< After John le Carré's death, his son had the 'daunting' task to revive George Smiley

TERRY GROSS, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. 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. His most beloved character was George Smiley - the physically unassuming but brilliant British spymaster, the protagonist of many of le Carre's novels, including "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy" and "Smiley's People." Le Carre, whose real name was David Cornwell, died in 2020, but George Smiley returns in a new novel called "Karla's Choice." It's written by Cornwell's son Nick, who goes by his own pen name - Nick Harkaway. Harkaway spoke with FRESH AIR's Sam Briger. Here's Sam.

SAM BRIGER, BYLINE: "Karla'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 Karla. This is Nick Harkaway's first George Smiley novel, but his eighth overall. They include "Tigerman," "Gnomon" and "Titanium Noir." So Nick Harkaway, welcome to FRESH AIR.

NICK HARKAWAY: Hello.

BRIGER: Tell me, how did you decide to write a George Smiley novel? And why now?

HARKAWAY: I actually decided not to.

BRIGER: (Laughter).

HARKAWAY: 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 put the books back in everybody's mind? 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 I had decided I wasn't going to suggest I should do it. I had firm reasons why I wouldn't.

We were having the meeting, and my brother, Simon, said, so before we get started, there's a really - there's quite a compelling logic that it should be you. And I was like, yeah, I know. And he said, no, but, I mean, I'm asking you, you know, will you do it? And in that moment, all the reasons why I wouldn't - it's incredibly challenging, it's this extraordinary piece of 20th century literary history, it's this, it's that - all these things became the reasons why I would.

BRIGER: It must've been a pretty daunting task, though, to - when you decided to go ahead, to actually start writing this book.

HARKAWAY: Oh, yeah, and, I mean, not past tense either. It's still daunting.

BRIGER: It's still daunting.

HARKAWAY: You know, and it'll be daunting after the book comes out. It'll probably be daunting for the rest of my life.

BRIGER: (Laughter).

HARKAWAY: Yeah. No, it's huge. But it's also - but again, that's why - you know, that's why it's worth doing. You don't do things that are safe. You do things that are scary. And when I started doing it, yes, it was terrifying, but it also became something that I loved.

BRIGER: What were some of the things in your head that you thought about that sort of overrode the anxiety or fear about writing this that you were really excited to try to do in the novel?

HARKAWAY: I mean, so nonspecific things - I wanted a literary apprenticeship with my dad because I watched him write. I learned writing from him by osmosis, but we never really talked about writing very much. And so the idea of sitting down and holding the controls of the machine and operating it the way he did and working with those characters was a way to learn, which I wanted.

BRIGER: Let's talk a little bit about George Smiley. He's physically unremarkable. He's this pudgy, middle-aged guy who you'd likely forget if you saw him in a crowd, and that's in part intentional. One character, when first meeting him, thinks he has more, like, the personality of a greengrocer rather than a spy master and not how she would imagine what a spy was like. And you write he has a wit so dry that many people miss it and mistake it for dullness. So why do you think your father originally wrote the character like that?

HARKAWAY: I think he wanted - I mean, I think first of all, it was because he wanted to say that the spy world is not the world of James Bond.

BRIGER: Right.

HARKAWAY: The one that he knew is not the...

BRIGER: Which was - it was almost an antidote to the James Bond that was originally...

HARKAWAY: Yeah.

BRIGER: ...Right?

HARKAWAY: And, you know, in the U.K., you had James Bond. You had Bulldog Drummond. You had these very - you know, very much action hero-type spy stories, and his experience was not that. It wasn't these sort of incredibly energetic, combat-orientated people - you know, sort of flawless heroes. It was ordinary people doing a hard, endless, possibly slightly futile thing and banging up against their own flaws. And he wanted, you know, to show the humanity. Showing the humanity so that you can understand it and feel compassionate about it is a big part of everything he wrote. So I think that's where it is. And Smiley is in many ways the epitome of that. He's just this guy. And yet, at the same time, of course, he's this tremendously intelligent reasoner, and he's empathic, and he understands people before they understand themselves.

So you have, on the one hand, a character who's in every man in a world that feels appropriately run-down to the universe we know. And on the other, you have a kind of Sherlock Holmes character, who can explain to you the impossibly complex, stupid, brutal realities of the world that you see around you and tell you why they are that way and even control them a little bit to make them less so. So it's that combination which I think makes him incredibly appealing.

BRIGER: I'd like you to just read a little bit from the book. This is as Smiley is going back to The Circus for the first time. He's been asked to come back after he's retired. And he's been enjoying his life. He's been spending time with his wife. He hasn't really been thinking about espionage. He's experiencing joy in a way that he hasn't in a very long time. But now he's - has to return to The Circus, which is the nickname for the intelligence agency, and he has to go through this transformation in order to become a spy again. And I asked you to shorten the excerpt, but if you could please read it for us, that'd be great.

HARKAWAY: (Reading) For Smiley, the experience of returning to The Circus that evening was like a willed drowning. It was as if - as he climbed St Martin's Lane in the direction of his old office - he were making his way down onto the plain of an abyssal sea. For the last month, he had lived in a daylight world, had espoused its meanings and attitudes and enjoyed the simple pleasures of other men. Now, as he approached the familiar door, he found that he was once again engaging in the exercise of paranoia which had governed his former life. Deliberately, he let the nature and movements of his fellow pedestrians function as a random factor in his own movements, making up ridiculous rules as he went along.

The notion of constant danger was a madness that men in his profession must both inhabit and put aside, and the truth was more complex - that the world could change in an instant from clear and kind to desperate and cold. And the trick to survival lay in knowing that instant before it happened and not when. This was a skill he had once possessed but could not guarantee until he tested it again. By the time he reached The Circus, he was, as he had been for the three preceding decades of his life, afraid.

BRIGER: That's Nick Harkaway reading from his new book, "Karla'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.

HARKAWAY: 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 U.K. 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, to do it in the micro, as well - to ask yourself whether the waiter is putting something in your drink. You know, 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.

BRIGER: 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? 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, or have you - had you heard that?

HARKAWAY: 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. You know, but the logic is impeccable, right?

BRIGER: Yeah, it makes sense.

HARKAWAY: So I...

BRIGER: If you don't know, like, the cold water is, say, switched in the sink, then that's going to give...

HARKAWAY: Yeah.

BRIGER: ...You up right away.

HARKAWAY: Yeah. I mean, yes, so it would seem. Certainly, someone in a training facility somewhere apparently believes that, right (laughter)?

BRIGER: Well, we need to take a short break here. If you're just joining us, I'm speaking with writer Nick Harkaway about his new novel, "Karla's Choice." It's a new story about George Smiley, the British spymaster made famous in the books written by Harkaway's father, John le Carre. More after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF BOBBY PREVITE AND THE NEW BUMP'S "SHE HAS INFORMATION")

BRIGER: This is FRESH AIR. We're speaking with novelist Nick Harkaway. He's written a new novel called "Karla's Choice." It's set in the world of his father, John le Carre's spy books, centered around the beloved spy George Smiley. Harkaway's other novels include "Titanium Noir," "Tigerman" and "Gnomon."

So Nick, this could be considered a prequel to "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy," if you'd 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 rehabilitate the character of Ann, George Smiley's wife. In your father's books, Ann is almost always offstage, having very public and multiple affairs, being unfaithful to Smiley. And in fact, in "Tinker Tailor," 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 Ann as a kind of villain, but you turn that on your head in this book.

HARKAWAY: Yeah. I mean, with Ann specifically, I wanted to do that. But in general, when I approached the characters and the story, you know, 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 "Karla'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 less - you know, the more there is to know.

And so with Ann and with George, first of all, when I was talking to people about Ann and George's relationship, I asked a bunch of people who love my father's books. And I said, does Ann love George? And everybody said yes. No one has any doubt that she loves him, and no one has any doubt that he loves her. So why doesn't it work? They have a relationship which, by any measure, ought to work, and yet it doesn't. It's fundamentally broken by the time you get to "Tinker Tailor," and so I wanted to elucidate that. I wanted, you know, to kind of say why that could be. How can that be? And then obviously, you know, the book ends where it does, and that leaves you with kind of, yeah, but how come? You know, surely there must be something they can do?

BRIGER: One of the things that I find so sad about "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy" is that George spends the most amount of his time trying to figure out two people. Like, one is his nemesis, Karla, in the KGB. But the other is Ann, his wife, and they're both mysteries to him. That's not a positive view of marriage, I guess, I would say, too.

HARKAWAY: (Laughter) No, it's not. Well - and I don't think it's a secret that my dad was abandoned by his mother at the age of 5.

BRIGER: Right.

HARKAWAY: And his relationships - you know, I mean, by the way, for good and sufficient reason, because his father was a monster. You know, so his relationships were shaped by that, as you would expect. I mean, and, you know, he was in a traumatic environment for an extraordinarily chunky part of his young life, and eventually kind of ran away from school and ran away from the U.K., and found himself a place to exist in Bern and so on. But, you know, and so - you know, without wishing to be kind of armchair psychologist about it, it's not hard to see why, you know, particularly in his earlier writing, the female characters tend to be absent and offstage or inaccessible, because that's what he knew.

BRIGER: We'll talk about your dad's family life a little bit later, but before we get to that, how did you approach the language of this book? It seems to me that you're emulating your father's style of writing, which I think is quite different from your own instincts as a writer. Like, your father tended to write pretty straightforward, elegant, but simple sentences. And I think when I read your previous books, like, I feel like you tend to be playful in the structure of your sentences. Like, they - they're almost Victorian in their complexity. Sometimes I feel like I'm on a roller coaster. And the pleasure is sort of watching the daring of the sentence, that - and there's, like, humor almost embedded in the sentence structure. So how did you go about writing more in your father's style?

HARKAWAY: So lots to unpack there. First thing is my father's style isn't constant across his writing. I mean, of course it's not, because it's a huge career. But with the Smiley books particularly, you have the first three - "Call For The Dead," "A Murder Of Quality" and "The Spy Who Came In From The Cold." And they are, as you described, shorter sentences, quite declarative. They're almost noirish. They have quite simple plot lines. And they obey this dictum that he had that he liked to trot out of - from civil service telegrams and civil service reports - 400 words, no adjectives (laughter). They're very clear and stark. And then, by the time you get to "Tinker Tailor," you've had a couple of books in between. You have a different ethos at work. The language is much more roving, much more illusory. The book is more complex. The structures are more complex, and there's - you know, it's more poetic. So that's the first thing, is that, you know, there's a lot going on. And then his language changes again in the post-Cold War novels. There's a whole other thing going on there. So that's number one.

Second thing is, yes, my writing in my books does tend to be denser, playful and so on. But part of that, with my earlier books, is an absolutely determined attempt to put some clear blue water between him and me. And the thing that I realized when I started talking about "Karla's Choice," because - and it would have been so great to have had this thought before I wrote the book, not because it would have changed anything, but because it would have made me feel much safer. I was born in 1972, and I grew up with my dad reading his work - new pages he'd write in the early morning and then come to the breakfast table, read them across the table to my mother. Sometimes she'd type them up, you know, and then he'd be reading them again in the afternoon from the typescript, or he'd be working on the typescript the following morning. And incidentally - I love this - they used to use scissors and a stapler. That was cut and paste.

BRIGER: (Laughter).

HARKAWAY: 'Cause we're pre-digital word processing.

BRIGER: Right.

HARKAWAY: And so - but in the fundamental years where I was developing language at all, an hour, two hours of my day consisted of hearing the George Smiley novels being written. So when I came to write this, and I thought, I got to turn the dial a little bit towards Dad, it was 1% - one notch - and suddenly it was there.

BRIGER: Really?

HARKAWAY: The - yeah.

BRIGER: It was that easy to come to?

HARKAWAY: It was so simple.

BRIGER: 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? Like, what was your home like?

HARKAWAY: 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 that's nonsense on an epic scale. My life was very odd 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, 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.

I remember, on the one hand, we lived - when I was little, we lived on a house on a Cornish cliff. We had - 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 6. You know, I was a little bit feral. I came back with mud on my face and - you know, and I dreamed "Lord Of The Rings" dreams, because I was reading "Lord Of The Rings," well, a year later. You know, and, I mean, I just thought I lived in Rivendell. 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 (laughter), you know. And they were fascinating.

BRIGER: Right. We need to take another break here. We're speaking with novelist Nick Harkaway about his new book, "Karla's Choice." It takes place during the Cold War and follows the pursuits of spymaster George Smiley, a character created by his father, John le Carre. More after a break. I'm Sam Briger, and this is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF NICHOLAS BRITELL'S "VICE - MAIN TITLE PIANO SUITE")

BRIGER: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Sam Briger. Our guest is 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 new novel with George Smiley called "Karla's Choice." It takes place in the time period between two of le Carre's best-known books, "The Spy Who Came In From The Cold" and "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy." This is Nick Harkaway's eighth novel. His other books include "The Gone-Away World," "Gnomon," "Titanium Noir" and "Tigerman."

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 Carre. So - and...

HARKAWAY: Well, 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 to...

BRIGER: Nick Harkaway is not so easy to say.

HARKAWAY: Nick Harkaway - well, but you don't have to do the double C in the middle, right?

BRIGER: Right.

HARKAWAY: 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, when you go into any bookshop in London and look in the C section for Cornwell, you find Patricia Cornwell and Bernard Cornwell, 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, OK, I'm going to have a pseudonym. And the other thing was, to be honest, I knew from my father's life that having a pseudonym is a really useful shield. If somebody wants to yell at Nick Harkaway, they can really do it as much as they like. In the end, however much it upsets me, it doesn't get to me, you know? But when somebody comes for you in your real name, that's a different experience.

BRIGER: Why Harkaway? 'Cause it does kind of rhyme with le Carre, doesn't it?

HARKAWAY: 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.

BRIGER: Three syllables. Yeah.

HARKAWAY: 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 I - when I decided I wanted a name, I went to "Brewer's Dictionary Of Phrase And Fable," and I literally let it flop open, stuck pins in the words. And I had a list of 20 absolutely stupid names, and Harkaway was the last one.

BRIGER: Can you give us another one? Do you have any - do you remember...

HARKAWAY: Cantaloop.

BRIGER: Cantaloop.

HARKAWAY: Thomas Cantaloop. Which would not have been good.

BRIGER: No. So, Nick, your paternal grandfather, Ronnie, it's known that he was a conman. 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," is 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?

HARKAWAY: 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 - at which point, my mother apparently kind of stepped between us and said, no, he does not. You know, Ronnie was a conman, 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 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, would - you know, because he was charming, and he made everybody feel good.

But, you know, I have the privilege of having grown up with the funny Ronnie stories and not with Ronnie. But in my kind of adulthood, as I look at my dad's life and my dad - and incidentally, you know, when we say they were hiding from the bailiffs and they were hiding from the law and so on, Ronnie was hiding from the law, and his minor children were dragged along for the ride.

BRIGER: Right. And your dad was at times recruited to work for him to...

HARKAWAY: Yeah. Not just recruited. I mean, I think the reason that Ronnie wanted his children to counterfeit the manners of the aristocracy and the elite class in the U.K. at the time was because that was how you got a better class of mark.

BRIGER: Oh, really? So that was to further future crimes.

HARKAWAY: Yeah. I'm sure he told himself or told them that he just wanted them to be better than him. But I have absolutely no doubt that he wanted them to be his doorways, his signers, you know, his access.

BRIGER: Well, we need to take a short break here. If you're just joining us, I'm speaking with writer Nick Harkaway about his novel "Karla's Choice." It's a new story about George Smiley, the British spymaster made famous in the books written by Harkaway's father, John le Carre. More after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

BRIGER: This is FRESH AIR. We're speaking with novelist Nick Harkaway. He's written a new novel called "Karla's Choice." It's set in the world of his father John le Carre's spy novels. When we left off, we were talking about his father's childhood as the son of a conman. Let's listen to a clip where Le Carre is talking about his father from the 2023 documentary "The Pigeon Tunnel" by Errol Morris. The other voice you'll hear is Errol Morris.

(SOUNDBITE OF DOCUMENTARY, "THE PIGEON TUNNEL")

JOHN LE CARRE: My father was a confidence trickster. Life was a stage, where pretense was everything. Being offstage was boring, and risk was attractive. But above all, what was attractive was the imprint of personality. Of truth, we didn't speak. Of conviction, we didn't speak.

ERROL MORRIS: So you felt like a dupe?

LE CARRE: No, I joined. I joined.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

LE CARRE: You polish your act, learn to tell funny stories, show off. You discover early that there is no center to a human being. I wasn't a dupe. I was invited to dupe other people.

BRIGER: So that's John le Carre from the documentary based on his memoir, "The Pigeon Tunnel." And Nick, you know, in the memoir, your father goes on to explain that learning how to be a liar, that watching his father's cons - like, he thinks that that set him up for his two main careers - being a spy and being a writer - because he says at one point, I'm a liar born to lying, bred to it, trained to it by an industry that lies for a living, practiced in it as a novelist. I was, you know, wondering what you thought of that idea.

HARKAWAY: I think it's undeniable. And I think incidentally, I would throw in the contemporary British public school system, which taught emotional deceit at a very high level. You know, he was shipped off to boarding school at 5. And I was talking to someone who said you - you know, in that situation, you have to choose whether you love your family or you love the school, and it's just less painful to love the school. You know, and those institutions turned out our colonial governors, our military commanders. You know, it was a machine for the creation of the British Empire. And that was what Ronnie wanted to participate in, and it's what he wanted his sons to become.

BRIGER: And so do you see that that sort of extends to you, that, like, your ability as a writer is due in part to, like, this lineage that goes back to your grandfather?

HARKAWAY: Yeah, because stories were the currency around our table. When I was growing up, if I came home from school, I had a story. Dad would have something to share. We'd - you know, we'd swap stories as a way of getting to know each other. If I came back from when I was at university, when I came home, you know, what's the best story you've got? Come on. Let's have it. What's been fun? What's been interesting? What's been strange? And - you know, and vice versa. And we traded stories as emotional currency, as a way of reestablishing contact and closeness.

And so - you know, so in that situation, you learn to tell stories. And I've done it completely unconsciously with my own children. In fact, we play a game, where everybody in the room comes up with an object or a thing or even just an idea, and you all say them out loud at the same time. And then people take turns, knitting them together into a narrative that makes sense. It's a great car game for children. You can do it - you - unlike I Spy, you can do it indefinitely because it's attractive to children, and it's attractive to adults.

BRIGER: Would you practice those stories as a kid? Because if you knew you were going to have to tell a story, would you perform them in your mind to get them right?

HARKAWAY: No.

BRIGER: No.

HARKAWAY: No, you learn to do them first time. You learn effectively basic improv. And that also, by the way, is still part of the curriculum of the schools that I went to, you know, just that kind of baseline ability to start from a question to which you don't know the answer and knit a response that's plausible. And I - when I was - when we had Boris Johnson as our prime minister, I was watching him do all the things I learned how to do - just make up a plausible answer to a question you have no idea about. And I just...

BRIGER: So you went to a boarding school as well?

HARKAWAY: I did not go to boarding school. I went to a minor or mid-grade U.K. London public school, but not a boarding school.

BRIGER: But were you taught to lie there as well?

HARKAWAY: Oh, yes, directly, very - extremely elegantly and openly. We had a moment where one of our teachers said, look. In five minutes, we're going to talk about the influence of Ludwig Brand (ph) on T. S. Eliot. And we all looked at each other in absolute horror. And he goes, no, there is no Ludwig Brand. But there will come a moment in your life, whether it's professional or whether it's academic or whatever, when you have to answer a question you don't know the answer to. And I will tell you right now the best thing to do is say, I'm so sorry. I have absolutely no idea. But there are contexts where you cannot do that. And you are not leaving this building unable to...

BRIGER: Wow.

HARKAWAY: ...Counterfeit an answer.

BRIGER: Wow, that's remarkable.

HARKAWAY: Actually, incidentally a really superb skill because also the other thing it teaches you how to - is how to spot when someone else is doing it.

BRIGER: Well, because of their language, or you're looking for tells, or what are you doing?

HARKAWAY: Well, the first - so, I mean, the first thing that we were taught was you say, well, I think the really interesting thing about Brand is maybe not his direct influence on Eliot but the discussion with Pound. And then you can talk about Pound and Eliot for as long as you like...

BRIGER: Right - which - right.

HARKAWAY: ...Which is knowable.

BRIGER: So you've gotten rid of the thing you don't know.

HARKAWAY: Exactly.

BRIGER: Right.

HARKAWAY: And then when - but then you look back at your interlocutor, and they say - of course they do because they want to be polite, and they want to be part of this interesting conversation - they say, well, yes, and of course, you know, Brand was also involved with - you know, with some of the other intellectuals in that circle and interestingly with a lot of visual artists, you know. And you bring up then whatever - you know, whatever visual artist you want to.

BRIGER: Right.

HARKAWAY: And little by little in the course of the conversation, you can get more information from them about Brand. And so by the end of the conversation, you can actually know enough to say something obvious - but nonetheless which they will agree with because they've just told you - but overtly about Brand and Eliot, and then they think you're very clever.

BRIGER: Well, now I'm just questioning this whole interview.

(LAUGHTER)

HARKAWAY: I haven't had the opportunity to do it.

BRIGER: You know, getting back to your father's family, his mother ran away from the family, abandoning him at 5. Do you think that it was hard for your father to figure out how to be a parent himself because he had no good role models? Like, I mean, it seems like he was a very loving dad, but, like, he had to sort of figure it out from scratch.

HARKAWAY: I think that's true. I mean, I think he had bizarrely good role models who were not his parents. He had teachers. He had aunts. He had his Irish grandmother. He had these kind of people who stepped into those roles. Half of them were kind of con artists and chauffeurs and dancing girls. But they - you know, but they did the job because it was there, and they were decent people - decent people, but crooks some of the time, you know? But not - you know, it's possible to be a crook and not be Ronnie Cornwell. So - but yeah, he had to make it up. But then I think, I mean, I'm a parent now, and you always have to make it up.

BRIGER: You know, you said that your father was haunted by his father, you know, and he tried to figure out what to make of his father through his writing. And I was wondering that - in some ways, if your father haunts you, not as an unwanted spirit, but because you chose to become a writer, because he's such - he has such a presence as a novelist. Like, when you're writing, do you sort of see him looking at your work over your shoulder?

HARKAWAY: I hoped, in the kind of inevitable, kind of corny movie sequence way, that when I wrote this book, I would sort of look up from my desk and see him sitting in the chair by the window, kind of - you know, maybe with a kind of Obi-Wan Kenobi vibe, like, remember the semicolon.

BRIGER: He's a Force ghost (laughter).

HARKAWAY: Exactly. And of course, I didn't, and I'm not sure I even really hoped it. I just - you know, it just would have felt kind of movie-appropriate. But what I got instead was the companionship of occupying the space that he occupied, the business of standing and holding the levers of the Smiley machine and moving them around. And there is a kind of unity that I get from that, which is incredibly emotionally powerful. And some days, it's actually kind of too emotionally powerful. You know, you have to kind of tamp it down.

BRIGER: Yeah.

HARKAWAY: But I'm not haunted by him. I'm - even in the most benign sense. I grieve occasionally. I mean, you know, that doesn't go away. It just gets manageable. You know, but when he died, I had this extraordinary moment, because it was the deep days of COVID lockdowns in the U.K., and he was in a hospital that we couldn't go into. He was allowed in - because he was ultimately in end-of-life care, they would let one person in every day. And there were only two people allowed to be on that list, so they could alternate, and two of my three brothers then were in town. And one of them, Tim - who, alas, is also now dead - had a more shaky relationship with him at the time. And I had to have this extraordinary sort of moment where one of us could go and see him, and one of us couldn't. And I was like, well, OK, it's obviously you, because I really didn't have anything that I needed to say or that I needed him to say to me. We had no unfinished business, and I felt that Tim did.

And he went in, and they held hands. I don't know whether they even spoke, really, but it mattered to Tim. It was important. And I hoped that the next day, they would bend the rules for me, because there was - you know, anything was possible in that moment if you asked nicely enough, because it was obvious what was happening. And then he died at sort of 9 o'clock that night. And obviously, on the one hand, I wish I could have kind of said hi and bye one more time, however awful that would have been. But I also don't regret the decision for one second, because there was nothing outstanding between us.

BRIGER: And your brother Tim passed away a few years after that, didn't he?

HARKAWAY: Yeah. He died by ridiculous medical accident - I mean, not in a hospital situation. He had a pulmonary embolism, I think...

BRIGER: Right.

HARKAWAY: ...And died on holiday. So, you know, that - yeah, it was a rough few years.

BRIGER: Yeah. Well, we need to take a short break here. If you're just joining us, I'm speaking with writer Nick Harkaway about his new novel, "Karla's Choice." It's a new story about George Smiley, the British spymaster made famous in the books written by Harkaway's father, John le Carre. More after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF GERALD CLAYTON'S "SOUL STOMP")

BRIGER: This is FRESH AIR. We're speaking with novelist Nick Harkaway. He's written a new novel called "Karla's Choice." It's set in the world of his father, John le Carre's spy books, centered around the beloved spy George Smiley. Harkaway's other novels include "Titanium Noir," "Tigerman" and "Gnomon."

There was a collection of your father's letters...

HARKAWAY: Yes.

BRIGER: ...That came out a few years ago. It's called "A Private Spy." And there's one letter to you in this book, and I was wondering if you wouldn't mind if I read it.

HARKAWAY: Yeah, it's terrifying. I can't remember which one it is.

BRIGER: OK, well, hope - I don't think it - it doesn't read terrifying, so...

HARKAWAY: (Laughter).

BRIGER: But this was on the occasion of your 21st birthday. I don't know if, in Britain, turning 21 is a big a deal as it is in the United States, but - is it?

HARKAWAY: It doesn't have any legal consequences anymore.

BRIGER: Fair enough. OK.

HARKAWAY: Yeah. But it's still symbolically...

BRIGER: A rite of passage, in some ways.

HARKAWAY: Yeah.

BRIGER: OK. So here it goes.

(Reading) My dearest Nick, I have had this little candlestick in my work room for the last 25 years - from the last years of my first marriage and all through my second till today. It acquired a corny but real symbolism for me. And in bad times, I would shove a candle into it and light it as some kind of affirmation of belief in myself, my talent, my survival. For this reason, I wish you to have it now, with my love, as an antidote to occasional despair. I hope it will remind you that you are a good man when you need reminding, and your own man and no one else's; and that you have one life only, and no candle ever got longer; and that you have a great spirit and a lot to do. With all my love, David.

So that's a lovely letter. Do you still have that candlestick?

HARKAWAY: I do. Of course, I do. Yeah. No, absolutely. And I have it - and normally - actually, at the moment, it's in a cupboard because I need to give it a proper clean. But normally it sits on a little campaign table that he had, which he occasionally used for writing, although it's not very practical, which he gave me a couple of years before he died. So that's why I have the two of them together.

BRIGER: You know, it's a lovely letter, and it's a very thoughtful gift. Were you able to appreciate it at the time you were 21, or were you like, oh, thanks a lot, a candlestick (laughter)?

HARKAWAY: Oh, no. Yeah, no, I knew what I was being given. I mean, it's no - you know, it's very un-British, but we did big gestures. We did kind of emotional conversations. He would almost have you believe that we were all too buttoned up to do that. But except if you read the books, you realize that, of course, you know, they are depictions of actually the Brits coming unbuttoned in all kinds of, you know, extraordinary ways, and he was very much that person. He was actually the most cosmopolitan soul.

He was somebody who reached out looking for, as it were, Goethe's Germany or Red Vienna or, you know, the moments when anything is possible and people mix and great ideas are discovered or great poems are written, whatever. He went as a child and kind of constantly as an adult. He went looking for those places. And so very appropriately, he's the least British Brit, despite being sort of iconically - and, of course, he ended up Irish anyway.

BRIGER: I saved the most important question for last, so I hope you're prepared for this.

HARKAWAY: I am. I am.

BRIGER: For a while, you had a job writing copy for a lingerie catalog.

HARKAWAY: (Laughter) Yes. Briefly.

BRIGER: So I just was wondering what that was like. And, you know, I assume that a lot of lingerie is purchased by men and not by women, you know, as gifts that perhaps women will appreciate, perhaps not. So I was wondering, like, when you're writing copy, were you writing from the perspective of a man or a woman? Or what were you doing?

HARKAWAY: First of all, I think we need to loosen our sense of who wears the lingerie in the situation.

BRIGER: Fair enough. OK.

HARKAWAY: It's open season.

BRIGER: OK.

HARKAWAY: Second of all - (laughter) so this was a friend of mine, ran a boutique in north London, and she had this wildly glamorous goofy selection, which was beloved of all kinds of people. And she said to me, will you - you know, we're doing the catalog. Will you do text for the catalog? And I said, sure. What do you want? She had created this extraordinary character, Miss Lala, who was the kind of muse of the boutique, and she wanted it all written in the voice of Miss Lala. And so it was less about describing the number of clips and buttons and how frightfully erotic the whole thing is and more about expressing a kind of massive joy in the ridiculousness and the beauty and the preposterousness of the whole thing and doing a kind of Eartha Kitt as Catwoman kind of, you know? And it was huge fun. And it terrifies me that that biography is still out there in the world for you to find.

BRIGER: Can you channel a little Miss Lala for us?

HARKAWAY: You know, I honestly can't. I can - let me see.

BRIGER: Sounds like the J. Peterman catalog from "Seinfeld."

HARKAWAY: Yeah. Well, no. It was so it was kind of, oh, my darlings, you need to understand the sheer iridescent beauty of this piece. It just - it makes me feel so divine. And, of course - except that it was quite fruity, and I'm not sure what we're allowed to say. But, you know...

BRIGER: Probably not very much.

(LAUGHTER)

HARKAWAY: Probably not very much. No, exactly. No. It was about the joy of being liberated into a world of passion. That was the brief. For the briefs.

BRIGER: Well, we should all hope for that.

HARKAWAY: (Laughter).

BRIGER: Well, Nick Harkaway, it's been a real pleasure to have you on the show and speak with you, and I love the new book. Congratulations. Thank you for being here.

HARKAWAY: Thank you so much. It's a pleasure.

GROSS: Nick Harkaway's new novel is called "Karla's Choice." He spoke with FRESH AIR's Sam Briger. Tomorrow on FRESH AIR, our guest will be painter, sculptor and filmmaker Titus Kaphar. He'll talk about his directorial debut, a new movie based on his life titled "Exhibiting Forgiveness." It's about a celebrated painter whose world unravels when his estranged father, a recovering addict, suddenly reappears in his life. I hope you'll join us.

To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram - @nprfreshair.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

GROSS: FRESH AIR's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director is Audrey Bentham. Our engineer today is Adam Staniszewski. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Ann Marie Baldonado, Sam Briger, Lauren Krenzel, Therese Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Nyakundi and Anna Bauman. Our digital media producers are Molly Seavy-Nesper and Sabrina Siewert. Roberta Shorrock directs the show. Our co-host is Tonya Mosley. I'm Terry Gross.

Copyright © 2024 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.