Karla's Choice: A John le Carré Novel

March 27, 2025 8:33 PM

Karla's Choice is a novel by Nick Harkaway published by Viking Press on 24 October 2024. Karla's Choice is the first George Smiley continuation novel published after John le Carré's 2020 death. The novel is set in the time period between The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Nick Harkaway is the pen name of Nicholas Cornwell, the son of David Cornwell who wrote the original Smiley novels under the John le Carré pen name. While the cover identifies Harkaway as the author it also describes the book as "a John le Carré novel".

Karla's Choice is set in 1963, during the immediate aftermath of the events described in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and almost ten years before the events depicted in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Troubled by the death of field agent, Alec Leamas, and disaffected with The Circus (le Carré's fictional version of the British Secret Intelligence Service MI6), spymaster George Smiley has retired, apparently happily with his wife, Ann.

In the office of a small London literary agent, Szusanna Gero discovers that her fellow Hungarian émigré and employer László Bánáti has gone missing. On the same day a professional killer Miki Bortnik, arrives at the office with the intention of killing Bánáti, but apparently has a religious vision, and allows himself to be taken into the Circus by Gero, who acts with remarkable initiative and calmness under pressure. Smiley is once again brought out of retirement by Control and assigned the task of tracking down Bánáti.

posted by ashbury (7 comments total)

It's been a long time since I read a le Carré book. Like, so long that if I read any of them again they would be brand new to me. That said, what I do remember was the great dialogue that didn't often indicate who was speaking, terms and expressions that I didn't understand, seemingly meaningful things happening that weren't explained until later, and what seemed like unnecessarily long details about trivial things. This all may sound like it's a negative but these are all part of the reason why we love le Carré, right?

I'm not the person to say whether Harkaway imitated his father's style really well, moderately well or badly but my faulty memory feels like it was a pretty good match. Full disclosure, I'm somewhat biased since I really, really, really like Harkaway's writing, including his novels under his alter ego Aidan Truhen.

I felt that the descriptions of people and places were visceral, the dialogue sharp, and the plot was believable and fast-paced. Smiley and Gero were well-developed as the central characters; the secondary characters, not so much which was okay because they weren't intended to be. I might have one quibble about Alec Leamas: while not necessary to understand the plot, if you haven't read The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (or forgot everything about it) then you won't understand some of what's driving Smiley. Leamas is also a bit of a ghost at times, talking to Smiley, which also felt a little off to me.

All in all, I enjoyed the book; I looked forward to reading it when I was doing other things and finished it in just a few days. This is saying something because I often take weeks to finish a book of this length.
posted by ashbury at 8:55 PM on March 27 [2 favorites]

Nick is an old friend of mine! I wasn't terribly surprised he eventually continued his father's literary legacy; his own fiction is so unique and complex that I wonder if writing something a little more straightforward like a spy novel was a welcome break.
posted by Kitteh at 5:09 AM on March 28 [1 favorite]

I've lent out my copy and I can't recall the exact wording in the foreword about the way readers would approach his "John le Carré novel", but I came to it with malice aforethought. Especially so as I didn't much enjoy the two Harkaway novels I've read, despite recommendations from trusted sources and the genre, influences, etc. all being things I like. The sentences in both The Gone-Away World and Angelmaker just went on and on and became so convoluted and too-clever-by-half that I found myself constantly thinking "get to the fucking point" and that feeling extended to the books as a whole after a while. And yet, despite thinking there's no way I'd accept this story as canon (though, as noted in the foreword, le Carré didn't write a franchise as we think of them today), Harkaway emulating his father's more straightforward prose style sanded off most of the tics that bother me and I ended up enjoying the novel far more than I had expected to.

He's better at writing women than le Carré was (one would almost have to be), though I'm still not quite sure how I feel about getting a real look at Smiley's marriage or that it was ever happy. I'm also of two minds about seeing Smiley in the field rather than there just being allusions to what he did during the war.

While I knew it was fan service as I read it, I enjoyed the time with Toby Esterhase, especially him sticking up for "rootless cosmopolitans" and wish he'd been in it more, especially as he is Hungarian. It was also interesting to see Mundt post-The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. A throwaway reference to the wonderfully bleak and cynical The Looking-Glass War felt like fan service for me alone.

Minor nitpickery: there were a couple factual errors that I don't think le Carré would have made given how much research he'd put into each novel. An anti-aircraft train strikes me as anachronistic for the Russo-Japanese War what with it predating the first deployment of aircraft in combat and I think (again I don't have the book to hand) he referred to the Special Boat Service when at the time it would have been the Special Boat Company.
posted by Strutter Cane - United Planets Stilt Patrol at 5:10 AM on March 28

Kitteh: "Nick is an old friend of mine! I wasn't terribly surprised he eventually continued his father's literary legacy; his own fiction is so unique and complex that I wonder if writing something a little more straightforward like a spy novel was a welcome break."

Get out! Is he as clever and humorous in person?
posted by ashbury at 6:31 AM on March 28

He's lovely and has a top-tier chocolate fudge cake recipe. He was part of Barbelith back in the late 90s/early 00s, which is how I met him. I used to go over to the UK a lot to hang with Barbelith people and he was one of them!
posted by Kitteh at 6:50 AM on March 28 [1 favorite]

Today I learned about Barbelith! It sounds very interesting and it’s too bad that it doesn’t exist anymore. I bet you miss it but at least you’ve got some good memories of your time there, and chocolate fudge cake.
posted by ashbury at 8:28 AM on March 28 [1 favorite]

Barbelith is also how I met my husband, who brought me over here once Barbelith finally folded for good.
posted by Kitteh at 9:16 AM on March 28 [1 favorite]