The spy who came back from the dead

Now, the franchise builders have set their sights on a more prestigious target. The latest character to be revived after the author’s death is George Smiley, the unprepossessing British agent first introduced by John le Carre in The Spy Who Came in From the Cold and subsequently immortalized in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Smiley has been delicately handed over to le Carre’s son, Nick Harkaway, who has made all the right noises about protecting his late father’s most memorable literary creation. The good news is that Harkaway is a talented writer who does a fair impersonation of his father. The bad news is that his talents would almost certainly be better served elsewhere. 

Reviving Smiley is fundamentally different from bringing back Jack Ryan or Paul Atreides. Clancy was a proficient thriller writer, and Herbert was a talented mythmaker, but there is a reason Philip Roth called le Carre’s A Perfect Spy “the best English novel since the war.” Le Carre is one of a few authors who bridged the gap between genre fiction and capital-L Literature. Not many writers can describe spycraft in painstaking but thrilling detail while delivering forlorn meditations on the state of Cold War Britain. 

Harkaway’s new novel, Karla’s Choice, takes its title from Smiley’s Moscow Centre nemesis, and it is a testament to le Carre that an otherwise unremarkable code name can be imbued with such menace. Harkaway situated the action in the early 1960s between The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, in which Smiley oversees a successful but brutally costly mission in East Germany, and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, which follows Smiley’s efforts to track down a mole Karla has recruited at the heart of British intelligence. 

Karla’s Choice finds Smiley coming out of retirement to help the Circus, a lightly fictionalized version of MI6, locate a Hungarian living in London who has been marked for death by Moscow Centre. With its obvious parallels to earlier Smiley books, the novel sometimes feels like a talented cover band playing a medley of the original act’s greatest hits. Smiley, getting dragged back to the Circus, immediately recalls Tinker Tailor, as does a sad pilgrimage to consult with a retired spymaster. A cast of displaced foreigners adrift in the gray world of 1960s London also brings to mind other Smiley adventures. 

At times, the melody kicks in at just the right register, and you really feel that Harkaway is channeling the old master through some arcane literary ritual. The descriptions of Circus protocol would fit seamlessly into any of the old Smiley novels. Even the most dedicated student of le Carre would struggle to distinguish Harkaway’s version of Toby Esterhase, a Circus operative of Hungarian origin whose English is perfectly comprehensible but slightly awkward, from the original. 

At other times, however, Harkaway’s le Carre impression is a bit like Esterhase’s grammar: fluent but just a bit off. It starts with the book’s first 50 pages, which bring in familiar faces from Smiley’s world at a fast and furious pace. It’s as if Harkaway, or perhaps his editor, felt the need to reassure nervous readers by rapidly name-dropping as many old characters as possible. Look, there’s Roddy Martindale, a gossipy bureaucrat who appears as a minor figure in several Smiley books. Over there, you’ll notice General Vladimir, a Soviet defector whose murder brings about Karla’s eventual downfall in Smiley’s People. Smiley quickly runs into Bill Haydon, the dashing British agent-turned-traitor who will go on to seduce Smiley’s wife. To borrow the language of the age, these stray references are Easter eggs for le Carre devotees. Their inclusion conforms to the remorseless logic of the franchise, which seeks to reassure readers (or viewers) that they’re in the comforting environs of a familiar story. 

Le Carre usually waits until the final act to have his characters ruminate on Cold War morality, but Harkaway wastes no time in having Smiley deliver a speech about the ambiguities of his profession. These are familiar notes, but they feel rushed, forced, and slightly out of place. Other episodes seem frankly out of character. It is presumptuous, perhaps, to lecture le Carre’s son on how best to carry on his father’s legacy. However, when we meet Smiley, he is comfortable enough to have stopped practicing basic spycraft, a choice that seems utterly at odds with his meticulous, often paranoid disposition.   

These objections are the cost of doing someone else’s business. Either the new author is trying too hard to ape the original, or he’s taking liberties with the source material that some readers will inevitably object to. It would be easier to dismiss the entire enterprise if Harkaway were a bad writer, but that’s not the problem. He’s a good writer trapped in someone else’s world. 

Returning to Smiley in 2024 feels like mining the last bit of ore from an already exhausted vein. Le Carre, in his prime, was preoccupied with the post-World War II decline of Britain, which had, in the words of Dean Acheson, “lost an empire but not yet found a role.” The dour landscape of 1960s London, the decaying country houses of British grandees, and the bureaucratic squabbling over a rapidly shrinking pie were as integral to the Smiley novels as the old spy’s expensive but ill-fitting clothes. 

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Now, these preoccupations seem as out-of-date as Smiley’s tailoring. At one point, a Soviet defector in London incredulously notes the absence “of a state mechanism of coercive control.” In the modern United Kingdom, the prime minister is forced to publicly comment on home visits by police over offensive social media posts. Fears of Britain’s waning influence east of Suez feel quaint in an era when the Royal Navy can barely defend its home waters. 

The advance of the franchises is relentless, but Smiley belongs to another age. I hope Harkaway makes a lot of money from this book. Enough to resist the siren song of writing more lucrative but unsatisfying Smiley novels.

Will Collins is a lecturer at Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest, Hungary.