Karla’s Choice: A John le Carré Novel, by Nick Harkaway review 'a remarkable homage'

This work is not entirely unique – Adrian Conan Doyle wrote the pastiche The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes with the assistance of the novelist and Doyle biographer John Dickson Carr. But Karla’s Choice is curious, since Nick Harkaway is an acclaimed novelist in his own right as well as being the son of John le Carré (or of David Cornwell if one wishes to be precise). To be honest, I have read all of Harkaway’s work and most of le Carré’s. Harkaway gets his defence in sharpish with a clever epigraph attributed to Picasso – “I can fake a Picasso as well as anyone” and a more ambiguous line from Smiley’s People – “In the spy trade we abandon first what we love the most.”

But to the crux: it is absolutely first rate, as both a homage to le Carré and as a work in its own right. Harkaway has made the clever decision to write a canonical intercalation, a literary February 29th. It takes place in 1963, between The Spy Who Came In From The Cold and Tinker. Tailor, Soldier, Spy, but has to take into consideration other works (especially A Legacy Of Spies). It requires Phillipe Petit levels of tight-rope walking, balancing what the reader knows and what the characters know at that specific time: so Bill Haydon is still “one of us”, though his entitled smarm is apparent. Harkaway provides a note on his research and working method, and – although it may be different for other readers – I mentally saw Ian Richardson when Bill Haydon appeared rather than Colin Firth, and, of course, Beryl Reid was Connie Sachs. This stereoscopic approach to narrative means that if a character is introduced who isn’t in the later books, their situation comes with a built-in sense of jeopardy.

The plot’s trigger is a young Hungarian immigrant, Zsuzsanna, working for Bánáti & Clay, literary agency and who has dropped the indicative zeds. A man, Miki Bortnik, turns up at the door, prostrates himself, and tells her he has been sent by the Thirteenth Directorate of the USSR to assassinate Mr. Bánáti, but “God has told me I will not be a murderer any more”. Bánáti has done more than alter the spelling of his name, and Smiley is brought in from retirement as a final favour to Control, this case supposedly being the last little piece of house clearing from the Leamas misadventure. Except it is nothing of the kind.

Harkaway captures the feel of the novels with precision. I haven’t re-read the le Carré novels in a while, but the description of erratic plumbing in the Circus is literally apt and beautifully metaphoric: “You could hear the ribs of the building creak and the water pipes moan, and their burning Victorian radiators hiss and whisper; and you could feel that you were in some ways part of something, some enormous sleeping mystery that was the greater cause, that gave meaning to failure as well as success”. Harkaway’s own novels are so exuberant, I had reservations about the impersonation, but he manages the almost classical, tight-lipped restraint. It is there in the description of “a rumour – unconfirmed and a little scandalous – that George Smiley might almost be happy” and in the almost gnomic, apothegms of wisdom – Mitteleuropa is conjured with “in those places there is only now, and it goes back forever”. Can the reader detect Harkaway’s fingerprints? Slightly. The Aunts under Connie seem to make him twinkle, with the rooms of bric-a-brac like avant-garde sorcery. The relationship between Smiley and Anne is done with more demonstrative pathos.

The other ingenious aspect is the way Harkaway deals with Karla. It is not as gauche as an “origin story”, and Karla is still shrouded in mystery. Part of the plot is the weaving of the shroud. For those with eyes to see there are signs. One theme is – ironically – family as weakness (paging Dr. Freud), which reaches fruition in Smiley’s People. The most Harkaway-esque invention is the East German Mundt’s invention of “Gegner” – a fictional counter-intelligence operative he imagines, even play-acts, to attempt to think like the enemy. (Harkaway’s own debut, The Gone-Away World dealt with encountering one’s own simulacrum).

It is difficult to encapsulate what a remarkable achievement this novel is. In some respects it is more like theatre. I have seen (among others) Derek Jacobi, David Tennant and Maxine Peake as Hamlet – curiously, Patrick Stewart, as well as playing Karla was Claudius against Jacobi and Tennant’s Hamlets, and was breathtakingly completely different. They were all different yet recognisably Hamlet. In a way, forget about le Carré and Harkaway, maybe even Alec Guinness: what matters is that this is Smiley.

Karla’s Choice: A John le Carré Novel, by Nick Harkaway, Viking, £22