Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is Fresh Air. I'm David Bianculli. John Le Carre wrote spy novels that transcended the genre. Philip Roth called Le Carre's 1986 novel, A Perfect Spy, the best English novel since the war. The author's most beloved character was George Smiley, the physically unassuming but brilliant British spymaster.
He was the protagonist of many Le Corre novels, including Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Smiley's People, both of which were adapted into hit TV miniseries starring Alec Guinness as George Smiley. Le Carre, whose real name was David Cornwell, died in 2020. But George Smiley returned last year in the novel called Carla's Choice.
It was written by Cornwell's son, Nick, who goes by his own pen name, Nick Harkaway. Harkaway spoke with Fresh Air's Sam Brigger last year. Here's Sam.
Carla's Choice takes place in 1963, between Le Carre's novels The Spy Who Came In From the Cold and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Smiley has retired from the circus, the nickname for the British Overseas Intelligence Agency, after an agent and his lover were killed in East Berlin, their lives sacrificed for the success of a mission, a decision Smiley initially agreed to but has come to regret.
But Smiley is called back into service by his boss, known as Control, to conduct one simple interview. However, that leads to much more than he bargained for. The story also serves as the origin story of Smiley's nemesis in the KGB, known only as Carla. This is Nick Harkaway's first George Smiley novel, but his eighth overall. They include Tigerman, Noman, and Titanium Noir.
So Nick Harkaway, welcome to Fresh Air. Hello. Tell me, how did you decide to write a George Smiley novel and why now?
I actually decided not to. We had this conversation running inside the family because when we inherited the estate, the literary estate, we inherited an obligation to try to keep the books read, to keep the name alive, but more than anything else, to keep the books in circulation and so on. And in this moment...
the way that you do that is by focusing attention on them through adaptations through new material through essentially commercial projects so the conversation we were having was you know what can we do to to put the books back in everybody's mind how do we how do we fulfill this obligation and the obvious thing is you need a new book so i had a list in my head of people who would be amazing
at writing a new george smiley novel and and i had decided i wasn't going to suggest i should do it i had firm reasons why i wouldn't and we were having the meeting and my brother simon said so um before we get started there's a really it's quite a compelling logic that it should be you and i was like yeah i know uh and he said uh no but i mean i'm asking you you know will you do it and
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Chapter 2: What themes does 'Karla's Choice' explore regarding espionage?
That's Nick Harkaway reading from his new book, Carla's Choice. So Nick, tell us about that idea that you came up with, that in order to be a spy, you really must be afraid.
I think... The job of the spy in many ways is to think the unthinkable, to ask yourself the questions which in normal life you would dismiss as absurd. I had some brief discussions. I did a consultancy gig here in the UK where people were asking me to look at what are the unseeable threats, what are the invisible ones. And it's very hard. You can't look at the back of your own head in the mirror.
But a spy's job is to do that all the time. And to do it, if you're an operative in the field, do it in the micro as well, to ask yourself whether the waiter is putting something in your drink, to question whether the person you see delivering the mail is actually a postman.
And, I mean, we are to a certain extent speaking of fantasy life, but hypervigilance, that sense of looking at everything twice and seeing things out of place, the psychological trait that people develop who've been in traumatic situations for prolonged periods of time, I have absolutely no doubt that that is an aspect of being in the field in an espionage context.
And this is in his own country, but you have characters that have to go behind the Iron Curtain. And their contingencies, they're worried, have I picked the right shoes? Are they scuffed enough? Are they going to look too new? Did I forget to put on the right watch? Am I... Did I just whistle a song that's going to betray my origins?
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Chapter 3: What inspired Nick Harkaway to write a new George Smiley novel?
And you actually have a funny moment where a Soviet spy tells someone that he was trained at a facility that had a dozen different kinds of toilets because the one thing that would betray you the quickest would be if you didn't really understand how to use a bathroom that supposedly you'd lived with your entire life. So first of all, was that something you came up with it or had you heard that?
So I had a long time ago a conversation with a guy who identified himself as having been trained at a facility like that, which I thought was, I mean, the most extraordinary idea. But the logic is impeccable.
Yeah, it makes sense. If you don't know that the cold water is, say, switched in the sink, then that's going to give you up right away.
Yep. I mean, yes. So it would seem. Certainly someone in a training facility somewhere apparently believes that.
Right.
So, Nick, this could be considered a prequel to Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, if you care to use that word. And one of the things that a prequel can do is kind of explain the background to behavior in the original book. And one of the things I really like about this book is that you – you rehabilitate the character of Anne, George Smiley's wife.
In your father's books, Anne is almost always offstage, having very public and multiple affairs, being unfaithful to Smiley. And in fact, in Tinker Taylor, she's sort of a pawn in a huge betrayal of Smiley. And so when you read those books, like, it's hard not to think of Anne as a kind of villain. But you turn that on your head in this book.
Yeah. I mean, with Anne specifically, I wanted to do that. But in general, when I approached the characters and the story that I knew I was fitting into, one of the things I wanted was to have a situation where they would, on the one hand, kind of be illuminated by the story, but on the other hand, that would just leave you with more questions.
And so when you learn things about the characters in Carla's Choice, and you're going to see them again later in Tinker Tailor if you go on and read Tinker Tailor and so on, what I want is for you to feel that you know them, but somehow that just makes them more mysterious. The more you learn about people, the more there is to know.
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Chapter 4: What challenges did Nick face while writing 'Karla's Choice'?
Really? It was that easy to come to? It was so simple.
So, Nick, you grew up really during the height of your father's career. And when his books came out, it was an event. Like, everyone read his books. I remember them sitting on my parents' bedside table. And your father was... One of the most famous, if not the most famous writers of his time. He was a celebrity as a writer, but he was also considered a serious novelist.
What was it like to be his son at that time? What was your home like?
So the first thing I should say is that it's unknowable for me in a way because I don't know what it was like to be anybody else's kid. And for most of my life, I have imagined that because my mother made a huge effort to keep our lives somewhat down to earth in various ways.
and was very successful in that, that my life was sort of mostly like everybody else's, but not in certain very specific ways. And the more I look at it now from a distance, the more I realize that's nonsense on an epic scale. my life was very odd, um, by any reasonable standard. I mean, so how did it actually, how did it work?
I mean, I, we've talked about him reading across the table to my mom and so on. So, you know, um, and that's, you know, that's not something most people experience and certainly it's not something most people experience with kind of genre defining historical period defining fiction. Um, I remember, on the one hand, we lived, when I was little, we lived on a house on the Cornish Cliff.
Our nearest neighbor was a mile away. I'm a Gen X kid. I spent my time walking up and down the coastal path with a dog by myself at the age of six. I was a little bit feral. I came back with mud on my face. And I dreamed Lord of the Rings dreams because I was reading Lord of the Rings, well, a year later. And I just thought I lived in Rivendell.
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Chapter 5: How does Nick Harkaway channel his father's writing style?
And then every so often the house would fill up with people and those people would be in some way important that I didn't properly understand. And they would be publishers and they would be foreign correspondents and journalists and some of them would be politicians and some of them would have no defined profession. And they were fascinating.
We're listening to Sam Brigger's interview from last year with novelist Nick Harkaway about his book Carla's Choice. It's now out in paperback. Harkaway's novel takes place during the Cold War and follows the pursuits of spymaster George Smiley, a character created by Harkaway's father, John Le Carre. More after a break. I'm David Bianculli, and this is Fresh Air. This is Fresh Air.
I'm TV critic David Bianculli. Let's get back to our interview with novelist Nick Harkaway. That's the pen name of Nick Cornwell, son of David Cornwell, better known by his pen name, John Le Carre. If all those aliases remind you of a good spy thriller, well then, I guess that's appropriate. John Le Carre wrote spy novels considered great literary fiction.
They often revolved around his most beloved character, British spymaster George Smiley. Le Carre died in 2020, but his son, Nick Harkaway, has written a novel featuring George Smiley called Carla's Choice. It takes place in the time period between two of his father's best-known books, The Spy Who Came In From the Cold and Tinker Taylor's Soldier Spy. This is Nick Harkaway's eighth novel.
His books include The Gone Away World, Titanium Noir, and Tiger Man. Sam Brigger spoke with Nick Harkaway last year.
Why did you decide to use a pen name? I mean, I think you probably could have gotten away with being Nick Cornwell since you wouldn't have been associated with your father because, well, perhaps you would have been, but he was more known as a novelist as John le Carré.
So there's two reasons why. And the first one you just experienced, which is saying Nick Cornwell is quite difficult. It's just genuinely hard. Nick Harkaway is not easy to say. Well, but you don't have to do the double C in the middle, right? Right. Um, the second thing is actually, I mean, you're right and you're wrong about whether I would have been associated with my dad.
The name of David Cornwell was sufficiently well known, certainly within the industry, that it wouldn't have been a very big fig leaf. But also, um... when you go into any bookshop in London and look in the C section for Cornwall, you find Patricia Cornwall and Bernard Cornwall. And between them, they have, I don't know, 100 books or something more.
And I was like, I'm going to write one book, and they're going to put it right next to these... And no one's ever going to find it. Never mind if they never look for it. Even if they look for it, they're never going to see me. And I just thought, okay, I'm just going to have a pseudonym. And the other thing was, to be honest, I knew...
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Chapter 6: How does the character George Smiley differ from typical spies?
Why Harkaway? Because it does kind of rhyme with le carre, doesn't it?
I know. Isn't that weird? I did not notice that until much too late to change it. I think it's because I just, again, like, osmotically, I believe that the rhythm of a pseudonym should have, the second part should have three syllables. Yeah. You know the story about my dad choosing his own pseudonym, that he was told he should have a good, solid, like two monosyllables, good English name.
And he was so irritated by this advice that he chose to make up a French name instead. So anyway, yeah. So when I decided I wanted a name, I went to Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, and I literally let it flop open and stuck pins in the words. And I had a list of 20 absolutely stupid names. Harkaway was the last one. Can you give us another one? Do you have any? Cantaloupe. Cantaloupe.
Thomas Cantaloupe, which would not have been good.
No. So, Nick, your paternal grandfather, Ronnie, it's known that he was a con man. He did time for fraud. At one point, he was an arms dealer. Your father would have periods of life with him where they would be living the high life and then other times when they had to hide from creditors. And your father seems to have wrestled with this relationship his whole life.
Like my favorite chapter of his memoir, The Pigeon Tunnel. It's all about his father and his novel, A Perfect Spy, considered one of his best, is also a way where he's wrestling with his dad. He died when you were very young. Do you know if you ever met him?
I was in a room with him as a baby, and he immediately looked at me and said, there you are, you see, my eyes. Hmm. At which point my mother apparently kind of stepped between us and said, no, he does not. You know, Ronnie was a con man and he did do prison time. He didn't do enough.
You know, and my dad, although he talked about Ronnie and he didn't struggle with Ronnie, he was haunted by Ronnie. He was sort of onwardly terrorized by Ronnie. Ronnie was... was walking trauma with a shiny smile. And... you know, and the weird thing, he had that thing that some really terrible people have where...
even the people he worst misused were pleased to see him when he turned up again. People he conned, people whose life savings he ruined would go to court to defend him because he was charming and he made everybody feel good. But I have the privilege of having grown up with the funny Ronnie stories and not with Ronnie. But in my...
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