“In the old days if an agent did something embarrassing he’d have the good sense to defect. Christ I miss the Cold War.” says M in the film Casino Royale.
That nostalgia for Iron Curtains, Checkpoint Charlies, Warsaw Pacts and Berlin Walls is salved in KARLA’S CHOICE, sure to put a smile on the face of Cold War spy fiction fans everywhere.
George Smiley returns in KARLA’S CHOICE, a hitherto non reported mission that operated shortly after the disaster of events chronicled in The Spy Who Came in From The Cold.
Alec Leamas is dead and George Smiley has retired from The Circus. But Control has one more job for the seasoned spy. A Russian agent has defected in curious circumstances and the man he was sent to assassinate in London has vanished.
The defector, Miki Bortnik, wants to reinvent himself as an actor, seeking asylum to make a popular film with Peter Sellers. The incongruity and absurdity has the ring of verisimilitude.
The link to the missing man is his sole employee, Susanna, a young Hungarian emigre, and Smiley is assigned to interview her and hopefully sniff out a lead.
Nick Harkaway is John Le Carre’s son and he seamlessly picks up the baton in exploring that grim exposition of the ignoble art of double bluff. There’s the staggering detail and the straightforward unaffected prose flashes through his father’s unique style.
A near synonym for cynicism, the bleak universe of George Smiley, is a literary legacy well served by Harkaway, a practised navigator through those shadow lands where old decencies are overwhelmed by deceit and duplicity.
If there are to be further continuing volumes in the Smiley saga, there is no safer pair of hands.
KARLA’S CHOICE by Nick Harkaway is published by Viking an imprint of Penguin Books.
