Karla's Choice

"Yes, it is. Let me be honest with you, when it first became public that Nick Harkaway was writing a George Smiley novel, I was very apprehensive. For me, the two most famous fictional spies in the world are James Bond and George Smiley. But I try to be open minded. I wondered, ‘If this is like the new Star Wars movies, is it going to be the dreadful Phantom Menace or is it going to be the brilliant Rogue One ?’ And I’m pleased to say it’s more Rogue One than Phantom Menace. I was absolutely blown away with how well Harkaway has written this book. It smells like the Circus. He brings a lot of characters back and reintroduces us to them. Where he was very clever was that instead of writing a brand-new George Smiley novel—like a lot of the James Bond or Tom Clancy continuation novels, which are set in the modern day—he identified that there was a nine year gap between The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy . He’s cleverly positioned his book within that timeline, so he’s able to refer back to the events of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. What’s really good about Karla’s Choice is you can read it as a standalone novel. So if you’ve never read any Smiley novels or le Carré you can pick it up. I think the intention was—and what I hope happens is—that you then go, ‘Oh, this is great. Now I want to read The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and the whole Smiley series. In terms of the language, it’s not pastiche. Harkaway has got his own style. But he did say in an interview that when he was a little boy—he was born in 1972—le Carré didn’t type and would dictate his novels to his wife over the breakfast table in the morning. So Harkaway acquired the world of Smiley when he was acquiring language and he didn’t have to move the dial too far. The other books that he has written are very different genres: this is the first time he’s written an espionage novel . But my God, it’s incredible. He really has kept that style of his father’s. Just meeting again the characters from the Circus—Toby Esterhase, Peter Guillam, Control, as well as new characters that he’s brought in. It’s a real revelation. This is the book of the year for me, he’s knocked it out of the park. So much so that I wrote him saying, ‘You’d better be writing more of these!’. Harkaway says that his father’s intention was always to write more Smiley novels than he did. The challenge was that because Alec Guinness played such a great George Smiley, le Carré always had Guinness in his head. That prevented him from writing more Smiley. Karla is Smiley’s old adversary, he is the head of the Thirteenth Directorate of Moscow Centre. Karla features in Tinker Tailor and the other Smiley books, but not in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold . Again, Harkaway has been clever here. It’s a bit like Jaws: you don’t see the shark very often. It’s the same with Karla: he’s used very sparingly. The book opens with a Soviet hood turning up to assassinate a Hungarian émigré in London, Bánáti. On the doorstep of the office, which is opened by Bánáti’s assistant, Susanna Gero, the assassin has a change of heart. He says God has told him not to kill Bánáti. When I first read this scene, I thought, ‘Really?’, but le Carré shared quite a few stories with young Nick about the secret world, and this actually happened. Spy fact is often stranger than spy fiction. The first half of the book is George Smiley interviewing people. He’s brought back into the service having left after the events of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold . I don’t want to reveal what happened for those who haven’t read that book, but it has a pretty jarring, emotional ending. Smiley has had enough and doesn’t want to be part of it but Control brings him back in, saying ‘I need you for this. What are the Soviets doing sending in assassins to London to kill this guy? Who was he? We need to know.’ And the plot unfolds from there. George Smiley is like Sherlock Holmes rather than James Bond. He’s not going out there and shooting people, bedding women and drinking too much alcohol. He is sitting down with a cup of tea and talking to people, and that’s how everything unravels. You asked me what I love in a spy novel, and this is it: the good spy novelists keep us guessing throughout the book. We’re trying to find out who it is or what it is before the author tells us. There are clues that are dropped, but also red herrings. In the second half of the book, they have an idea of what’s going on, and go on the hunt for Bánáti. You see George Smiley in some action sequences. He goes to Vienna, he goes to Berlin. You’ve got Hans-Dieter Mundt from The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and also appears in Call for the Dead, the very first Smiley novel. What I love about Karla’s Choice is that you get the history of Mitteleuropa or Central Europe. There’s a lot in this book about Hungary. In 1963 most people would have been aware of what happened in 1956 in Budapest. Today, not so much. Harkaway did a lot of research and was able to tell the history of Hungary without it being a history textbook. I thought that backdrop was very clever. Hungary was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire , then there was World War Two and the Soviets coming in as ‘liberators’, and then there was the Revolution. It’s a heady history. You’ll notice in some of my picks later on that food is very important to me in the books I read. They talk about Hungarian food in the book and the best compliment I can give Harkaway is that on finishing the book I went and bought some really good paprika and made a goulash. So the first half of Karla’s Choice is more mystery or detective book and the second is the pursuit and of course the reveal. I believe there are nine. Again, it’s the shark thing: in some of them he features very little. Smiley doesn’t come into The Spy Who Came in from the Cold till the very end, and it’s a fleeting appearance. But you find out more about that in this book. That’s where Harkaway has been very clever."