Banner Image: Nick Harkaway – Credit: Ula Soltys
When Nick Harkaway was a child, his father, David – better known by his pseudonym, John le Carré – would rise early to write. Once finished, he would sit at the breakfast table and read his morning’s work to his wife, Jane – who Nick describes as his “crucial, covert collaborator.”
Many of the pages from which Nick’s father read chronicled the adventures of his most beloved literary creation: George Smiley, the unglamorous but honourable spymaster who’s sometimes described as the ‘anti-James Bond’. And while his father’s razor-sharp espionage tales probably went over Nick’s head at the time, he considers these morning readings to be important developmental experiences.
“As I was learning to speak, I was hearing an hour a day of George Smiley,” Nick says. “Those books are formative to how I use language at an absolute baseline.”
Nick is now in his 50s and a distinguished author in his own right. Since the release of his debut novel in 2008, he’s forged a distinct literary path from that of his father, who sadly passed away in 2020, publishing imaginative, genre-bending tales unfolding in alternate realities and post-apocalyptic futures. They’re worlds away from le Carré’s smoke-filled London offices and slate-grey Iron Curtain cityscapes.
However, with his new novel, Karla’s Choice, Nick has taken on what he describes as “the impossible task” of stepping into his father’s shadowy spy world and bringing his most enduring character back to life.
We sat down with Nick to discuss his new George Smiley book and the job of carrying on his father’s legacy.
Enter our competition for a chance to win
Whether you’re a longtime fan or looking to enter George Smiley’s world for the first time, our friends at Penguin Publishing have kindly offered one Rest Less reader a set of eight Smiley titles from their beautiful Penguin Classics collection, along with a signed copy of Karla’s Choice.
Simply fill out this form and answer our quiz question for a chance to win the bundle. Terms & conditions apply.
“It’s an impossible task, but that’s how you get better at art; by doing things you probably can’t do”
Despite his literary lineage, Nick’s sights weren’t always set on becoming a novelist. His first job after university was as a production runner on a film set, which he loved, despite the long hours.
“Then I decided that the world needed another screenwriter, which turned out really not to be the case,” Nick smiles. “I had the experience that lots of people have going into screenwriting, where you occasionally get commissioned, write something, and it goes nowhere. It was very disheartening.”
After years of trying to make it work as a film scribe, Nick changed direction and gave novel writing a go, a decision he credits to his now-wife Clare.
Nick Harkaway – Credit: Ula Soltys
“I was about to get married and I couldn’t bear being a sporadically employed screenwriter. It felt like too much of a cliché. My wife is a lawyer and has always been enormously productive and formidable. I needed to be someone who could stand next to her without everyone going, ‘Blimey, that’s a bit of a mismatch.’ So I wrote a book.
“My genuine sense was that, if it didn’t work, I would retrain into something more tangible like environmental law. But the book did fine, people still like it, and the world is therefore rescued from a really terrible lawyer.”
The book in question was The Gone-Away World (2008), a post-apocalyptic odyssey complete with monsters, mutants, ninjas, and pirates, which was praised for its ambitious scope and wild originality. Since then, Nick has released a steady stream of novels, including Tigerman (2014), his twist on the superhero genre, and Gnomon (2017), a sci-fi story set in a near-future where citizens live under strict surveillance.
After his father passed away in 2020, leaving his final novel, Silverview, a few yards short of the finish line, Nick helped prepare it for publication, playing, as he describes, “the writer’s role in the editing process.” But after Silverview went to print, Nick’s role in furthering his father’s literary legacy was far from over.
He says, “When my father and mother died, we inherited the literary estate, and with that comes an obligation to try to make sure people continue to read my father’s books […] One thing that re-enlivens people’s interest in the older books is to produce a new one. But, obviously, if the author is dead, that new book can only come from someone else.”
Yet, despite his qualifications, Nick always said he wouldn’t be the one to steward the Smiley universe. Instead, he entered a meeting with his older brothers armed with a mental list of all the authors he thought might be up to the task. But, before he could share his suggestions, they asked him point-blank if he would do it.
“In that moment, the reasons why you [don’t want to do it] also become the reasons why you must,” he explains. “It’s an impossible task, but that’s how you get better at art; by doing things you probably can’t do.” And with that, Nick agreed to start work on what would become Karla’s Choice.
“Some say it’s a piece of ventriloquism [...] but it’s not. It’s my voice, just two degrees to the left”
Karla’s Choice hit bookshelves on the 24th of October
Karla’s Choice takes place in the missing decade between two of le Carré’s most beloved and acclaimed novels: The Spy Who Came In from the Cold (1963) and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974). The year is 1963, and we find Smiley, who’s ostensibly put his spying days behind him, enjoying a quiet retirement. However, when a Russian agent defects in rather strange circumstances, Smiley’s called back into the shadowy world of the Circus (le Carré’s fictionalised version of MI6), where a mysterious plot is unravelling.
One of the remarkable things about Karla’s Choice is how naturally it fits with the other Smiley novels. From the minute details of the world (part of Nick’s research involved reading a whole book on Eastern European tobacco) to the overall style, Nick has created what, as Richard Osman describes, “reads a lost le Carrè.”
Despite the diversion from his usual out-of-the-box narratives, Nick explains that this kind of storytelling came quite naturally to him.
He says, “I realised quickly, and to my surprise, that I didn’t have to turn the dial very far from what I would normally write to [create] something that people would identify as like him. When people read it, some say it’s a piece of ventriloquism – an extraordinary adoption of somebody else’s voice – but it’s not. It’s my voice, just two degrees to the left.”
Nick ascribes this stylistic sympatico with his father to growing up with Smiley as “a friendly ghost” at his family’s table – “absorbing it all through the pores,” as he puts it – and the literary influences they shared. Charles Dickens, P.G. Wodehouse, and Arthur Conan Doyle were all mainstays of his father’s library and formative reading experiences for Nick as a result. Nevertheless, he still had to keep his penchant for the wacky and surreal in check while writing Karla’s Choice.
He explains, “As soon as I said I was doing it, a friend of mine asked, ‘Is this going to be five George Smileys walk into a bar?’ Because that’s the Nick Harkaway mode: fractions of universes colliding, illusions and shifting realities, and so on – and the answer is obviously no. It can’t be that. I had to restrain myself from doing the weirder, wilder things, and come back from the slightly more obvious jokes and pop culture references, which I lean into from time to time [in my other books].”
However, for Nick, writing within the boundaries of the Circus universe posed a welcome challenge.
He says, “I’ve never met two genres I didn’t want to blow up and bang together. I don’t naturally sit inside one shelving convention – I pillage everything. So one thing I wanted from this experience was to be made to colour inside the lines, to do something that was identifiably a single thing, which was a departure for me.
“But when you set rules around a story, bouncing off those walls is actually what produces the most exciting stuff. I went to places and let the characters lead the way. The process of writing is a really interesting exploration.”
Enter our competition for a chance to win
Whether you’re a longtime fan or looking to enter George Smiley’s world for the first time, our friends at Penguin Publishing have kindly offered one Rest Less reader a set of eight Smiley titles from their beautiful Penguin Classics collection, along with a signed copy of Karla’s Choice.
Simply fill out this form and answer our quiz question for a chance to win the bundle. Terms & conditions apply.
“I poured myself into this book. It has so much of my grief about my parents, so much of my hope [in it]”
Aside from being an exciting technical challenge, Nick also explains that writing Karla’s Choice offered him a chance to connect with his father and mother.
“You have this idea that you’ll get a kind of Obi-Wan Kenobi moment, one where you can see Dad sitting opposite you in the chair going, ‘Remember the semi-colon,’” Nick says, waving his hand like Alec Guinness. “But that doesn’t happen.”
“Instead, what I got was a sense of connection because I’m standing at his metaphorical workstation, his machine, pulling the levers, adjusting the dials, and seeing it produce the same material. And I feel a sense of unity and companionship with them doing that.
John le Carré – Credit: Nadav Kander 2016
“The dialogues that I have in my head about whether a line works or doesn’t work are ones [my parents] used to have across the breakfast table. And that simultaneously makes it more wonderful and much harder. There were days when I was writing this book when that was very present in my mind and not very welcome. But there were other days when it was like standing in the sunshine.”
As well as the sometimes painful process of remembering his parents, Nick is also forthcoming about his anxiety around the publication of Karla’s Choice. He says, “The whole thing is frightening. Fundamentally, will I get it right?” While many longtime le Carré fans have been vocally excited about the new instalment, others, as Nick explains, aren’t so thrilled about the idea.
“You’ve got a group of people who really care about George Smiley who are just horrified,” Nick says. “They’re sitting there going, ‘What is this madness? What is this heresy?’ With them, I just hope that they hate the idea so much that they have to have a look.
“If you’re absolutely appalled that I’ve written this book, I just want three minutes of your time. Open it at random in a bookshop and tell me that you’re not a little bit interested by the time you’re done. Because, honestly, I poured myself into this book. It has so much of my grief about my parents, so much of my hope [in it].
“And the thing is, we all want the same thing: we all want to spend more time in this world, and I think you can with this book. I did – because as well as a son, I’m also a fan.”
And it seems that, as a writer, Nick has done his father proud. Over the past few days, legions of reviewers have shared glowing support for the novel. With Karla’s Choice, Nick injects his own artistic spirit into the world of the Circus while delivering a tale that’ll feel unmistakably familiar to fans of the franchise. For lifelong Smiley lovers, Karla’s Choice will feel like a stroll around the block with an old friend, and hopefully, this isn’t the last we’ll see of him in Nick Harkaway’s hands.
Want to read the book?
Are you excited to read Karla’s Choice? We’d love to hear from you in the comments below.
