Review by Annabel
When it was announced that Nick Harkaway, one of the lateJohn Le Carré’s sons, was going to write another Smiley novel, I rubbed my hands with glee. Karla’s Choice became my most anticipated read of the season. I believed that the much-loved characters were in the best hands, as I’ve enjoyed Harkaway’s own writing, (read my review of Tigerman), and Harkaway has written about how his own siblings urged him to do it.
In Karla’s Choice, Harkaway carries on the legacy of Smiley vs. Karla from Le Carré’s books to bring us a completely new novel that sits neatly between The Spy Who Came in From the Cold and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, beginning in 1963. It could have been awkward, but Harkaway is such a good novelist anyway, and of course he grew up with George Smiley, the Circus and their adversaries as his father was writing the books.
After the debacle in Berlin that led to Alec Leamas’ death (in TSWCiFtC) that Smiley blames himself among others for, he has retired for the first time to get to know his wife Ann again.
Having done away with the Circus as his too-demanding mistress, Smiley lived between libraries and love, and came as close to contentment as a man of his peculiar constitution is able. Without a tie and with several pairs of spectacles distributed around his reading-room lair, you might have taken him for anything from a schoolmaster recovering after the termtime’s excessive use of restorative alcohol to a bibliophile ticket collector newly pensioned from the Cornish Riviera Express.
In the early spring of 1963, there was a rumour – unconfirmed and a little scandalous – that George Smiley might almost be happy.
He and Ann are due to travel to Geneva and on to Vienna and St Moritz – but the arrival of a sportscar driven by Amelia ‘Millie’ McCraig (introduced in A Legacy of Spies) signifies trouble. She is there to persuade Smiley to come back, just for a couple of days, to do a job for Control that needs his subtlety. He’s already refused twice, but this time he does give in – we knew he would, naturally. He still plans to catch up with Ann in Vienna – she doesn’t believe it!
The job: to ‘walk in’ a young Hungarian emigré woman whose boss was, unknownst to her, a) not whom he seemed, and b) in fear of his life from Russian reprisals. Lázló Bánatí is a small publisher and his only other employee is Susanna Gero, who is his general assistant and slush pile reader. This day, she arrived at work to find him not there – he was usually first. Then a knock on the door and a sixtyish Slav-featured man was there. He spoke:
“I am Miki. I am here to kill your Mr Bánatí on the personal instruction of a senior officer of the Thirteenth Directorate for the Committee for State Security of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. But I have changed my mind. I am Miki, and God has told me I will not be a murderer any more.”
Instead of just calling the police, she locks him in the office, hot-foots it to Bánatí’s flat, finds that empty, and then goes with Miki in tow to the Adams Secretarial Agency where she was sure that Rose Jeremy would be able to help. She can – she puts a coded call through to Millie McCraig, who will later hand her over to Smiley to debrief her. As they enter the building, they bump into an old friend.
“George, my dear man! What on earth are you doing here?” It was a voice that belonged on horseback, equally ready to command cavalry or hounds.
[…] His mouth twitched at her assessing gaze; inclining his body slightly, in something not quite a bow, he put out his hand.
“Hello,” he said, meaning: would she like to go to bed? “I’m Bill.”
Lothario Bill Haydon is not the only character from TTSS that we’ll meet. Toby Esterhase, Jim Prideaux, Peter Guillam and Connie Sachs all feature too, plus Control himself. It took me right back to the original TV series with Alec Guinness. As much as I love and admired Gary Oldman as Smiley in the film, my Smiley is Alec Guinness, and he’s surely Harkaway’s too. I could imagine Ian Richardson as Bill Haydon saying the quote above too, can’t you? We meet interesting new characters too, including East End forger Raghuraman Vishwakarma, whom Harkaway says he would like to write more about… (Does that mean another book? I do hope so!)
As the search for Bánatí aka former Hungarian agent Ferencz Róka and his missing son, who seems to have sparked off this crisis, begins, Smiley will head first for Berlin. This is where Stasi officer Mundt, who had been Leamas’ target still plays a double game, but soon Smiley finds himself joined by Susanna – as none of the British team speak fluent Hungarian, setting her up as his travelling salesman’s secretary!
As you can imagine, things get complicated pretty fast as the numerous twists and turns play out and we move to Budapest; it’s absolutely thrilling to see the guys at work in the field. But I can hear you ask, ‘What about Karla?’ I’m not going to say a thing, other than that Harkaway has done something rather clever that his father would have been very proud of with the enigma that is Karla. You’ll just have to read the book for yourself to discover what.
Annabel is a co-founder and editor of Shiny New Books.
Nick Harkaway, Karla’s Choice (Viking, 2024). 978 0241714904, 320pp., hardback.
Buy at Blackwell’s via our affiliate links. (Free UK P&P)
