shows us Smiley and his wife Ann enjoying each other’s company, giving us a sense of why their marriage worked at times.

It can’t last. Smiley’s crazy ex-boss ‘Control’ calls him back to the Circus, and, after a ding-dong about Leamas’ death – much better handled, I thought, than Peter Guillam’s late confrontation with Smiley on the same theme in Le Carré’s own novel from 2017 A Legacy of Spies – Smiley is persuaded to undertake another mission. The scene in which Ann discovers that her husband is torpedoing their new, carefree life is one of many written with the brilliance of le Carré at his best: ‘She wouldn’t crack. If she couldn’t get Smiley to keep smiling next to her, she absolutely refused to hold him with her tears.