In May 1966, an aggrieved John le Carré wrote to the editor of the Soviet newspaper Literaturnaya Gazeta in response to a critical review. Noting that his books were at that point unavailable in the Soviet Union, he set out his stall for the benefit of (sadly imaginary) Russian readers: ‘I have equated, in hypothetical terms, the conduct of East and West in the espionage war. I have suggested that they use the same weapons – deceit – and even the same spies.’

This neatly sums up the donnée not only of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and The Looking Glass War – the two novels touched on by the Russian critic, both featuring early chapters in the career of le Carré’s anti-hero George Smiley – but also of Karla’s Choice, a posthumous addition to the Smiley canon written by Nick Harkaway, le Carré’s youngest son. ‘I sat down’, Harkaway writes, ‘to see whether I could fit some sort of story into [the] ten-year gap’ between The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, which closes with Smiley mourning the death of Alec Leamas and Liz Gold, and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, in which Smiley reappears.

Harkaway’s story opens in the early spring of 1963. Having resigned from the Circus over the catalogue of intelligence failures and betrayals that made le Carré’s early spy stories – unlike Ian Fleming’s – such a hit with the grown-ups, Smiley is now living ‘between libraries and love’, giving full rein to his passion for German literature while enjoying an uncharacteristic (at least for readers of le Carré’s later novels) entente with his wife, Lady Ann Sercomb. Into this unlikely Eden comes Millie McCraig, nominally in charge of the Housekeeping section (and last seen in the 2017 novel A Legacy of Spies), but here bringing an urgent personal appeal from Control, the head of the Circus.

It seems a Hungarian émigré named László Bánáti, a London literary agent whose existence was unknown to the Circus, has disappeared. The Soviet agent sent to assassinate him has, owing to an attack of religion, decided to defect. Bánáti’s secretary, Susanna Gero, who herself fled Budapest seven years earlier (just ahead of Soviet tanks), finds her way to a Circus safe house, and no one but Smiley will do as her interrogator, confidante and protector.

If all of that sounds confusing, it is. But only in the way that most of le Carré’s novels get off to an oblique start, supernumeraries and stars ambling in from the wings, all lovingly described and set in motion, while, with our attention fixed stage left, the real action takes shape stage right. The jacket of Karla’s Choice promises ‘the origin story of [Smiley’s] greatest enemy’, yet Karla, future head of the KGB’s Thirteenth Directorate, doesn’t actually get a mention until page 205. If you convert that to screen time, Marlon Brando’s Kurtz makes an earlier appearance in Apocalypse Now.

So is it worth the wait? Le Carré’s plots, like Raymond Chandler’s, don’t always add up neatly; it’s the characters and the atmosphere that keep us turning the pages. And in those aspects, Harkaway does not disappoint. The claustrophobia and paranoia peculiar to the game of spy versus spy are every bit as vividly conjured here as in his father’s books. Having grown up with Smiley – Harkaway was born in 1972; Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy came out when he was one – the author is thoroughly steeped in Circus jargon. A clandestine meeting is a ‘treff’ (from the German Treffen, a meeting). A ‘mole’ is an enemy agent inside the secret service. ‘Lamplighters’ do surveillance work and look after safe houses. The CIA are known as ‘the Cousins’. And he’s taken over the whole Circus puppet show – from Peter Guillam and Toby Esterhase to Bill Haydon and Smiley himself – with admirable dexterity. If Karla, at least on this outing, turns out to be more MacGuffin than master spy, that hardly matters.

And in at least one respect, Harkaway improves on his father, conjuring up a far more sympathetic Lady Ann than le Carré’s caricature of an aristocratic bolter whose infidelities and general instability cast such a lurid shadow in the later novels. Here – at least while Smiley considers a second career in banking – Ann seems genuinely content, and even deeply in love with her husband, who in turn seems equally smitten. ‘There was a rumour’, the narrator informs us, ‘that George Smiley might almost be happy.’

Of course it can’t last. And while it doesn’t, the novel does allow them a clear understanding of each other’s motives, plus a deeper sense of what drives Karla – though he is the same mystery wrapped in an enigma that we will encounter ten years on in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.

Given that Harkaway serves up so much caviar for the le Carré cognoscenti, it seems churlish to quibble about history. Or politics. Yet when I read that in 1963 ‘the Circus … was enjoying a small heyday’ and that ‘Control’s preference for patient intelligence gathering over the interventionist American style only looked wiser in the light of Khrushchev and Kennedy’, I nearly choked on my borscht. Leave aside the Cuban Missile Crisis of the previous year, which saw both the American president and his Russian adversary defying their
respective intelligence services in backing away from nuclear confrontation. In the real world, January 1963 was when Kim Philby – the inspiration for Bill Haydon – failed to show up at a dinner party in Beirut given by the first secretary at the British embassy. Philby’s flight to Moscow wasn’t confirmed until the following July. The inescapable conclusion – that for over a decade Her Majesty’s Secret Service contained more holes than a pound of Jarlsberg – means that during this period the words ‘enjoy’ and ‘heyday’ don’t really apply.

Le Carré, as he reminded his Russian critic, was in the business of demolishing the myths of the intelligence world. His son seems more interested in burnishing them. But considered purely as what his father’s great rival Graham Greene called an ‘entertainment’, Harkaway’s novel delivers handsomely.