Nick Harkaway steps into the legacy of his father, the renowned John
le Carré, with his latest novel Karla’s Choice. Known for his inventive,
speculative thrillers, Harkaway deftly balances homage with innovation,
drawing readers into a Cold War espionage story while maintaining his
unique voice. In this candid interview, Harkaway reflects on continuing
the Smiley series, navigating family influence, and how his upbringing
immersed in the world of spies shaped his creative process. He also
shares insights on writing suspense, the pressure of meeting fans'
expectations, and the emotional depth behind Karla’s Choice.
Taking on the legacy of your father must come with unique challenges and pressures. How did you find the balance between honouring his style and creating your own voice in Karla's Choice?
There’s actually much less conflict than you’d expect. In a sense that’s unexpected – I usually write fantastical thrillers where a detective must solve the murder of a billionaire made huge by rejuvenation science, or a god-shark devours Fortune 500 companies while the hero tries to unravel an impossible murder. But stylistically and in some sense thematically, we’re not so far apart. It’s obvious once you look past my fireworks: I grew up with George Smiley. My father was writing the Tinker Tailor sequence as I learned to walk, talk and think. I heard him read the early drafts to my mother in the mornings before I went to school; I came back at night and they were sitting with the new pages, cutting and pasting them – literally, with scissors and glue. He read me Dickens and Conan Doyle and Wodehouse, so as I learned to write I also learned the rhythms of some of his favourite writers… and so on. When I went looking for Smiley it was less a question of compromise than of eliminating all the things in my own work that were not part of his world – the magic, the wildness - and you find our writing voices, like our speaking voices, aren’t so dissimilar.
Initially, you hesitated to continue the Smiley series. What ultimately convinced you to take on this project, and how did your family's involvement play a role in that decision?
I actively decided not. I’d spent a dozen years drawing a hard line between Nick Harkaway and John le Carré – and he was so careful to do the same. He wanted not to squash me by accident. When we started talking about whether someone should write a new Smiley novel – we’re tasked as his literary executors to keep the work alive, and one of the things which does that is, of course, new work – I had this long list of EVERYONE else, from Colson Whitehead to Arundhati Roy and all points in between. So I had my list, and I was about to start explaining why each person on it would be so great, and my older brother Simon said “It’s pretty obviously got to be you, hasn’t it?” And they all just looked at me as if it was obvious, which perhaps it was. So I took a couple of weeks to try it out, and I loved it.
Karla's Choice dives into the backstory of the Soviet agent Karla, Smiley’s nemesis. What drew you to explore Karla's character more deeply, and how did you approach developing his story while staying true to the original series?
We know both a lot and a little about Karla from the original stories – and by the way we still come out of Karla’s Choice knowing very little of the detail. It’s like a monster movie: it’s not scary once you see the shark. So all we ever really know about Karla is that he’s hungry. From a writing point of view, Karla is the Berlin Wall made flesh, the Soviet system’s brutality given a face – so we don’t actually need to see his face – in fact we need not to, in any meaningful way – because we know what he signifies and that’s what we should see when we look at him. I took a kind of inventory of everything we do find out in the original stories – the great thing is some of it is contradictory, a lot of it is unmoored in time and space, just as you’d expect with a rumoured spymaster – and I worked around it. And here’s the thing: in The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, there is no Karla. He’s never mentioned. In Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, we find out that Smiley met Karla in the 1950s but didn’t really consider him a big fish. So there has to be an evolution from 1955 through the early 1960s to the moment where he’s Smiley’s nemesis. So already you know there’s a point to all this, in the narrative between the two of them. You have to get from indifference to an almost dualistic enmity. And that’s what begins here, that journey. It’s not an origin story and you don’t see too much of the shark. But you do see the hunger.
You've previously written speculative fiction and science fiction. How did your background in these genres influence your approach to writing an espionage novel set in the Cold War era?
I’m a child of the Cold War, albeit only the end of it. I grew up with the nuclear threat, the fear of sudden annihilation. If you look at my first two novels, they’re apocalypses. The third is about fatherhood and heroism against the backdrop of a possible local (un)natural disaster. And so on. My speculative fiction, science fiction, whatever you want to call it, has never not been about the world I grew up in, and for that matter still live in – as I say, it’s just that where before I’ve used one kind of fictional world to write about hope and fear and radical reversal, now I’m using another. Stories are stories. Look: a mouse runs from a cat. It’s fear, horror, survival, desperation – the story of prey. Look again: they do this every day, they’re both bored, maybe they should look for a new career together? Look again: the shadows are long. The mouse drinks whisky in a bar, and he and another mouse agree to rob a bank. The cat isn’t the point, never was, the true horror is about what mice do to one another… You can tell any story you like about the mouse and the cat and their world. Any genre, any flavour. I can make you believe – for an hour, or a week – the mouse is the most frightening monster you’ve ever read. I can make you believe the cat is a romantic lead, a poet, a psychopath. It’s not the genre the matters, not really. It’s the story.
“I’ve never not been my father’s son. I can’t climb out of my own head, so I think of everything as normal.”
You mentioned that you "lived with" the Smiley universe as a child. Can you share some personal memories or experiences that influenced how you approached writing Karla's Choice?
It’s hard to think of something specific. I’ve never not been my father’s son. I can’t climb out of my own head, so I think of everything as normal until I realise that – I don’t know: Alec Guinness standing in your kitchen holding one strand of home-made pasta on his fingers and lamenting that when he and his wife made pasta they ended up with it draped over all their chairs – that’s not everyone’s experience. But I was there when they filmed the TV show of Smiley’s People, in the dead of winter in the dead of night, not so far from where I live now. The old general, Vladimir, walking down the Lime Walk. Running, hiding his prize, running again, someone chasing him… Honestly, filming isn’t always very exciting. The same moment over and over and over… but I was very small and it was magical, and fearful. In the final show it’s barely the beginning. But I’m immersed, literally, in memories of Smiley and his world. Heard it, woke up to it, went to sleep to it, swam in it.
With Karla's Choice being part of a beloved series, there must have been high expectations from both long-time fans and new readers. How have you handled the pressure of meeting these expectations, and what kind of feedback have you found most rewarding or challenging?
It’s terrifying, of course. Mostly it comes and goes. The most vertiginous moment was when we put the music on the first cover reveal video. BAM. It went from being a book cover reveal to being a GEORGE SMILEY BOOK and I hid under the duvet for an hour or so. The longtime fans, in a sense, are easier – psychologically, for me. A given percentage just won’t believe it’s any good, and I have to respect that. There is no le Carré but le Carré. End of. Then there’s a matching group for whom any touch of the Circus is a joy – and I respect that, too. I feel the same way. The people I worry about are the ones in the middle – new readers, old readers – who are willing to give it a try and who will actually just enjoy it or not, be moved by it or not. That’s where I find out what I’ve done here. But I’m fortunate – not least in terms of my sanity – because we have strong advance reviews from Publishers Weekly and Kirkus and amazing quotes from the likes of Richard Osman, William Boyd, Tan Twan Eng, Mick Herron... The first judgements say “yes”. And my family say “yes”. I couldn’t be in a better place. So now I hand it over to the booksellers, the people at the pointy end. I sing for my supper, and I hope that everyone else says “yes” too. That’s all you can do.
You’ve mentioned that the Cold War remains relevant to today's world despite being viewed by some as a historical backdrop. Can you elaborate on why you believe this period continues to matter, and how you conveyed that in Karla's Choice?
The strategic geography doesn’t change! And the history that’s bound up with it echoes on. Austria-Hungary’s dissolution at the end of WWI leads, directly or not, to Hungary siding with the Nazis in WWII, which in turn results in Stalin’s occupation of the country. For centuries Hungary has told itself a story about Paris and London and so on all promising mutual aid, but when Hungary is invaded, they’re always too busy to help. No one objects in 1947 when Stalin imposes a de facto Moscow client government on Hungary after the centre right won the election, and in 1956 Hungary tries to kick Stalin out but London and Washington and everyone else are too busy in Suez to care. Or perhaps they choose to be too busy. The prophecy comes true - again. Now here we are, Putin is in Ukraine and Hungary is the bad boy of the EU. Tell me part of that constellation is not derived from a perception that in the end, we won’t show up for them. History doesn’t begin or end, but the most recent expressions of the story can tell us things about the bit we’re in now.
Your wife, Clare, and your brothers were among your first readers for Karla's Choice. How did their feedback shape the final version of the novel, and were there any moments when their input led to significant changes?
I always rely on Clare, and on my agent, Patrick Walsh, for impressions, corrections, questions… and this time, yes, my brothers too. We discussed the ending, we tried out various fates for various people. In the main, it’s more about achieving clarity than getting big redirects. Clare will say “why does this happen?” If the reader should know by that point, then I’ve made it too obscure. If they shouldn’t know, have I left them too undirected? What do I want you to experience as you read? Are we sharing a ride into the dark, or are you grasping in the shadows with your bare hands? Do I need you to know that someone’s in control? Or do I want you to believe anything could happen from this moment?
You’ve mentioned that Karla's Choice contains a lot of your sorrow following your father's passing. Could you share more about how this personal emotion influenced the novel's themes and tone?
Not just my father – my mother, too. The life they had together – a wonderful, incomprehensible network of passions and compromises which revolved around the work – informed a new understanding of Smiley and Ann, who essentially fail to find the balance they ultimately did. So Ann has a lot more to say for herself, and we get to see their relationship a little more even-handedly. Then, yes, there’s a sense of grief in the book, of loss, because I lost them both. It’s about parents and children and husbands and wives, and about those relationships which are less well-defined but mean a lot to us. I’m going to be stubborn and refuse to go too much into that, because: spoilers.
Now that you’ve ventured into the Smiley universe with Karla's Choice, do you have plans for more books featuring these characters, or are you considering returning to your roots in speculative fiction?
Well, we’ve established my roots are a little more ambiguous than that. But if there’s an appetite for it – and obviously the omens are good – I’d love to dive into the Circus again. I do have a plan! But I’m also not putting away my stranger worlds; I finished a sequel to Titanium Noir before I started Karla’s Choice, and we’re talking about when to publish it next week. Then there’s the book I drafted during the first days of the pandemic and which I’m editing now – a day-after-tomorrow story of cloning, climate crisis and radical change… Let’s say I wouldn’t want to be any less who I am, and – like my father – I’m a lot of people.
Karla’s Choice by Nick Harkaway is out now.
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