I am always glad when one of those fellows dies, for then I know I have the whole of him on my shelf.” So said the ever tactless Lord Melbourne (1779-1848), speaking of the poet George Crabbe (1754-1832). He could have no such assurance now.
Continuation novels, to give them their respectable name, have been a thing since Kingsley Amis’s James Bond pastiche Colonel Sun, written under the pseudonym of Robert Markham, in 1968. Ian Fleming had published 11 Bond novels before his death, at the age of 56, in 1964. His estate was eager to continue production and offered Amis, who had written a “dossier” on Bond, £10,000 for the job. The book was not much admired but there have now been more than 50 Bond continuations.
Other literary estates have followed suit. There’s been a new Poirot, a new Miss Marple, a new Lord Peter Wimsey, a new Marlowe and so forth. Sebastian Faulks contrived a new Jeeves and Emma Thompson has given us several new Peter Rabbits. And now here is a new George Smiley, written by John le Carré’s youngest son, Nick Harkaway.
Harkaway (a pseudonym chosen by Nicholas Cornwell so as not to ride on his father’s coat-tails, but also emulating his own use of a pseudonym) has previously published eight fantasy/science-fiction novels in his own right, as well as beginning a thriller series under yet another pseudonym, Aidan Truhen.
In 2021, Harkaway oversaw publication of Le Carré’s posthumous novel Silverview, which Le Carré had fully completed in 2014 but decided not to publish. In an afterword, Harkaway said his father had asked him once, on Hampstead Heath, to complete any unfinished work he left: “One writer to another, father to son: when I cannot continue, will you carry the flame? Of course, you say yes.” In the event, he says, Silverview needed only the lightest of editorial brush-ups.
Karla’s Choice is a different proposition altogether, not even claiming to be based on unfinished notes or sketches, like many James Bond sequelae. It’s a full impersonation of John le Carré.
The novel is set in the missing decade in Smiley’s life, shortly after The Spy Who Came in from the Cold of 1963, before his return in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy of 1974 and his long career thereafter. Guilt-stricken by Alec Leamas’s death in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, Smiley has resigned from the Circus in early 1963, and appears almost happy in his private life with Lady Ann. Then, like Cincinnatus, he is called back to serve once again.
A mysterious Hungarian émigré literary agent based in Primrose Hill, Mr Bánáti, has suddenly disappeared. His assistant, 23-year-old Szusanna, also a refugee from Hungary, discovers that a Soviet assassin, Miki, had been sent to London to kill him but, on seeing how free people were there, had a crisis of conscience and turned himself in instead. The Circus is soon involved and Control insists it’s a case for Smiley and no one else.
Soon it is revealed that “Mr Bánáti” was in fact a former, and perhaps continuing, Soviet agent, Ferencz Róka. But then why would the Soviets want him dead? What would he have to reveal if he could be found? A fast-moving investigation ensues, taking Smiley to Berlin, Vienna, Budapest and Lisbon, involving not only his usual sidekicks, Peter Guillam, Toby Esterhase, Jim Prideaux et al, plus the nasty German Stasi officer Mundt, but also sweet Szusanna, improbably recruited as an amateur agent.
After many tangles and byways, it emerges that Róka is motivated by concern for his wild, beautiful but estranged only son, Léo, whom he had with a glamorous, fiery Hungarian poet, Iren, still in Budapest. Léo has been arrested in Berlin by the Stasi and Róka is desperately applying pressure to all his former contacts to help get him out – including, dangerously, activating a deep link to the most powerful of them all, the mystery man at the top in Moscow, Karla. Karla has a choice to make – and he will act with total ruthlessness, while George, of course, hopes always for decency and restraint.
Harkaway has made a pretty good job of this imposture. The story is intricately interwoven with the existing books, looking back constantly to The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, artfully playing on the possibility that Róka may be connected with the mole in the Circus that we know about from Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. His back-story expertise is impeccable. He has also quite successfully imitated Le Carré’s roundabout method of narrative delivery and nicely pastiched his prose style.
He has fun with the clipped reports, the mangled English in the dialogue, those placing capsule descriptions. The veteran spy Steed-Asprey is “a little man with an athlete’s body turned brittle, and a cap of neat silver hair”; Iren is “a great beauty – square shoulders, tiny waist and all that Magyar fire”. Harkaway assiduously plays up to expectations, so that when Szusanna first glimpses Smiley, she takes him to be not the boss but “a doorman or a janitor: a stout, hurried little man with pouchy cheeks and thick-framed spectacles… She judged he was wearing a second-hand suit. It was well-made but not for him.” Not quite a match for the comment on the first page of Le Carré’s first novel – “he appeared to spend a lot of money on really bad clothes, which hung about his squat frame like skin on a shrunken toad” – but in its tradition. Harkaway even chucks in plenty of Le Carré’s trademark, gloriously corny declamations about love and death. “I cannot kill his love to save his life. Can you?” Iren dramatically demands of Szusanna.
The publishers go to the legal limit in claiming this is not just a novel about Smiley but actually a John le Carré novel, assembling a bouquet of desirable testimony to that effect. Richard Osman says it “reads like a lost Le Carré”, William Boyd finds it an “almost uncanny incarnation of Le Carré’s voice and world”, while Mick Herron observes more carefully that it is a “note-perfect tribute” and “fits seamlessly into the world of Smiley’s Circus”.
Harkaway himself insists on the direct lineage – “There were always supposed to be more Smiley books. I know, because I was there” – while also artfully appealing to the way that Smiley has become part of common life, being so brilliantly performed off the page by Alec Guinness and others. “My Smiley is my father’s, but he’s also the Smiley we collectively inherit.”
If Le Carré’s actual novel-writing can be successfully replicated, though, what does this suggest about the quality and originality of his work? And for how long will any human author be needed to produce continuations, when AI is so efficient in producing imitations and derivations? The Booker Prize website currently hosts a piece by Ian Leslie admitting that genre fiction (Simenon, say) can already be readily duplicated, but hoping that the original fiction the Booker seeks to promote – that which questions the very nature of humanity – will always remain beyond large language models such as ChatGPT. Le Carré, who thought the Booker was beneath him and fantasised about the Nobel, was always enraged by suggestions, notably from Salman Rushdie, that his work was no more than genre fiction. Perhaps Nick Harkaway has accidentally, against all intentions, confirmed it.
Or perhaps not. Karla’s Choice does not ring true: an act of filial piety and inheritance-claiming, it is not driven, as Le Carré’s best novels are, by his secret, tortured history, the lifelong struggle to come to terms with his mother’s early abandonment and the endless, shaming con tricks of his father, and all the extraordinary affairs he pursued in search of the love he felt he never had. There is no secret spring here.
The truest continuations of Le Carré’s story and storytelling since his death in 2020 have been a series of texts exposing that secret life and its direct influence on his fiction: not only the family-edited A Private Spy: The Letters of John le Carré, but also the head-clasping revelations of The Secret Heart by a mistress, Suleika Dawson, and Adam Sisman’s addendum to his biography, The Secret Life of John le Carré, revealing much that he had previously suppressed.
Reviewing Sisman’s book in these pages, John Banville announced that “the details of a writer’s private life… have no bearing on his work. John le Carré’s books stand apart from David Cornwell the womaniser.” Sisman’s conclusion was subtler: “The more we can understand this complex, driven, unhappy man, the more we can appreciate his work. And in the end it is the work that survives.” Complete on the shelf
Karla’s Choice: A John le Carré Novel
Nick Harkaway
Viking, 320pp, £22
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[See also: Has a whole generation lost the ability to read books?]
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This article appears in the 16 Oct 2024 issue of the New Statesman, Make or Break