Next week, a new novel comes out featuring George Smiley, John le Carré’s meek, mild, fiercely intelligent Cold War spymaster.
Karla’s Choice will be the tenth book where Smiley plays a central role, yet this time there is a difference. It isn’t le Carré, who died in 2020, telling us the story, but his son Nicholas Cornwell (under his usual pen name of Nick Harkaway).
Harkaway, determined to continue and build on le Carré’s legacy, said earlier this month that his father had given him permission to ‘write into this world.’ Following Silverview (a le Carré novel Harkaway finished for his father after the author’s death), Karla’s Choice, we’re told, is set in the period between The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. It’s the time, in other words, of Swinging London and the crushed Prague Spring, of Harold Wilson, Edward Heath and, in the Kremlin, the bushy-browed Leonid Brezhnev.
Smiley speaks for the repressed and quietly desperate, those who can do the Times crossword in 20 minutes but receive a C-minus in bed
The notion of one writer carrying on the work of another is nothing new.
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