Take a perfectly reasonable city and make it impossible: think of Venice, with every second calle or sottoportego opening not on onto another road but a canal, and only comparatively few bridges to get you from one maze to another. Berlin was different, the Wall a gash down the center of its face, but the same rules applied. Streets were broken in the middle by a no man’s land of barbed wire and searchlights; schools were cut off from their playgrounds and warehouses from markets. Guillam had heard there was a boatyard with no route to the water. The map of the war was burned forever on to what should have been reconstruction, and the city existed in a frozen parody of peace.
Of course, this paragraph immediately identifies the author as John le Carré — the setting of Berlin; the timeframe (when the Wall was still up); the mention of Peter Guillam, acolyte of George Smiley in Le Carré’s wonderful Cold War novels.
And yet, it’s not. Le Carré’s son Nick Harkaway (he uses a pen name, as did his dad), an author of several thrillers and dystopian-future novels, has written his own novel featuring George Smiley, his father’s greatest creation. In the forward, he is self-deprecatingly (and appealingly) honest:
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. To those people [..] I can only apologize.
Ok, enough background. What of the novel itself?
Karla’s Choice is set in the period between The Spy Who Came In From the Cold and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. The events of The Spy Who.. are still fresh in everyone’s mind at MI6: their man Alec Leamas died crossing the Berlin Wall along with Liz Gold, while the East German Mundt, who is at least a double agent if not more, is safe in his position due to Leamas’ death. George Smiley has resigned in the wake of this debacle, and now spends his time with his aristocratic and beautiful wife Ann.
A Russian assassin arrives in London, but has a crisis of conscience and decides not to complete his assignment of killing Mr Banati, the Hungarian head of a small publishing house. Instead, the Russian meets Susanna Gero, the copy editor, also Hungarian, who leaps into action: locking him into the office, attempting to find Mr Banati at his flat, and finally bringing the Russian to MI6. As it turns out, Mr Banati has already fled. Control, the enigmatic and secretive head of MI6, calls Smiley in from retirement to deal with this situation: find Mr Banati and figure out why the Russians are after him.
I thought Harkaway started off tentatively, but gained in self-assurance over the course of the book. He maintains the le Carré style of switching observations from person to person, making it seem as though everyone is constantly under observation or having their actions analysed post-facto.
The next thing she did was — Toby Esterhase later told her, as if she hadn’t already known — completely mad.
The novel is full of familiar characters: the dashing young Peter Guillam, the elegant and distinctly ‘foreign’ Hungarian Toby Esterhase, the aristocratic Bill Haydon, Jim Prideaux who is the authority on all things Czechoslovakian, the donnish Connie Sachs with the infinite memory. All of them are younger than their versions in Tinker Tailor, and the author has quite effectively captured this: Connie has just started drinking, Bill is arrogant but not quite as confident, and Jim is lithe and active since this is set before he was shot in the shoulder. The supposedly unforgettable Ann Smiley is as mysterious as ever. Karla, Smiley’s opposite number in the KGB, is not yet well known, but given the title of the book, the reader knows he will make an appearance.
This would be perhaps too much of the le Carré style and world, so it’s a good thing that Harkaway brings in a few new characters. The civilians, of course, are new, and so is Tom Lake, another boyish young operative who is more than he seems.
She had expected [Lake] to be excited, but the boyishness had evaporated from his face and for the first time he seemed to belong in Smiley’s world.
le Carré’s Circus was largely male, except for Connie. The other women who worked there were unnamed secretaries who made tea, typed up documents, and acted as den mothers. Harkaway’s novel has significantly more women characters. Susanna plays an increasing role over the course of the book; Millie McCraig was briefly mentioned in Tinker Tailor but is a full-fledged MI6 operative here. Katrin and Jessica are two of the ‘Bad Aunts’:
Drawn from every region and class of the fallen Empire which would hear her call, the Aunts were a brains trust dedicated to answering questions which would stump more conventional analysis.
le Carré’s Circus was also, as far as I can recall, 100% Caucasian: the ‘foreigners’ were East or West European. Here too, Harkaway has an update. Jessica is from Jamaica (‘who had travelled with her parents not on the Empire Windrush but a year earlier on the SS Ormonde’). Fake passports are made by Raghuraman Vishwakarma, who had worked at the Calcutta Mint before bringing his skills to London. I wouldn’t know if this is reflective of the real-life Circus of the time, but given the rapidly increasing diversity of London in the 1950s and 1960s when this book was set, I think it’s a welcome update.
Perhaps the most brilliant sections of the le Carré novels were when there was little action: a sense of patient but nerve-wracking unfolding of events, people waiting to hear from other participants via coded phone calls and encrypted radio transmissions, agents walking along streets waiting for the prickle in the back of the neck that tells them they are being watched. Harkaway captures this very well too.
My back was itching. Bill Haydon told me when I was still wet behind the ears: when you can feel the space behind you, when it feels crowded, that’s when you watch out.
There were a few moments that struck me as odd, mostly related to Susanna. She was drawn deep into an MI6 operation with no training or experience, the other characters suddenly used their own names with her instead of aliases, and there was what seemed like unlikely over-sharing of information with her. For some but not all of these events, the reasons become clearer later in the novel.
There is era-appropriate tradecraft, there are moral ruminations (some rather incomprehensible to me), and there is a rather nice inversion of the Tinker Tailor paradigm. Lastly, to get back to the quote at the beginning of this review, there is a wonderful sense of place as in all the Smiley books, but even more astonishing for this author who was not even born when the events of this novel took place.
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