John Le Carré 2.0?

 Michael - Alternate Thursdays

 

Smiley and the Circus are back. No, it’s not a lost manuscript discovered after David Cornwall’s death, but a completely new novel written by Cornwall’s son Nicolas, who writes under the name Nick Harkaway. 

Harkaway is no beginner. He’s written seven other successful thriller-style novels with futuristic settings. I admit that I haven’t read any of them, but they were well received and one won an award and was shortlisted for the Arthur C Clarke award for the best science fiction novel of the year published in the UK. The recently released Karla’s Choice is his first excursion into the sixties and the labyrinthine world of cold war spies that his father so convincingly created.

Well, that’s not quite true. Harkaway finished the last Le Carré book, Silverview, after his father’s death. To me that ending felt rushed and somehow unsatisfying, and I wasn’t surprised to learn that Le Carré had left it unfinished. So I picked up Karla’s Choice with mixed feelings. I wanted to go back to that world, but I wanted to go there with John Le Carré. His sardonic writing and smooth yet gripping prose led to his books being among my favorites and always mentioned when I’m asked about the writers I admire and who influenced me. Obviously, Harkaway was very close to Le Carré and no doubt knew more than the ordinary reader about the world of Smiley’s Circus, but would that be enough? Harkaway recognizes the problem. In his introduction to the book he writes:

“There will be people who love the book whatever it is, because their attachment to George Smiley and the Circus is so deep that any slight touch of his hand is enough to bring them joy. There will be others who, for the exact same reason, cannot conceive of reading it and whose hackles rise at the mention of my absurd hubris.”

Gary Oldman as George Smiley

I finished the book last night so I suppose I haven’t digested it completely yet. The plot is intriguing. Susanna, a refugee from Hungary after the Russian invasion of 1956, is the PA to a literary agent in London. One morning she arrives to discover he is not at work and shortly thereafter a man who identifies himself as a Russian assassin sent to kill her employer arrives. He has an epiphany when he sees her, believing (incorrectly) that Susanna is his daughter sent by God to make him change his ways. It seemed a rather unlikely start to a spy thriller and some of the writing seemed strained as though a different type of book was intended. But after that, either Harkaway got more into the period and his father’s style or I became more used to his different way of writing. Things seemed to flow. Control and Smiley felt right.

Naturally, the Circus is interested in the assassin. They are even more interested in the man he was sent to kill who has completely disappeared. Smiley badly wants to know why, and who the man really is. Slowly the connection with Karla, the head of the Moscow Central spy ring emerges. That eventually leads to an excellent climax in Hungary itself.

I struggled a bit with the sections concerning Smiley and his wife Ann. In the Le Carré books, this is always at arm’s length. Harkaway tries to develop the closeness between them and the distance. Somehow the former never quite convinced me. But generally the characters felt real and felt like Le Carré’s characters.

If Le Carré himself had written Karla’s Choice, I would probably be a bit disappointed. Maybe I would have given it four stars out of five. But four stars out of five is a very high rating on the Le Carré scale!

To sum up – would I recommend the book to fans of Le Carré’s Circus? Yes, I would. Would I read another Harkaway Smiley novel? Yes. It won’t be Le Carré’s writing, but Harkaway has the skill and style to pull off a posthumous Circus series if he wants to.