The directive, “Don’t!”, is something that gets bandied around the creative arts pretty frequently. Don’t follow up a hit pop record with a woolly concept album, don’t turn a beloved film in to a cheesy stage musical, and don’t revive a hugely successful literary franchise when the creator of said franchise has passed to the other side.
But when did creative types ever listen to wise counsel?
Until recently, Nick Harkaway, 51, was an author of speculative fiction with several well-received novels to his name. Now he has decided to step into the shoes of his late father, John le Carré, in order to revive the MI6 operative George Smiley: Le Carré’s most beloved creation and possibly one of the most famous literary spies of all time.
It’s a brave move – and possibly reckless one.
Harkaway appears keenly aware of the danger of his undertaking throughout, however, and constantly attempts to manage readers’ expectations. In the preface, he explains that “there were always supposed to be more Smiley books”, adding that he grew up while his father was writing them, and so surely he knows them as well as anyone. While he wants to stay true to the source material, he tells us, he also has his own ideas of how to take things forward.
So, in what is presumably the first of a series of further Smiley adventures, Karla’s Choice sees Harkaway revisit the spy in the decade between his father’s most famous books: 1963’s The Spy Who Came in From The Cold and 1974’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. He is nothing if not faithful in recreating both the chilly atmosphere of the Cold War period, and in resurrecting several characters who will be familiar to anyone with an elephant’s memory of those books.
When we meet Smiley again in this novel, it is 1963, and he has retired from the Circus (MI6), notionally to spend more time with his upwardly mobile wife in whose world he “moved like a kind of fog”. Smiley, Harkaway concedes, is not “a wag by any measure, and not a dancer or a gay blade, but surely an affable, intelligent fellow with a wit so dry you could mistake – many had – for dullness”.
Such perceived dullness, however, is likely to be key for one whose work it is to remain undercover. He is brought back into the Circus when a Russian agent arrives in London to kill a man, but who then abruptly changes his mind, deciding he would much rather appear in a film with Peter Sellers – an amusing sidebar Harkaway perhaps sadly fails to pursue. The agent’s target had been a Hungarian émigré with a complicated past, and though this Hungarian seems to pose no serious threat to the British state, Smiley is nevertheless charged to find him, a task he undertakes assiduously for 300 pages.
Modern spy thrillers tend towards crash, bang and wallop. How else is Netflix to adapt them otherwise? But Le Carré’s – and now Harkaway’s – Smiley is cut from a different cloth. Like James Bond, he is a British spy, but in many ways he was, and remains, the very antithesis of 007. Where Bond was forever swayed by fast cars, clever gadgets and beautiful women, Smiley is a methodical, sensible, nine-to-five operative who always puts in the hours at the office.
Proper spy work, we are reminded, is mostly “waiting”, and that “the best intelligence work is slow”. So Karla’s Choice never quite quickens the pulse – but then it never bores either. Instead, it diligently follows its narrative arc with deliberate attention to detail all the way to the end. Harkaway is a fine writer, and if he often feels a little too beholden to his father’s muse here, then perhaps that is inevitable, at least for now.
Does he succeed in reviving the franchise? He does, yes, but a little more Harkaway next time and a little less Le Carré might ultimately serve its future better.
