Karla's Choice

Nick Harkaway has bravely attempted to follow in his father’s footsteps, his father being John Le Carré! The book is basically a sequel to The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. Harkaway explains in an introduction that there’s a ten year gap between that book and the next Smiley book, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and it looks like his intention might be to continue the series and bridge the gap. In any case, he has done a very decent job at imitating his father’s work here. Smiley is convincing as a central character tasked with finding a missing Hungarian in London and there’s a complex plot involving a young Hungarian woman Susanna who had worked for the missing man.
Harkaway brings in familiar characters like Control. Jim Prideaux, Connie Sachs, Toby Esterhase and Peter Guillam.
It’s unfair to compare the book to those his father wrote as Le Carré was such an accomplished and brilliant writer but Nick has written a thrilling book which succeeds in recreating the spy world of his father. I enjoyed it and look forward to further books by the author.
Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher Viking for an advance review copy in return for an honest review.

A satisfying entry into the world of George Smiley's Cold War.

"Karla's Choice" opens in 1963, around six months after the events of "The Spy Who Came In from The Cold", and the operatives of the Circus are still feeling the effects of Leamas' death. George Smiley has retired and is trying to rebuild his life with his wife, Ann. However, when a Russian assassin attempts to defect, claiming he is unwilling to kill his target, Control entices him back one last time, in order to track down the target, with the help of his secretary.

What follows is a complex tale of plans within plans, plots within plots and past events influencing the present, as Smiley and his team travel across Cold War Europe in search of the missing man. The prose is fairly dense in places, with complex reflections on who did what, and when, and why, but the story moves along at a respectable pace. What is slowly revealed is a decades-old story of a boy, who grew up to be a dangerous man, and it's this which holds everything together. Reading it, there's sufficient echoes of le Carré’s writing to satisfy fans. Seemingly random events slowly merge into the bigger picture, as Smiley digs deeper into the past. There's also the ever present reminder of what a dirty and heartless thing the Game is, and how easily lives are sacrificed for the greater good. Smiley spends a lot of time reflecting on his part in Leamas' death.

All the characters from TSWCIFTC and TTSS are present, including Guillam, to Esterhase, Connie and Haydon. Mundt is also back in play, and Karla, of course, although it's three-quarters of the way through the book before he is mentioned. The characters play out as they did in the original books, so there should be no complaints on that score.

A lengthy foreword by the author attempts to explain how the book came about and how much of the story came from le Carré himself. As the author himself admits, the book will divide readers - fans of le Carré will claim perhaps that things were best left as they were, others will applaud the attempt to expand the story of George Smiley and his dark world. "My Smiley", he says, "is my father's, but also the Smiley we collectively inherit".

However, the marketing of the book - "Karla's Choice - A John le Carré Novel by Nick Harkaway and John le Carré" seems overly complex and confusing. I'm sure die-hard fans would prefer a simple "based on the characters created by Karla's Choice John le Carré". It's certainly those die-hard fans who will make or break this book - while it's probably not essential to have read "Spy" or "Tinker", it's those who have who will gain most from it.

I approached this book with trepidation as I have read a number of books claiming to be the best le Carre and as a fan, have been disappointed.

This was different. As an avid reader of John le Carre’s works, there were times, whilst reading that I forgot he was not the narrator. The plot was as circuitous as le Carre’s spy books,but at the same time intriguing. There were some things that clashed with my mental image of Smiley, such as driving a car whilst being pursued by police, however this is a minor cavil.

All in all, a very good book, and as I did with the Karla trilogy I shall re-read it soon.

I don't really fit neatly into either of the two groups Nick Harkaway enumerates in his prologue - people who are so attached to George Smiley that they will love this book "whatever it is", and people who refuse to read it for the same reason - my love for John le Carré's oeuvre extends far beyond Smiley.

I wanted to read this because I've already consumed everything le Carré ever wrote, and since Graham Greene is dead there aren't many authors out there that can do what he did, i.e., write books that are notionally genre fiction but that are in fact simply good books that handily break out of the narrow confines of the espionage genre. Evidently the apple doesn't fall too far from the tree (author Nick Harkaway is John le Carré's son), because that's what Karla's Choice is.

The existing cast of characters Nick inherited, literally and metaphorically, are wonderfully evoked - the music of Toby Esterhase's Hungaro-English was a particular highlight for me - and his new creations are easily their peers. He does something good by rebalancing the gender inequality inherent to a cast of characters first dreamt up in the 1960s by filling out Connie Sachs' research team, the 'Bad Aunts'; I suspect we haven't seen the last of S(z)usanna Gero, either. Anyone with even a passing familiarity with, e.g., the Bletchley Park codebreakers knows that women have always had a huge part to play in the secret world.

This is a more than worthy entry in the Smiley canon - and, tantalisingly, perhaps the first of many. In my opinion, not just a great novel about spies and spying, but a great book in its own right - as well as one that makes the other Smiley novels better for existing. For example, although Karla must be opaque and unknowable, we now have the reason why he thought that going after someone that was family to Smiley was not 'out of bounds' - Smiley had made the first move. That's quite the trick to have pulled off.

I was given a digital copy of this book by the publisher Penguin Random House via NetGalley, in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

I greatly enjoyed Angelmaker and Gnomon, so was keen to read this take on of the Smiley storey. Set in the missing years between the Spy who cam in from the cold and Tinker Tailor, we find Smiley in retirement following the death of a close friend on a mission in Berlin. He is summoned back by Control after a Russian hit-man defects, and the Hungarian emigre he was sent to assassinate has disappeared. The hunt to find him takes us to Berlin, Vienna, Budapest and finally Lisbon. Its an excellent story, told well and reads uncannily like Le Carre..Its a great achievement and I hope there's more to come.

Karla's Choice by Nick Harkaway

Firstly my thanks to Net Gal!ey, Penguin Random House and the author Nick Harkaway for the Advanced Reading Copy of this book in return for an honest review.

This book is expected to be published on 24 October 2024.

Karla's Choice is written within the world of John le Carré espionage series of books and set in 1963, following The Man Who Came in from the Cold, by his son Nick Harkaway.

I absolutely loved this book. The characters from George Smiley, and existing to new, were in keeping with what I hoped for! The expanded view of the circus and it's associates were lovingly wrought.

No spoilers from me but if you want to read a John le Carré, or an espionage genre book or to read a great novel, you too will enjoy this book!

Thoroughly recommend! Five stars.

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