John le Carré, With a Son’s Help, Comes Back In From the Cold War

KARLA’S CHOICE: A John le Carré Novel, by Nick Harkaway

In an intriguing afterword to John le Carré’s last novel, “Silverview” (2021), Nick Harkaway, the novelist’s son, wrote that he had promised to finish any work of fiction his father left incomplete at the time of his death. When le Carré died in 2020, Harkaway thought there might be quite a bit of work to do. Then he read “Silverview”and discovered that the book was “not incomplete, but withheld.” Why?

Harkaway gives us two answers. One is a theory sketched in his afterword. The other is a new novel called “Karla’s Choice,” attributed to Harkaway but also billed as “a John le Carré novel.”

The theory is that “Silverview,” in which a bookseller befriends a retired agent of the British secret intelligence service and learns more than he wants to know about hidden knowledge and changing loyalties, does “something that no other le Carré novel ever has. It shows a service fragmented … and ultimately not sure, any more, that it can justify itself.”

Harkaway thinks his father, a former intelligence officer, “couldn’t quite bring himself to say that out loud. … He wrote a wonderful book, but when he looked at it, he found it cut too close to the bone.”

It’s a good theory. In “Silverview,” a senior member of the service describes what a “misguided” writer has been highlighting as the current politics of western espionage:

There is no indication that the speaker agrees with these propositions. No indication that he doesn’t either.

“Karla’s Choice” confirms the theory but it also refines it, and suggests different ways of saying things out loud. In an author’s note, Harkaway tells us he was hoping to “fit some sort of story into that 10-year gap” between le Carré’s breakout novel, “The Spy Who Came in From the Cold” (1963), and “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” (1974). He does this very precisely.