George Smiley had people, Karla had choices. Dedicated readers of le Carré’s oeuvre will recognise the deliberate riff on the title of one his unforgettable novels and that of the book by Nick Harkaway, le Carré’s son. Le Carre also wrote a novel (A Perfect Spy) about his father. Harkaway’s remembrance of his father is of a completely different kind. He is not trying exorcize his past. On the contrary he is trying – with remarkable success – to relive his father’s fictional world by bringing back le Carré’s most memorable character George Smiley and the people, the institutions that made his life, his loyalties, his disillusionments and his humanity.
‘Karla’s Choice: A John le Carré Novel,’ Nick Harkaway and John le Carré, Viking, 2024.
Le Carré had a habit of resurrecting Smiley from retirement. Harkaway does the same in this novel. He catches Smiley at a most unusual time in his life. Smiley has retired from the Circus where Control still sits on the fifth floor holding all the strings. Smiley is reconciled to his beautiful wife, Ann, and for once is enjoying domestic bliss. But deep down there is something clawing at his heart that causes him incredible anguish. This is the death of Alec Leamas, his friend and colleague, who had been shot on the Berlin Wall. Smiley was an eyewitness to that killing. He was urging Leamas to jump on the western side as bullets felled him. Leamas, as readers of The Spy who Came in from the Cold will recall, was sent on a most dangerous mission into East Germany and the Soviet Union. Control had lied to him about the real target of the mission. Smiley had not been able to accept Control’s deception and his utter lack of morality.
This book is situated in the immediate aftermath of Leamas’s death just as le Carré’s A Legacy of Spies was placed in the years intervening between Call for the Dead and The Spy who came in from the Cold.
Smiley is back in action in this book as are his people – Ann, Jim Prideaux, Peter Guillam, Connie Sachs, Millie McCraig, Mendel, Toby Esterhase and in passing General Vladimir; Control, of course; Bill Haydon makes a couple of cameo appearances and there is the looming presence of the ghost of Alec Leamas. All the le Carré coinages are here – lamplighters, scalphunters, tradecraft, deadletter boxes, treff, safehouses and so on. But there is one significant difference so far Smiley is concerned and this is the reason for italicising the words ‘in action’ above.
In all previous Smiley novels, the eponymous protagonist had been the backroom case officer – analysing intelligence, taking back backbearings, thinking inside out, pouring over files, interviewing people who can provide vital leads and information. He is never out in the field engaging in acts of derring-do. Yes, there was the first-hand investigation in Hamburg and then the dash through Schleswig-Holstein in Smiley’s People but Smiley was essentially what in le Carré lingo was called the juju man – always reflective, often puzzled and for ever cleaning his glasses on the lining of his silk tie. In this novel, all these recognisable facets of Smiley are there but he is also out there in the field to the extent of actually going into the cold by crossing the Iron Curtain and being present in Budapest the scene of action and then driving at break-neck speed to drive into Czechoslovakia and then flying onwards to safety in London. Smiley is in action perhaps because he is much younger. He is also witness to a peppering of violence in Budapest which leaves one his officers – a scalphunter – dead. This is a reminder that Smiley in his youth, after being recruited into the Circus, had spent some terrifying years behind the lines in Nazi Germany. Smiley thus knew the game and the thrill of the chase and the escape.
The escape from Budapest is the only somewhat implausible part of the novel. It leaves one wondering if le Carré would have done it differently. I don’t want to give away the plot and the storyline but Smiley rushes into Budapest, against Control’s explicit instructions, to exfiltrate two women who are not only in danger of being killed but are in a position to provide valuable information about the whereabouts of a former Karla agent who has gone missing. Smiley’s recall from retirement and devotion to Ann is on an order from Control who believes George Smiley – and only George Smiley – can find the missing Russian agent who when found will be a source of invaluable intelligence.
Also read: In John Le Carré’s Swan Song, Commitment, Betrayal and a Love Affirmed
This brings the reader to another of Smiley’s people though not quite his favourite one. This is Karla who through intrigue and ruthlessness has risen to be the head of the notorious Thirteenth Directorate of Soviet intelligence. Readers know from a flashback sequence in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy that Smiley and Karla had met in the mid-1950s in a jail in Delhi and that Karla had recruited the mole, Bill Haydon. Readers of Smiley’s People will also remember that at the end of that novel Smiley had engineered the defection of Karla. But in this novel, all these (except the Delhi encounter) in terms of chronology lie in the future. Here Karla has just risen to power and is working to erase traces of his past, including friends and comrades who know about his antecedents. In this sense, this is Karla’s debut and he is already making choices that bear his trademark ruthlessness.
Nick Harkaway leads off with a saying attributed to Picasso as one of the epigraphs to the novel. Picasso apparently said, “I can fake a Picasso as well as anyone.’’ Harkaway has not produced a fake le Carré. Far from it. He has only brought back to life some of le Carré’s characters, especially George Smiley. If le Carré was a master of creating atmosphere (recall the opening of The Spy who came in from the Cold and the closing pages of Smiley’s People both depicting the Wall and the crossing), Harkaway doesn’t venture down that path. There are rare exceptions and he nearly matches le Carré.
Take the following as an example: “Take a perfectly reasonable city and make it impossible: think of Venice, with every second calle or sottoportego opening not on to another road but a canal, and only comparatively few bridges to get you from one maze to another. Berlin was different, the Wall a gash down the centre of its face, but the same rules applied. Streets were broken in the middle by a no man’s land of barbed wire and searchlights; schools were cut off from their playgrounds and warehouses from markets. Somewhere, Guillam had heard, there was a boatyard with no route to the water. The map of the war was burned forever on to what should have been reconstruction, and the city existed in a frozen parody of peace.’’
Thus, Nick Harkaway is his father’s voice.
Rudrangshu Mukherjee is chancellor and professor of history, Ashoka University. Views are personal.
