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-Hello, and welcome to "Book Lust."
I'm Nancy Pearl.
My guest today is writer Nick Harkaway.
His newest book is "Karla's Choice."
Nick, it's such a pleasure to have you on the show.
I have wanted to interview you for years
and I'm so glad it worked out.
-It's a pleasure to be here.
Hi, at last. -Hi. I'm a big fan.
I was a big fan of your father's, John le Carré.
And your newest book,
"Karla's Choice,"
actually is based on characters and situations
created by your father.
Which I have to say, as a huge fan of George Smiley
and the "Tinker Tailor" books, is how I think of them.
I was thrilled that you had done that.
And I think the book just really does a marvelous job
capturing that world, and that voice, and those individuals.
So -- -Fantastic. Thank you.
-So how did it all come about?
-We were talking as a family last year
and I had sort of decided -- we'd had a conversation about
whether we should ask someone to write another Smiley book.
And I had decided in my head that that shouldn't be me.
I was just not going to do it,
you know, for all the same reasons you would imagine.
And then my brother, Simon, in this meeting, said,
"Well, you know, I think there's --" and we've talked about,
you know, the possibility we might get someone to do that.
"Before we talk about anybody else.
I think there's a fairly strong argument that it should be you,
so will you do it?"
And when somebody says that, when they ask you to do it,
particularly when it's your family,
it's completely different from the conversation
that you're having in your head.
Because it's no longer, you know, do I dare and, you know,
have I got the sheer effrontery to do this?
It's like, oh, they want me to do this.
And then all the reasons that it's hard,
it's challenging, you know, it can go wrong, you know,
all that stuff suddenly becomes a reason why you should do it.
So I said can I have a couple of weeks
just to kind of work out whether I can.
And I reread all the Smiley novels, and I sat down,
and I wrote little bits of stuff, not story,
just kind of like you would paint
if you were choosing a color for a wall
and going would it work like this.
Would it work like this?
You know, and by the end of the two weeks,
I was like I want to do this. Like I really want to do this.
You know, and thank goodness, Simon kind of did that,
because otherwise, I would have said no, no, no.
We should get someone else.
You know, so, yeah, I mean, it was a surprise to me, too,
but, you know, it's really exciting.
-When you went back and read the books,
how did you decide -- your book, "Karla's Choice,"
is set in between the events of
"The Spy Who Came in from the Cold"
and "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy."
How did you -- was that an obvious place
to put the book for you? -I don't know if it's obvious.
It's certainly it's a really good place for it to go.
-Oh, yeah.
-Because you've got in "Spy Who Came in from the Cold,"
you have, you know, the classic book.
And but Karla is not mentioned.
And then in "Tinker Tailor,"
you have the beginning of the trilogy
and the first mention of Karla.
And this kind of construction of the circus as a world,
as an infrastructure, as a bureaucracy, as an environment.
And it has a history and that history goes back before
"Spy Who Came in from the Cold."
But none of those things,
you know, is in the original book
because he's not building a franchise at that point.
He's just writing novels.
And so you've got this ten-year or nine-year gap
between these two extraordinary books,
and that's enough time to do something entirely its own.
You're not just writing in-fill.
You get to say, okay, you know,
we can do this and we can build this.
We can break it, again.
We can go to places and we can come back, again.
And all that can belong to whatever story
you're telling into that space.
And then at the very end of that,
you can then join on very neatly if you need to back into
"Tinker Tailor" having done nothing bad and enriched
or, you know, kind of enlightened it a little bit.
But really just having told a sequence of stories
that belongs to itself.
And that was really important, and, you know,
it just -- it felt narratively like the place to be.
-Mm-hmm.
I was trying to think of where else it could possibly be,
but that decade
where George has left the circus after the events of
"The Spy Who Came in from the Cold,"
and then is back in, in "Tinker Tailor," seemed like the place
that would give you, as a creator and a writer,
the biggest canvas to work on
because you don't want to be hampered.
-I think that's right.
And then the other thing that I looked at was between
"Honorable Schoolboy" and "Smiley's People,"
where there is also a gap.
It's not determined quite how long the gap is.
But you could have the stories of Smiley
as the caretaker chief of the circus,
but when you're the caretaker chief of the circus,
you're not the foot soldier anymore.
You can't go plodding around into dark alleys
and asking silly questions, and so on.
You know, you have to be above the fight,
and that's not nearly so much fun.
This is Smiley when he's allowed to go and be Sherlock Holmes,
be Poirot, you know,
and do the good stuff, and be a little bit disobedient.
-Right.
When I was reading "Karla's Choice,"
my thought was I thought, you know, Nancy,
you have not reread
"The Spy Who Came in from the Cold" in like decades
and then I went out and got it.
So I mean, I think that one of the things
that's going to happen
is there's going to be a huge rush on
"The Spy Who Came in from the Cold."
Because so much of the book
that you wrote plays off of those events.
-I think -- I mean, so, it comes directly after "Spy,"
and so there's an instinct to go and read "Spy."
But actually, it plays towards "Tinker Tailor."
-It does.
-You know, it drives you, you know,
so my hope is that it gets everybody back
into the Smiley stories.
Which, I mean, I've got to say, you know,
as we look at the world in the place it's in,
a discussion of what the Cold War looked like
doesn't feel out of place.
-Right.
-You know, but also just, you know,
because part of the impetus for doing this
was that when we inherited the literary estate,
we inherited it with an obligation, a request
that we try to get -- broaden the audience,
continue the audience through time.
That was -- that's the whole gig for us,
you know, is my dad wanted to be remembered.
And, you know, remembered as a novelist, read as a novelist.
And the, you know, people talk about when you say,
you know, it's very hard to know which books will be read
in 50 years or 100 years.
I think with Victorian novels,
that's probably true.
You know, it's kind of a lottery.
But now we live in a world with very kind of structured
and quantified markets, and attention economies, and so on.
And if you want something to persist,
you've got to steal some attention for it.
And the ways in which you do that are kind of knowable
and fairly limited.
And the most obvious is if you have new material.
-Mm-hmm.
When you were working on the book that became
"Karla's Choice," your, oh, your father's books,
he was angry about the way the world was.
Do you share that anger and do you think that comes out
in "Karla's Choice," or was it more frustration?
I couldn't decide.
-So he was increasingly angry as he got older,
which is always fantastic.
I feel in the Smiley novels,
he's angry, but he's also driven by a compassion.
He sees the human dimension
in an impossible meat grinder of geopolitics.
And he's interested really in that,
in the effects on the people,
and, you know, he wants to say
how do you find the right action in a bad place?
And then and that theme continues into the later books
but then you also get very specific
political angers directed at particular movements,
particular moments, and so on.
And, I mean, you know, I do share those things,
and he and I, for example,
we went on his birthday a few years ago,
we went and marched on the Brexit march
or the anti-Brexit march.
You know, because, you know,
that felt like a thing, you know,
we weren't really cross about.
You know, so yeah, I mean, I share those,
but I didn't want to try to cross the streams too much
in "Karla's Choice."
I wanted to play to that anger and optimism and despair
that comes out of compassion
more than pointing at a specific thing
and saying, you know, this is a bad thing.
Because transplanting a modern horror into 1963
is something that can go sour on you.
I think it's better you take the story as it is
and let it teach what it has to teach
about people and compassion,
and hope that that applies in the modern context.
Which I, you know, I believe it does, anyway.
-Right. -To the extent that, you know,
I was sort of adding stuff in there.
I wanted to focus attention a little bit on --
In the UK -- I don't know how it is in the US --
in the UK, we don't educate ourselves properly
about the history of Central and Eastern Europe.
-Oh.
-And it matters terribly now, you know,
but, you know, we don't really look at the map
and say, wow, you know,
the Danube flows from Germany all the way to Odessa
into the Black Sea.
And that's the same Black Sea
where you can sail past Crimea to Rostov-on-Don,
and into the canal network there, and into Central Russia.
Like that's a revelatory kind of, you know,
a lot of people go, "Oh, wow, can you do that?"
Say yes, and that's a strategic corridor
which matters right now in a huge way.
You know, and, I mean, I have a global security politics degree
and I wasn't, you know,
confident on that stuff going into writing this book.
I had to kind of read up.
And, of course, now there's an app.
You can watch the shipping go up and down the Danube,
which by the way, is fascinating, right?
I mean, of course it is. -Wow.
Was there something when that you discovered --
so the two saddest books in that whole Karla thing
for me are "The Spy Who Came in from the Cold,"
which is heartbreaking.
And "The Honorable Schoolboy," which is equally heartbreaking.
You know, the other -- the trilogy,
that central trilogy I think doesn't --
and this doesn't take away from anything like my enjoy --
my love for them. But they don't break your heart.
Maybe they should.
You know, maybe the betrayal of Bill Haydon
should break your heart, but it didn't in the same way.
-I think they take people in different ways,
but yeah, I think, you know, definitely that middle story,
"The Honorable Schoolboy,"
it's really interesting, that one.
Because a lot of the time in bookshops,
you'll find "Tinker Tailor" and "Smiley's People,"
but not "The Honorable Schoolboy."
Because it's longer. It's more complex.
You know, and then, every so often,
you meet somebody for whom
"The Honorable Schoolboy" is like the only book.
Like everything else is it's building to that
or a consequence of that
and "The Honorable Schoolboy" is the one
and the defining le Carré novel.
And I had to look at that and I had to look at "Spy,"
and "Murder of Quality," and "Call for the Dead,"
and so on, and say, okay, where am I?
What, you know, what are we doing here?
Because when you look at the first three books,
they are shorter, less immediately complex.
They have sort of the clarity of language, simple structure.
They're more like a kind of noir detective story
than they are the later books,
which are very much more convoluted, more -- you know,
the prose is more ornamented, and there's a lot going on.
And it feels to me like I have, you know,
while I'm telling "Karla's Choice" and whatever else
I do next, I have to move also through that process.
You can't -- you have to leave "Spy Who Came in from the Cold"
and be able to step straight into "Karla's Choice,"
if that's what you're doing.
Obviously, it's a standalone book,
but if you are coming at it from "Spy Who Came in from the Cold",
you have to be able to go there.
And then, you know, at the far end,
you have to be able to step into "Tinker Tailor" without going,
"Whoa, what just happened?" -Right, yeah.
Was there something in those books
when you were re-reading them or when you came to write
"Karla's Choice" that made you wish your dad had made
a different choice about a particular plot point?
Or did you wish that you could argue with him about?
-I mean, I'd argue with him, you know,
I can argue with him at any time.
I mean, all the -- actually,
we agreed so much on so many things.
Arguments were pretty rare,
but I don't think there's anything that I look at and go,
"I wish you hadn't done that."
There are a couple of places where I go,
you know, I mean, just things like
when you go from "Tinker Tailor" to
"Honorable Schoolboy," the year changes.
The date of Control's death shifts by 12 months.
And, I mean, you know, the kind of precision maniac
in me kind of gets a bit [inaudible]
You know, but actually for me, that's fantastic.
Because what it means is,
you know, there's a lot of information
which is given only partially in the sequence.
You know, you know a little bit about the history
of Karla but not much.
You know a little bit about the history
of Percy Alleline's career
but you can't put the pieces together in a way
that you know is perfect.
So actually what that means is that I can move the pieces
around without crossing any lines.
And similarly,
if you've got dates that shift in the existing franchise,
to some degree,
you're liberated by the fact that you cannot get it right.
Because you will dovetail with "Tinker Tailor"
or with "Honorable Schoolboy."
You can't do both at the same time.
You know, which means that actually you're
liberated if you need to shuffle something six months
in one direction or another.
It's not the end of the world.
Which one of the great things for me
about this was I wanted to be made to color inside the lines.
Like I don't normally write books into a recognizable genre.
I, you know, I tend to kind of if I see a genre,
I want to break it and smash it together with something else.
And here was an opportunity to take this kind of apprenticeship
with my father and being, you know, inside the --
in one place, in one zone doing a recognizable thing.
But within that,
I still have the freedom to move things around
and stretch time a little bit if I need to.
-Mm-hmm.
I've -- talking about spy fiction as a genre,
I've -- the way I think about it
is that for contemporary Britain, I mean,
that it's --
that we talk about the Arthurian legends
as the matter of Britain.
But I think for the 20th century,
the matter of Britain begins with, you know, Philby.
-I wonder.
I mean, I think it's all, I mean,
and you see this in my father's books,
this imperial decline going on,
something which we still haven't come to terms with.
You know, you look at our politics
and how they work, and, you know, a lot of the time,
it's still about, you know,
how can we arrange to have an outsized influence on the world.
Why are we not being given the right level of respect?
And, you know, and you want to go, you know,
because we don't do that stuff anymore, which is a good thing.
So now we have to be this new country
that we haven't figured out yet.
But, you know, we've got a lot of stuff
that we need to work out before we can do that.
So this imperial decline in that story,
I think Philby, for people of my father's generation
and for the establishment, Philby and Blunt,
later on, were absolutely astonishing.
Because as everybody says, you know,
quote-unquote "He was one of us."
Like we knew he couldn't be a spy because he was one of us.
-Right.
-And there's an episode of the satirical show
"Yes, Prime Minister," or "Yes, Minister."
I can't remember which one it was.
Which is our kind of early-1980s "West Wing," you know,
which has a whole sequence about,
well, you know, so John Halstead couldn't be a spy
because he was one of us.
And, of course, he was, right?
It becomes increasingly obvious because it's a comedy show.
It becomes increasingly obvious that he was doing everything
except running around
Westminster wearing a Soviet flag shirt, you know,
and they're all going, "No, no, no, no, no."
But to a weird degree with Philby,
they kind of did that, you know, and it's my, you know,
my father's father was a confidence trickster
among his many other failings, most of which were worse.
But he was a professional con man.
And dad said about him
that Ronnie loved to take it to the edge.
And then when he was on the edge, he was unsatisfied.
He'd gotten away with being on the edge
so then he'd take it over the edge
and see if he could still get away with it.
And the example that he gave was that Ronnie
and his guys had a con going where they found a guy
who would survey houses for them after the war.
And they would -- and the guy would say this house
has been badly damaged when it wasn't.
So they'd buy up a house and they'd say,
"Yes, bomb damage from the German bombing.
Very sad. Beautiful house. Needs a lot of repair work."
And they'd get a government subsidy which was,
you know, to rebuild it.
And, of course, they didn't need the money,
so they'd pocket the money
and they'd just kind of give it a coat of paint
and that'd be great.
And they ran out of houses that had been built before 1945.
So at that moment, you pack up and you go home.
Like, you're done.
It's been nice, but it's finished.
But they started using houses
that had been built after the end of the war.
Lo and behold, all the police in London fell out of the sky
and they were all arrested. Like, well, of course you were.
What did you think was going to happen?
You know, but Philby was doing that with spying.
It was like.
"Well, if I do this outrageous thing,
you know, will the universe still love me enough
to let me get away with it?
How about if I, you know,
how about if I appear on television with,
I don't know, with Stalin?
Will that do it?"
You know, it's extraordinary the degree of kind of --
and that's actually very common
with those kind of flamboyant spies.
If you look at the history of a lot of them,
they get caught doing something nuts.
And then very often, they've supplied information
which is critical in which
if their own side would just believe them
would change the course of history.
And their own side's like,
"Yeah, he's crazy.
Like that's not happening right now, so you can ignore that."
And then it turns out to be true and he's, you know,
he's in the background going, you know.
And then he's going, "Oh, wow.
We thought you were just drunk in a bar in Lisbon.
We had no idea that was true." You know, it's the relationship.
I'm fascinated by this, at the moment.
The relationship between the agent handler and the agent.
The agent handler doesn't trust the agent and vice versa.
And yet, somehow they have to trust each other more
than they trust anybody else.
That's extraordinary.
-So do you -- so two quick questions.
One is, are you going to continue writing --
I'm going to call it your own work.
I mean, please understand the way I mean it.
I mean, do you have like books on tap?
Because I'm a big fan of Nick Harkaway's books.
-Nick Harkaway's books are not going anywhere.
So I have the next Cal Sounder book is coming up.
And I'm editing right now a book that I was writing in 2020,
which then just got swallowed up by "Titanium Noir,"
and then by this, and so on,
which I'm incredibly excited about.
No one's seen it, yet.
Like and it's going to be one of those things
where usually what happens when I deliver a book is
that some poor editor somewhere has to sit there and go.
"Well, what do we do with this?
Like this isn't like anything else you've done.
We can't define the genre."
And the marketing team and the sales team are simply going,
"Well, I mean, we'll, you know, we'll do whatever we do.
Maybe it'll take wings, you know."
And, you know, and so it's another
of those "Someone's going to enjoy that" moment.
Because when I said, yes, I'll do "Karla's Choice,"
and yes, I'll, you know, potentially do more if,
you know, if it's something people want,
I also said, look, but I have to be able to do the other stuff.
Not just because I love writing it, which I do,
but because it's actually it turns out
if I'm not able to go off the rails a little bit,
I get, as a person,
I get very grumpy
and confused about what I'm doing with my life.
I start thinking, you know,
maybe I should retrain and be an environmental lawyer,
which is like my --
the theme of my life is what should I be doing, you know,
instead of this that is of greater use to mankind.
And, you know, so actually, I need the ability to do both.
I need the space to do both, which I have,
but partly because I write quickly,
so it's not the end of the world.
I can do one le Carré every two years, you know,
if that's what is desired in the world.
-Oh. Well, thank you so much for talking to me
about the book and about you as a writer.
And I just -- I'm just thrilled that we got to talk.
-It's really nice to see you.
-Yes, yes.
And if you come to Seattle, I hope we can meet in person.
-Thank you so much. It's great to talk.
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