A new story about cold war spymaster George Smiley written by John le Carré’s son expertly evokes the atmosphere of the originals
They do it with James Bond, so why not with George Smiley? The estate of Ian Fleming has allowed many new 007 books to be written by luminaries such as William Boyd, Anthony Horowitz and even Jeffery Deaver, to keep the franchise (and, perhaps, its copyrights) alive. So why not try the same with John le Carré’s great anti-Bond, the diffident, corpulent and brilliant spymaster of “the Circus”? At least here the literary pedigree is unimpeachable: the novelist Nick Harkaway is also le Carré’s son.
You wouldn’t want to plonk Smiley down in the present day and have him mutter owlishly about pronouns and smartphones. He belongs to the cold war, in his anonymous overcoats and ability to live in Chelsea. So Harkaway sets his story in a gap between canonical Smileys: after The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (published in 1963) and before the events of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974). (Smiley appears only in the background of The Looking-Glass War, 1965.) We are in 1963, to be precise, and the events recounted in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold are still fresh in the characters’ memories: they are all grieving for their colleague Alec Leamas, gunned down at the Berlin Wall.
