Field Report – Nick Harkaway, author of Karla's Choice in conversation with Philippe Sands at Waterstones Piccadilly.
At a recent Waterstones Piccadilly event, attendees were treated to a lively and candid conversation between authors Nick Harkaway and Philippe Sands. The discussion delved deep into Harkaway’s unique experiences growing up as the son of the legendary spy novelist John le Carré (real name David Cornwell) and Harkaway's own writing journey, culminating in his latest book, Karla's Choice, which expands on his father’s fictional spy world of the Circus and George Smiley Esq.
Growing Up With John le Carré
Nick Harkaway shared fascinating insights into his childhood, describing it as unconventional and immersed in the literary world due to his father’s career.
Philippe Sands: “Let's just go back a little ways growing up with such a Dad. I love the fact that you've put in the introduction of Karla's Choice an account, a mini account, of growing up and merging into that literary world. What was the impact of that on your childhood and then going forward?”
This book is dedicated to
DAVID JOHN MOORE CORNWELL
Father, husband, brother, son
Ping-pong player, cartoonist, wine drinker, dog walker
Germanist
Francophile
Lost boy
Late-life Irishman
Terrible cook
and to
JOHN LE CARRÉ
Novelist
(c) Karla's Choice
Nick Harkaway: “So the difficulty with that is that I was never anybody else's child, so I can't really compare it. I'm only now beginning to realize that my childhood was quite odd.”
John le Carré frequently dictated his drafts to his wife at breakfast, which, Harkaway joked, included daily reading of the Smiley novels. This childhood not only shaped Harkaway’s linguistic skills but deeply ingrained in him the narratives of John le Carré's fictional espionage world from a young age.
“He never typed his own work, and that was initially my Mum, and then later on various assistants as well, but he would handwrite them, and he would start quite early in the morning. So then over breakfast, really, he would read the day's pages to my Mum. So while I was acquiring language in the 70s, he was writing the Smiley novels, and I was getting ninety minutes of George Smiley immersion every morning. So Smiley was my imaginary friend (among others) for quite a long time.”
Why is Obi-Wan Calling Us?
Harkaway, who is a big fan of Star Wars, shared a fun story about answering the phone to the Jedi Master Obi Wan Kenobi, aka Sir Alec Guinness aka George Smiley.
“We had an early commercial telephone system with a kind of mini switchboard box that went on a wall and you could transfer calls from room to room, which was incredibly prestigious. Nobody I knew had a phone system like that. I was not to tell anybody ever either the telephone number they were calling. You just said hello, and never to acknowledge that my father was in the house. It was quite difficult, but you had to be polite as well. And a voice would say, for example, hello, I wonder if I could possibly speak to Mr David Cornwell, and it was Alec Guinness.”
“And yes that was a very strange. Why is he calling? Why is Obi Wan calling? And incidentally, and I want to point this out, because it was, it was omitted through sheer malfeasance from the John le Carré private letters book. But there is a letter in which is acknowledged that Alec Guinness thought I was frightfully intelligent when I was young. I fought tooth and nail with my brother Tim to keep that letter in but my older brother cut that right out!”
Nick Harkways' Journey to Becoming A Writer
“So when I was at university, I wanted to be an environmental lawyer, in fact. I studied for a global security degree, Russia, 20th Century history, revolution. I couldn't I just couldn't stomach the idea of doing more academia. I wanted to get out into the world and not be at university anymore. And so I took a job on the film set, and kind of did the runners job and made tea, and it became increasingly surreal.”
“I was in the car park at Pinewood Studios late one night having finished work and closing the office, and Richard Gere and 30 mounted knights rode past. And I was kind of like, okay, I'm going back in the production office. I'm going back to sleep, and I'll check in the morning whether that was a hallucination. And then my second job was working on Muppet Treasure Island. And I took the Muppets their post every morning.”
Harkaway initially tried his hand at script writing for films.
“So I became a film scriptwriter in the UK, and in the UK film industry at that time, there was a very clear demarcation between the UK and Hollywood. And the demarcation was that if you went to Hollywood, they would pay you more money, but if you stay in the UK, you get to keep your artistic soul.”
“I did that for a while, and I was, I think, quite bad at it. And in 2005, I said, okay, this is ridiculous. I'm getting married and I can't be a stereotype screenwriter living in an attic, so I'm going to write a book, and it's going to be make or break. If I write a book, it works, that's fine. If I write a book it doesn't work, then I will retrain.”
John le Carré's Response to His Son's Desire to Write
“My dad was incredibly supportive of all his kids, and so if you said to him, I'm going to write a book, his immediate reaction was, how fantastic. You should definitely do that. I actually didn't tell him I was writing a book until I was comfortably two thirds of the way through.”
“The dividend of being a film writer before that was that I knew I could finish a story, so I started writing, and I wrote something that was as far from being a film script as I could possibly imagine. Constraints of length, budget, sanity all went out the window, and I just wrote something that was as bonkers as I could possibly get it, but invoked everything I loved, martial arts, movies, crazy dissolution of reality, weird pop culture references, all kinds of mad stuff. And I just had fun.”
On Reading Spy Fiction
“I had always read fantasy, science fiction and so on, more readily than anything else, and lots of crime. And so, you know, the only espionage novels I read were his, really, and I loved them, but that didn't mean I was interested in writing spy fiction. What I said at the time was that you don't want to write into the same space, because there's no point standing next to a lighthouse waving a match.”
Harkaway Tried to Persuade le Carré to Write Happier Endings
“The way in which I am distinctly different is that I skew towards happy endings, and that's something he struggled with. The Night Manager and Single & Single has happy endings but I struggle to think of others. I used to try and persuade him to write happy endings.”
*****A Perfect Spy Spoiler Alert***** please scroll one paragraph ahead if you have not read/watched it.
Harkaway shared this fun story about the TV adaptation of A Perfect Spy with Peter Egan. “The guys from the American studio watching said, so he kills the old lady and escapes in her clothes, amazing. So they shot an extra scene where he's dead in the bathtub to go, No, he doesn't kill the old lady. No, that's not how this goes.
On Completing Silverview
Phillipe Sands then asked Harkaway about Silverview (Silverview was published posthumously on 12 October 2021) and if there was ‘any hesitation on your part of taking on that job? Or were you completely comfortable?'
Harkaway touched on the intriguing process of completing his father's unfinished work, Silverview, revealing the emotional and intellectual challenges involved.
“Silverview was this novel that he struggled with, put aside, grumped about, picked up again and so on. He told my brother he wanted Silverview to be published after he was dead. He told me we should make up our own minds about it. He told somebody else he never wanted to hear about again, and we didn't really know why he said that. So I was prepared for it to be bad. Any novelist can write a bad book.”
“Silverview was good and it was different. It was unexpected in some ways, and it was quite dark. It had a very eerily accurate portrayal of an old lady's dying, which actually was weirdly akin to my Mother's in that moment, which was bizarre, but he hadn't envisaged it that way.”
“I think he set out to write, to exorcize the spectre of his own mortality with that sequence and he ended up writing hers, and was appalled by it.”
On his own contributions to Silverview, Harkaway humbly suggests “It was barely clerical it was not a creative challenge. The difficulty, actually, for me, was I had to re lose all the arguments that I'd ever had with him about kind of anything that was tangentially related to the topic, because Silverview had to be his book. ”
“There's a moment where you can see the traces of a story related to A Delicate Truth about American money funding the Right in the UK. I would have been inclined to cut that or explore it, but that was not my job. Ironically, in the case, if he had edited that book for publication, he would probably have rewritten it in the proof stage, because he always did that and it drove his publishers nuts!”
On The Decision To Write The Next John le Carré George Smiley/Circus Novel
The le Carré literary estate's mission is to ensure that his books continue to be read. Harkaway revealed that there was a family discussion asking ‘Could we do a new book?' Harkaway compiled a list of interesting writers who he thought would be equipped to write the next John le Carré Circus novel. Harkaway remained tight lipped when a member of the audience asked him which writers were on his list.
Where are Fawn and Mendl when you need them?
“I had this list of people I thought would be great, and I was about to unveil it to my family. My older brother said, so I think you should do it. Let's be serious, because I've kind of counted myself out of this. I've spent 15 years putting blue water between myself and my father in writing terms.
But the family asked ‘Will you do it? We would like you to write it.”
On Choosing To Set Karla's Choice in between The Spy Who Came In From The Cold and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy Timeline.
“I reread all the George Smiley novels in sequence, just as a matter of course. And one of the things that becomes apparent is that the dates shift between, between Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and The Honourable Schoolboy. The dates move by twelve months because he wasn't writing a franchise, he was writing novels individually, which tie together, and those novels were always now. I guess also because he wants to tie events in The Honourable Schoolboy to events in the real world.”
“So you've got a nine year gap to Tinker Tailor, which is good to work with. Then you've got a very short gap to Honourable Schoolboy. You've then got a period where Smiley's is caretaker Chief of the Circus, until Smiley's People. And that's undefined. You could say that Smiley's People could take place in late into the mid 1980s, it could even be the defining moment that ends the Cold War. You know, Karla's gone, so you could tell stories in that space, but you're dealing with Smiley as Chief, and that is a slightly different enterprise. So the authentic target zone is this decade in which I set Karla's Choice. This is just where you have Smiley as this recognizable free ranging espionage Sherlock Holmes figure, where he can almost do anything.”
A Glimpse into the Creative Process
Philippe Sands and Nick Harkaway also explored the intricacies of the creative process, discussing everything from the initial conception of a novel to the detailed historical research that anchors Harkaway’s settings and characters in authenticity.
This peek behind the curtain into the crafting of a spy novel fascinated attendees and a fun spontaneous exercise on plotting, offered aspiring writers invaluable insights into the art of plotting a story.
Researching 1960s Europe for Karla's Choice
A well informed member of the audience asked Nick Harkaway how he invoke the world of Europe in the 60s.
Nick Harkaway: “I had to give a potted history of Hungary because in 1963 most people would have known the recent history. I didn't learn it properly when I was at university. I'm still kind of learning it now. I did research, and I tried to be very careful, but, you know, actually trying to judge the geopolitical cross currency in 1963 in Hungary, which is not well written about, is not easy.”
“The saving grace is that you're not writing a novel about 1963 you're writing a novel about the Circus in 1963 so it's actually an alternative world. That's the other thing is that in my father's novels, although the Cold War is taking place, the way, statements of the Cold War, which are historically accurate, are mysteriously absent. Cuban Missile Crisis, JFK Assassination, The Bay of Pigs I don't think actually get mentioned at all. So there's a kind of drawn out period of intense paranoia between the superpowers, which owes its origin to those events and to events like them. But those events don't take place or aren't mentioned. So what you're dealing with is profoundly before anything else, a mood of paranoia and a mood of the 1960s.”
“Nobody in the Smiley universe goes to a Beatles concert.”
“I read a book on East European cigarettes in the 60s. There is a book called Balkan Smoke by Mary Neuberger and it's fascinating. You should all immediately fall down the rabbit hole of the tobacco trade in the 1960s. Bulgarian tobacco trade was a major feature of the Cold War because they supplied the Iron Curtain countries with tobacco. They were effectively lined up against British American Tobacco and others. And I would wager fairly significant sum of money that those supply routes and those connections were also used or featured in espionage on both sides because why wouldn't they?”
The Future of the le Carré Literary Universe And Will Nick Harkaway Write Another George Smiley/Circus Novel?
“We haven't done a deal for another one, but I'm already making notes and 1965 is in my crosshairs, When I came to sit down and start writing Karla's Choice what I discovered was that I didn't have to turn the dial very far at all to find a voice which is authentically mine, but just it doesn't require me to dissemble in any way which reads to most people as being authentically his. And I think that's inevitable when you contemplate this thing about my acquisition of language being during the Smiley period of his writing.”
“I read the books that were in his library. So that was the things that he read. So lots of Conan Doyle, lots of Dickens, lots of PG Wodehouse, you know, Joseph Conrad. So my kind of sense of how language flows and how stories are told derives from those to some extent, as it does for him.”
“Now, I also have read a bunch of other things that he would never have contemplated reading. I have much trashier taste than he did. He read a lot of books on Napoleon and Charlemagne. He read a lot of non fiction books. I also read an enormous amount of non fiction, but I love offbeat trashy genre fiction. I just have a lot of fun with it. It makes me feel happy.”
“Looking ahead, Harkaway expressed enthusiasm for the potential expansion of the le Carré universe, possibly including collaborations with other authors. This openness to evolving his father’s legacy while maintaining its core essence suggests an exciting future for fans of the genre.”
The evening was not only a celebration of Harkaway’s work but also a profound exploration of the responsibilities and challenges of inheriting and continuing a literary legacy. Attendees left with a deeper appreciation for the craft of writing and the enduring influence of family in shaping a writer’s voice and vision.
Nick Harkaway kindly stayed around to sign books and as is tradition, members of Spybrary's Station L repaired to a local bar to discuss all things Le Carré, Harkaway, Smiley, Mundt and much more!
Watch our 64 minute Karla's Choice deep dive with Nick Harkaway on YouTube or listen on all good podcast apps.
Tim Shipman, the Sunday Times Political Correspondent and spy fan, ranks every John le Carré novel for Spybrary.
Amazon links in this report may earn Spybrary a small commission.
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