Book Review: Karla's Choice by Nick Harkaway
A worthy addition to the greatest spy franchise of all time.
Penguin, 2024
‘Please sit down, and tell me how I can help you.’
‘Do you work for Mr Smiley?’
He laughed, a single soft chuff of noise. ‘Sometimes I think so.’
For transparency, I should confess my passion – or rather, obsession – with John le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (Hodder & Stoughton, 1974). I have read, listened to and watched this masterpiece – in all of its myriad forms – so many times I can quote passages from the book, verbatim. It’s also one of the major literary inspirations for my own novel, Dark Century. Naturally, when Penguin announced a new novel set in le Carré’s universe, I was very, veryexcited. Nick Harkaway – le Carré’s son – is, in his own right, a brilliant speculative novelist, and having devoured his future-crime thriller Titanium Noir (Corsair, 2023), I was confident he’d make the murky world of the Circus (le Carré's nickname for British Intelligence) entirely his own.
Harkaway’s prose is crisp without falling into pastiche, excelling in the note-perfect dialogue of the Circus’ personnel; from Toby Esterhase’s delightful 'imperfect English', to Control's perpetual opaqueness. Karla's Choice felt like greeting – if not old friends – then certainly old colleagues; a dramatis personae plucked from le Carré's debut Call For the Dead (Gollancz, 1961) to the final act of the 'quest for Karla' with Smiley’s People (Hodder & Stoughton, 1979); and everything beyond and between.
Chronologically, Karla’s Choice neatly bridges the gap between The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (Gollancz & Pan, 1963) and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. If his father's skill was characterised from carefully deconstructing Moscow Centre’s elegant deception in Tinker, then Harkaway's lies in revealing, piecemeal, Karla’s meteoric rise to the top of Soviet Intelligence without giving toomuch away.
The star, undoubtedly, is George Smiley, arguably at his happiest and most fragile: compelled by duty, yet haunted by his own calculus leading to Alex Leamas' demise on the Berlin Wall in From the Cold. Here, we see a version of Smiley un-resigned to his eventual fate, blissfully ignorant of what's to come. The women in Karla's Choice are worth a special mention: from Millie McCraig and Connie Sachs' expanded authority, to Hungarian newcomer Susanna Gero's fiery impulsiveness (a proto-Westerby, perhaps), to the seed of Ann Smiley's heartbreaking infidelity; this more rounded ensemble cast adds a new and most welcome dimension to le Carré's estate.
This review originally appeared in Dispatch Edition #1.
The Dispatch is a monthly roundup by British speculative fiction writer, Jordan Acosta. News, short reviews and more, published every first Thursday. You can subscribe at jordanacosta.co, and read previous editions, here.
