14th February 2025
The front cover of this spy story boldly depicts it as “A John le Carré novel”. It’s a debatable point. Le Carré died in 2020 and the author – Nick Harkaway – is one of his sons. But, as marketing ploys go, it’s a strong sell.
There is no doubt that we are firmly – and reassuringly – in le Carré territory, however. The book is set in 1963, immediately after the climax of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963). (Readers unfamiliar with the earlier book should be warned that its denouement is clearly revealed). There is a cast list of familiar le Carré characters – Control, George Smiley, Toby Esterhase, Bill Haydon, Peter Guillam, et al – about whom those familiar with Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974) will not find it easy to avoid casting their minds forward to future events. And, of course, there is the liberal use of the spy-trade’s jargon – the Circus, Cousins, scalphunters, safe houses – with which we can remind ourselves of our insider knowledge.
The story begins with a London-based secretary and PA – Susanna Gero – arriving at work to discover that her boss – László Bánáti, a literary agent – has disappeared. We learn quickly that both are Hungarian émigrés and – via Haydon – that Bánáti is really Ferenc Róka, a former Soviet-trained agent. He had fled the scene only a day or so before the arrival in his office of a hitman with termination orders from Moscow Centre.
Control, the Head of the Service, commissions Smiley to find Róka and to determine why it is that the Centre wishes to eliminate him after his many years of living a quiet life in London. Smiley’s mission takes him to Berlin and Vienna with support from Peter Guillam, the scalpel Tom Lake and – rather improbably, on Control’s orders, Susanna – before events move to the other side of the Iron Curtain. Woven into this narrative – and, it turns out, crucial to it – is the backstory of the new power in the Centre’s hierarchy, who wishes to eliminate Róka: Karla, the man destined to fulfil the future role of Smiley’s great rival across the ideological divide.
Interestingly – given the parallels with the beginning of both Tinker Tailor, Soldier, Spy and one of its sequels Smiley’s People (1979) – Smiley has to be enticed out of retirement (or near-retirement) to fulfil the brief, as he had taken responsibility for the disquieting events at the end of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. Once on board again, however, he demonstrates his particular skills with his usual understated – and impressive – thoroughness. The episode in which he and Esterhase (remotely) access the conversation between two Soviet agents in a London hotel room is a masterclass. Likewise, when he and Lake are forced to shake off the attentions of some of the opposition’s agents in Vienna.
This is the era of Hillmans and Routemasters – not surveillance drones and mobile phones – and the pace of Harkaway’s story is steady rather than frantic. There is one high-speed car chase, though “high-speed” is something of a stretch as Smiley is driving a Trabant with a dodgy gear-box. More generally, the author provides sufficient space for the characters to breath and reflect and, occasionally, to consider the overarching validity of their chosen profession. For Control, “I want… to win. It is a war, after all, and if one must fight a war, better to win with all the unpleasantness that implies, than lose, and be subjected to the cost of losing”.
By contrast, Smiley is a more nuanced figure: “Literature tells us that sorrow is more profound than joy – a very Russian perception, as it happens. As I live longer, I’m more convinced that our valorisation of pain is what makes our world so bleak. We anticipate it, we approve of it, and in doing so, we make it. We need a better way”. We are not misled into thinking Smiley risks being vulnerably empathetic, however: when it is necessary, he is ruthless in achieving a given objective.
Within the le Carré oeuvre, there is a hiatus of a decade between the events of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and the depiction of George Smiley’s long-range battle with Karla in Tinker Tailor, Soldier, Spy. This is an open window through which Nick Harkaway could supply further variations of “A John le Carré novel”. In common with – I suspect – most Smiley-watchers, I hope he does.
JR Alexander 