By Peter Craven
Nick Harkaway revives his late father’s characters in Karla’s Choice.
Karla’s Choice
Nick Harkaway
Viking, $34.99
John le Carré was one of history’s more extraordinary popular writers, and it’s part of his potent legacy that invented the language and the idiom of how the complex business of the double agent invested in the mirror of a double image world.
This reaches its peak in the great Cold War books The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Smiley’s People. The former was made into a film with Richard Burton, as le Carré not only lends himself to dramatisation, the greatest of the versions are superior to the literary originals. The Night Manager miniseries with Hugh Laurie is incontestably superior to the novel. Le Carré’s son, Nick Harkaway, has been involved in this literary endeavour: a couple of years ago he completed his late father’s novel Silverview and the upshot was somewhat enfeebled.
None of which diminishes the fascination of Karla’s Choice in which Harkaway does his best to fill in the blanks of the years between Spy and Smiley.
Karla’s Choice is an attempt to write a literary spy novel in the grand manner, and it exploits a dense rhetorical manner in the way it embroiders, then turns on its head the moral paradoxes of an enigmatic heartbreaking world.
A Hungarian girl works as a literary agent’s assistant and sits all day as he fiddles with manuscripts. The editor also hails from Hungary but was forced out and has set up shop in London. He is, however, haunted by the figure of a young boy who has the key to his heart and may be seriously at risk.
Nick Harkaway, John le le Carré’s son, with his new novel.Credit: AP
Meanwhile, all sorts of figures crowd the narrative when the heroine becomes involved with the so-called Circus, and Control, the agency’s merciless overlord. Fished out of retirement for one last fling is the agnostic and illusionless figure of George Smiley. His quiet but brilliant spy mastering dominates Karla’s Choice. There is also a fierce and grand old woman, sometime intimate of the old lefty editor who pines for the boy.
Karla’s Choice is at its most successful in the delineation of Smiley and Harkaway’s best quality is his depiction of the old spy’s reluctant ruthlessness and his congenital gentleness, his purity of heart in the face of the necessary brutality of a world that sacrifices human lives for the sake of a battered and ambivalent principle.
The author makes it a bit easy for himself by lifting characters from extant work. There is the recurrent ironic voice of Leamas, and then there are figures like Jim Prideaux, another recurring le Carré character. He plays a significant if minor role and Ann, Smiley’s wife, is a more ambiguous figure in Karla’s Choice (there is a weird scene where Smiley, in Vienna on serious business, tries to hook up with her).
It’s as if the massive circumstantial detail of the classic books is fair game for Harkaway. This has its charm, but it also turns the background into the main game.
So it’s a strange sort of mix Harkaway has allowed himself, and it comes with some rather excitable writing in the face of a main plot that never takes centre stage. But this does not stop Karla’s Choice from having a consistent fascination.
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