September 15, 2025
Smiley’s Choice
To read or not to read Karla’s Choice
“Now, as he approached the familiar door, he found that he was once again engaging in the exercise of paranoia…” That’s how author Nick Harkaway describes the protagonist of his 2024 novel on his return to MI6 after an absence. The fact that the character in question is George Smiley, John le Carre’s classic spymaster who began life in the 1950s, and that the author is le Carre’s son can’t help but imbue the above quote with a sense of irony. Yes, Karla’s Choice is about returning, about revisiting and about confronting the loss of the familiar, and five years after le Carre’s death, we, like Smiley, have been given, in the form of a novel, an invitation to re-engage. Whether or not we do is up to us.
Now published in paperback by Penguin, Karla’s Choice transports Smiley back to 1963, where ghosts await him upon his return to the Circus, feeding off his doubts and disillusionment and challenging him at his new task. They are derived from memory, “a liar to itself” as the book declares, from operations gone bad and from agents sacrificed in their wake. In human form, they existed in The Spy Who Came in From the Cold and resurface in the future narratives of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and A Legacy of Spies, among others. But for the moment, they mark George Smiley’s MI6 homecoming.
The resurrection of a beloved character by a new writer will usually raise an eyebrow with readers but not with the character in question. Here, though, in a cleverly executed move, Harkaway provides Smiley with his own set of concerns and apprehensions about returning that might very well mirror that of a long-time fan. But the first two chapters are proof enough that any worries on the part of protagonist or reader are unwarranted. The author’s style is reminiscent of his father’s, his understanding of the characters impeccable and his attention to narrative detail and pacing masterful.
Le Carre’s presence is never too far from Harkaway’s novel, not just in the characters he created but in the subtly woven references to his works, yet another hovering ghost but one who, in this case, serves as guide and guardian. “Smiley was my dad,” Harkaway acknowledges in the Author’s Note, and we would be remiss to argue.
“The habit was easy to resume,” Harkaway writes of Smiley, “but the understanding that should underpin it…required of him an act of decision.” The same holds true for prospective readers of Karla’s Choice, for whom, the author hopes, “the appetite arrives in the eating.”
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