KARLA’S CHOICE: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

Fact, in a world of fiction. Clear reflection, for once, in a wilderness of mirrors. George Smiley left the Circus with unfinished business. His chronicler, John le Carré, is no more. The family firm, concerned with the writing of stories, passed to his son. And so, I picked up KARLA’S CHOICE – written by Nick Harkaway.
   The premise is that intelligence officer George Smiley left the secret world of espionage behind, that he’s happy away from managing shady activity, and there’s a decade or so of a gap to fill in the chronology. And now the story can be told.
   What happens between THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD and TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY…well, that’s the topic of this continuation/fill-in book. To get into that, just a little, first I must bring an old file from Cold War storage… 

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George Smiley is a character who sipped, like Horace Rumpole, from a minor immortality potion. Before A LEGACY OF SPIES came out, you could point to assorted Smiley stories and say, with confidence, that the dates didn’t quite match up. Characters simply had their ages revised, for convenience.
   This is the Batman Effect. Batman’s history extends back around a decade or so when considering his many adventures. He stays eternally fit and is forever 29 years old unless stated otherwise. The character is deliberately an older caped crusader in The Dark Knight Returns, for example.
   Inconsistencies in A LEGACY OF SPIES are overlooked. 

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Why mention this observation from yesteryear? Nick Harkaway, in his introduction to KARLA’S CHOICE, tells much the same tale. He thinks of all the Smiley portrayals. Various actors from television, the movie, and audio adaptations. I think of Smiley once…
   This particular once. Only SMILEY’S PEOPLE puts that character’s name in a book’s title. Harkaway had one eye on that, I’m sure, when he took Smiley’s Cold War adversary, Karla, and bumped him up to star status on the cover.
   Co-star status. The cover tells us this is A JOHN LE CARRÉ NOVEL. Not a George Smiley one. It is a George Smiley one, but it is from le Carré’s universe. Graham Greene has Greeneland, a country of everywheres. No matter where you are in the world, in Greeneland you are always in the same place – five minutes from betrayal if you are on the ball. That’s five minutes after betrayal, if you aren’t.
   But le Carré only occasionally flirted with Greeneland. If anything, he subscribed to Tolkien’s draughty character-building England, and took over management of a small misty corner of it when the resident wizard left for the dreaming spires of Oxford the Far West and a community of weed-smoking elves.
   Not for le Carré the excessive usage of a literary crutch holding Cold War novels upright: flashy expensive science fiction gadgetry of the Yankee variety, which he considered akin to the use of magic in a non-magical world when writing espionage fiction – stripping away the label of espionage fiction in the process of employing said wonders. With one mighty gadget, our hero clichéd free. No.
   Instead, he relied on muddy tea, clanking lifts, Victorian brickwork, and rattling radiators of a between-the-wars vintage. Oh, and Russian interference with same.
   Karla is the bogeyman. He’s mostly an off-screen villain: Sauron, with hints of Lenin’s face. An all-powerful ring in a le Carré story is going to be a spy-ring. And that’ll be an all-powerful spy-ring…with many flaws.
   In the television adaptations, Karla is an almost unknown force of nature. He provides the Russian wind which blows through the Cold War. In portraying him, Patrick Stewart says not one word. But he brings the adversary to life.
   The non-speaking role in the flashback is important as a driver of many plot-threads. Smiley meets Karla and tries to recruit him, early. This encounter plants seeds of doubt in the boss, Control, looking for a traitor. Control considers the possibility that Smiley was recruited by Karla at that meeting, instead. Or that Smiley was already a traitor before then, and used the meeting to catch up with his Russian master.
   Control was strong on paranoia. He took three lumps of it in his toffee – a strange mix of tea and coffee served in Victorian institutions that exceeded their original century by some time.
   TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY has a list of suspects, including Smiley for several reasons, but it is the flashback meeting which furnishes a prominent mark against Smiley’s name. Why mention Karla and his non-speaking role?
   I’ve gone over it several times. When reading this John le Carré novel, written by le Carré’s son, the question of voice comes up. Once Alec Guinness played Smiley on television, le Carré found it difficult to shake the performance from his head. And so, he wrote fewer stories about the character. Guinness, ever the imp, stole more than a few le Carré mannerisms for the role.
   Reading KARLA’S CHOICE, I can hear Beryl Reid when Connie Sachs enters the tale. No one says actually quite like Hungarian Toby Esterhase. He seems to speak that way by bringing remnants of at least two other languages into English and hiring the word actually as the face-paint on the foreign words, to whore its way around a sentence or two.
   There’s a Hungarian connection in this novel, so Toby is brought into the narrative – and a welcome addition he is. Connie Sachs is always great fun, if alcoholically tinged with great sadness. And that’s her point.
   So, yes, characters are preserved. The timeline is a moveable feast, but at least a feast is had. And Harkaway confesses this in his introduction. He’s damned right to do so. Expectation is high. We’ve been down this road before…
    When A LEGACY OF SPIES came out, le Carré went back and filled in a few gaps so that THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD would make sense in light of TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY. And there, date-of-birth and character age were on the moveable menu.
   In terms of age Smiley may very well pass for 63 in the dusk with the light behind him. He hovers in the perpetual Twilight Zone of fifty-something years old under your average pub lights on a bitter mid-week November night, and sixty-something to any doctor evaluating him for signs of heart trouble.
   With that loose age in mind, Harkaway visited the well his father had returned to. KARLA’S CHOICE gives us more about that time between THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD and TINKER TAILOR…
   In dropping his bucket into the well, Harkaway had to give us another layer between those books that didn’t ruin the extra layer of icing his dad had already added to the cake with A LEGACY OF SPIES. Difficult terrain. Many mines on that field. The best approach was to say…
   Well, dad shifted the dates around a little and where’s the harm…do you want this book or not?
   I am strongly reminded of the oft-mentioned Penge Bungalow Murders. Horace Rumpole, Old Bailey Hack, consumer of Chateau Thames Embankment, and husband to the formidable Hilda, would trot out this running joke on an hourly basis. But Sir John Mortimer left the gag dangling. It was better to travel than to arrive.
   Until, in the end, he wrote Rumpole and the Penge Bungalow Murders. Inconsistent? Rumpole isn’t a reliable narrator. If you believe that, I have Tower Bridge to sell you. And the book? A triumph, meeting impossible levels of expectation? It’s not about the murders. No, it’s about Rumpole’s meeting Hilda. A triumph.
   On a side-note about voice, and image, Leo McKern is Rumpole. His caricature adorns the book covers. Turning back to le Carré, you’ll find all sorts of editions of his books have very vague people on the covers.
   Except for one of the covers of KARLA’S CHOICE. One man, Karla, is inside the head of another – bespectacled Smiley. Smiley could be a vague nod in the direction of Sir Alec Guinness, though reminds me of Alan Arkin in profile. Karla seems to have been conjured up from publicity stills of East German Stasi man Markus Wolf.
   Le Carré almost used Wolf as a character, taken from his lawnmower. Then he learned Wolf was a real spymaster over in the East. If you believe the bit about the lawnmower, let it be on the basis that you’ve checked that brand exists. It does. We’ll leave off there, unless you, like control, also take three lumps of paranoia in your tea. And coffee. It’s toffee.
   What do we get in this book? Karla, scheming. He has a walk-on part. Many cogwheels click around. Do we have le Carré’s voice, and is Harkaway his own man? Yes and yes. He writes in the terrain of his dad, but not in his dad’s shadow.
   Harkaway respects the landscape of lamplighters and scalphunters. He wheels Connie Sachs on for a turn. But Harkaway gives us more. Connie is one of the Norns, weaving a thread and telling the tale of a man’s fate. She can’t do this alone, and has two other Norns in attendance, as is the custom. Harkaway uses another name for them. But they are Norns, just the same.
   This extra level of detail contradicts nothing in the original novel cycle. Even if there were contradictions, remember this is an espionage novel featuring Russian agents. The future is certain. It is only the past that is unpredictable.
   There’s a bit of a blip, but it is easy to overlook. Yes, there’s another book in the series. THE LOOKING-GLASS WAR features Smiley. But it doesn’t matter. He’s hardly in it. That story takes the Special Operations Executive from World War Two and imagines the organisation’s floundering and flapping along well beyond its use-by date.
   In that sense, it’s a bit of a curio that le Carré himself rejected and accepted and rejected by turn. Ultimately, he appeared to have settled on the idea that the bruises died down with the passage of time.
   Voice. Character voice. The voice of the setting. Voice of the argument, theme, being put forward. Those voices of TV and movie and radio/audio book actors. Smiley’s voice as a character and as Alec Guinness.
   Yes, le Carré’s voice and influences on him. His influence on Harkaway’s voice. (Harkaway sneaks in a spot of blurry family background that le Carré used extensively for THE PERFECT SPY. It’s his family history, though. So, fair game.)
   Then there’s the spectre of Kim Philby.
   Graham Greene and le Carré each had to deal with betrayal by Kim Philby. In le Carré’s case, he gave us TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY. Philby, in commenting on le Carré, set about a casual almost disinterested scathing dismantling of le Carré’s voice and purpose. By contrast, Graham Greene turned up to see Philby in Moscow, and sloshed vodka as they spoke of old times and a changing world.
   Greene provided a plug for THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD, and Harkaway seems to have returned the favour somewhat with a not-so-sly reference to Greene’s work in this continuation/fill-in novel.
   It’s difficult to evade the very long shadow of Greene in writing espionage fiction. Yes, le Carré fell foul of this with THE TAILOR OF PANAMA. That book has everything to do with Greene’s work OUR MAN IN HAVANA. For those embarking on the task of writing spy books, read Eric Ambler first. Then you’ll have a different shadow to leapfrog away from.
   I have to avoid the plot of this book. That means I must skirt around plotting in other books in the series. Where would I place it in the running? Same advice as ever. Read the Smiley books in order of publication…
   Start with the two murder mysteries. CALL FOR THE DEAD. A MURDER OF QUALITY. Then Smiley takes a back seat to proceedings in THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD. But events in that book come to haunt him.
   Smiley has a token role in THE LOOKING-GLASS WAR. After that, he’s back in THE KARLA TRILOGY – TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY, THE HONOURABLE SCHOOLBOY, and SMILEY’S PEOPLE.
   He turns up almost reluctantly in THE SECRET PILGRIM. Then we have the fix-it novel that connects THE SPY WHO CAME IN WITH THE COLD to THE KARLA TRILOGY. A LEGACY OF SPIES fills in some crucial gaps.
   Okay, but to read this book, KARLA’S CHOICE, I’d say – bare minimum – read CALL FOR THE DEAD, THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD, THE KARLA TRILOGY, and A LEGACY OF SPIES before even thinking about tackling Harkaway’s continuation.
   I have my suspicions about certain aspects of the plotting that could lead to another continuation book or two. More unfinished business. But I can’t really give you the plot here. Except to say…a man goes on the run, and everyone would like to find him.
   Smiley, called back to the job, goes after this man. Karla, Moriarty to Smiley’s Holmes, lurks in the deep background but haunts many a page. Characters collide, some old, some new, and Harkaway does justice to his dad’s legacy. Of spies.