Book Review: 'Karla's Choice' by Nick Harkaway
John Le Carré's youngest son channels the master
It's a missing chapter in his father's George Smiley series
Nick Cornwell writes as Nick Harkaway, and this isn’t his first novel - although it’s the first he’s published as deliberate homage in imitation of his father John Le Carré (David Cornwell), who passed away in 2020.
I reviewed the master’s last novel, Silverview, here. That book was published posthumously. Its story didn’t involve George Smiley, as fans might have hoped. In some ways, it was understandable that the manuscript had languished in a drawer. It was a mournful, end-of-life swan song for both a veteran spy and the Service that employed her. Le Carré may have felt the topic would be perceived as a last gasp, which it ended up being. In his afterword, Nick explained that he was reluctant to take up the task of editing it, fearing its unfinished status meant it would need rework. But he claimed it didn’t.
The title character of Karla’s Choice is the infamous eminence grise - the cold, vicious Soviet spymaster whose codename sounds like a woman’s and whose real identity is known to no one who has managed to survive his purges. The title might hint at a spoiler, echoing William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice, in which a Jewish mother during the Holocaust must make an impossible decision: Which of her two children will she send to certain death at the hands of the Nazis?
In the George Smiley series, Karla’s Choice occurs after the tragic demise of agent Alec Leamas in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold - and before the events of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and its sequels, The Honourable Schoolboy and Smiley’s People. (Our Game also features Smiley but not in this thread.)
The cover designer cleverly suggests bespectacled Smiley can’t get the fearful image of Karla out of his head.
A character trait of senior spymaster Smiley is his frustratingly unsuccessful efforts to retire from the Service. In this installment, he and his superior Control (whose real name is known to George but to few others) both feel some responsibility for the demise of Leamas. Their operative was gunned down along with his co-conspirator girlfriend trying to make it back over the Berlin Wall. The operation was a success, but the agent died - another paradox reminiscent of impossible choices.
At the outset here, George has decided he’d prefer a quiet life in the country. He also hopes to be more companionable to his chronically errant wife Ann, who uses his long field assignments as an excuse for her amorous, albeit temporary, affairs.
A mature gentleman - a Hungarian emigré who worked as a literary agent in London but may have been an undercover Eastern-bloc spy - has gone missing. The chaps at the Circus suspect he’s disappeared himself because he learned that one of Karla’s operatives had been sent to assassinate him. However, the hit-man failed for the understandable reason that he decided he would rather defect - requiring him to sing for his supper at the Circus.
But why would Control pull George out of retirement to track down an inconsequential, burnt-out Communist spy? Well, if Karla would risk killing the fellow on British soil, the evil genius must have a potent reason - one so serious that failing in the operation would be his undoing.
And any facts that would be the undoing of Karla would be gold indeed to his adversaries.
Harkaway is an experienced and accomplished novelist. In his bio on Amazon, he says, “I also write morally disimproving thrillers as Aidan Truhen.” He doesn’t define the term, and I have no idea how a reader might be disimproved morally or in any other way by the experience of reading a thriller.
As to whether Karla’s Choice works as worthy of the Le Carré opus, the answer is decidedly yes. The first two chapters started slowly, I thought, but Le Carré himself often took a while to get to the point, especially if he was strewing subtle clues along the way. After I’d finished the book, I went back to reread those pages, and they did make perfect sense.
Nick Harkaway is either a conscientious student who successfully rose to his tutor’s level - or he’s a medium channeling his father’s wise spirit.
Both, perhaps. Much as I fret for poor George’s inability to say no when duty calls, I hope there will be more.
Now, Smiley’s story has four installments, as well. Read them all!