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The Book Review
What It's Like to Write a New John le Carré Novel
00:38:15
The works of John le Carré are among the most beloved spy thrillers of all time. So it was a perilous task that author Nick Harkaway, one of le Carré's sons, set out for himself. On this week's episode, Harkaway discusses how he picked up the torch from his father, who died in December 2020, to write a new tale starring George Smiley, the Cold War spy who has appeared in more than a half dozen novels.
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- [00:00]
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This episode is supported by Merrell with a dedicated Merrell Advisor. You get a personalized plan for your financial goals and when plans change, Merrill's with you every step of the way. Go to ML.combullish to learn more. Merrill, a Bank of America company. What would you like the power to do? Investing Involves Risk Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner and Smith Inc. Registered Broker Dealer Registered Investment Advisor Member SIPC.
- [00:34]
Gilbert Cruz
I'm Gilbert Cruz, editor of the New York Times Book Review, and this is the Book Review Podcast. The works of John Le Carre are among the most beloved thrillers of our time. For some books like Tinker Taylor, Soldier Spy, A Perfect Spy, the Spy who Came in from the Cold, there are a lot of spies here are simply among their favorite works of literature. Full stop. So it was a perilous task that author Nick Parkaway set out for himself. A writer of multiple well received science fiction novels, Parkaway picked up the torch from Le Curet, who died in December 2020 to write a new tale starring George Smiley, the Cold War spy who has appeared in more than a half dozen novels and has been portrayed on screen, most famously by Alec Guinness and Gary Oldman. So a perilous task. I'm not sure whether the fact that Harkaway is Le Carre's son made the assignment any easier or more difficult. He can tell us that himself because he's here on the podcast to discuss his novel Carla's Choice. Nick Harkaway, welcome to the Book Review podcast.
- [01:46]
Nick Harkaway
Thank you very much.
- [01:47]
Gilbert Cruz
So Nick, I'm glad I reread the Spy who Came in from the Cold before picking up Carla's Choice. You chose to set Carla's Choice between that book and Tinker Taylor. These are two of John Le Carre's most famous works, maybe the most famous. Why was that a particularly fruitful place for you to start to play around in this 10 year gap between those two books?
- [02:12]
Nick Harkaway
So that gap is the place in the Smiley continuity where you can tell a new story and it belongs only to it. Even though, yes, we follow on from inspired Game from the Cold and even though, yes, ultimately we're gonna have to end up with Tinker Taylor, there's enough space in that 10 years that you can tell new stories with new arcs, new joy and new sorrows and so on so that you feel you're working into a rich world rather than essentially just doing infill.
- [02:42]
Gilbert Cruz
So I think a lot of people that have picked up this book are going to pick up this book, will have read both of those books and many, many other Smiley books in the past. Can you just set up very briefly, where is Smiley at this point in his career? He's coming off the events of Spy who Came in from the Cold, which ends with the death of a man whose name is brought up several times in this book, Alec Lemus.
- [03:05]
Nick Harkaway
Yeah, Smiley's career is a little bit tricky in terms of the continuity, because my dad, when he was writing these books, wasn't writing a franchise, he was writing one book after another, and each one was the only truth that he cared about. Although we have, in Tinker T, we have a kind of account of Smiley's history, it doesn't go into any great detail. The dates don't line up necessarily particularly clearly. So what we know is that through the 60s, Smiley is rising as an officer within the Circus, within the British Intelligence Service, until ultimately he and his boss are removed and the new broom comes in. And at this moment, he is just off the back of what is ultimately a successful operation, but with a terrible cost. He's not necessarily happy about that because of the cost. And he is looking to. In Carla's Choice, he's looking to reestablish his sense of who he is and why he does what he does.
- [04:01]
Gilbert Cruz
Now, at the beginning of Carla's Choice, George Smiley, who we're gonna talk a bunch about, is retired, and as you write in the book, quote, having done away with the Circus as his too demanding mistress, Smiley lived between libraries and love and came as close to contentment as a man of his peculiar constitution as able. What is it about Smiley that keeps him from staying out for too long? Like Al Pacino and the Godfather 3. Before Al Pacino and the Godfather 3. Right. Just when he thought several times, just when he thinks he's out, they bring him back in.
- [04:35]
Nick Harkaway
In this context, he's quit in a rage. He feels he's betrayed himself, and the Circus has done something he doesn't recognize. And it's interesting, when the Spy Come from the Cold was written. The events there were deliberately troubling to my dad, but George Smiley is a minor character in that book, and it didn't really strike him, as he took Smiley on new adventures and into new spaces, that he needed to account for Smiley's involvement in what happens in Spike and From the Cold. And then much later, looking back, when he wrote Legacy of Spies, which came out, I think, in 2017, he was suddenly horrified by Smiley's involvement in the operation, in Spiking from the Cold. So he never accounted for Smiley's Kind of moment where he's in the spiking from the cold. So I have to. In this book is one of the pieces of tidying up I have to do is give Smiley's emotional reaction to what takes place. And so, inevitably, he would leave. And the thing is that control the spider and the web of the circus isn't prepared to see him go. So he is literally gonna pull him back in.
- [05:38]
Gilbert Cruz
When did you get the assignment? Or rather, when did you give yourself?
- [05:42]
Nick Harkaway
No, you had it right. The first time I got given the assignment, I had actually decided I wouldn't do it. We'd had a conversation as a family about things that we might do to achieve the thing our father wanted, which was in the will. He said, make sure people keep reading my books. And one of the ways that you can do that is to write new books or to have new books. And so I had a little mental list of people who would. Right, Amazing George Smiley, New, different George Smiley. And I was about to start expounding on all these brilliant ideas I had, and my brother Simon said, there's quite a strong logic that it should be you. And I said, yeah, but come on. Okay, let's talk seriously. Who are we going to get? And he said, no, let me rephrase. Will you do this? And in that moment, all the reasons that you have why you shouldn't do it, that it's my father's universe, that it's this extraordinary piece of 20th century fiction that's definitive of the Cold War, for a lot of people, they become the reasons why you should. So in that moment, I found myself sitting there going, oh. And so to answer your question, I suppose I was given the assignment in 2023, and I sat down and said, can I really do this? And I took about two or three weeks. I reread all the Smiley novels because I know them extremely well. And I started writing little chunks of text, not even narrative, just bits of Smiley's life, to see whether I could. And at the end of that, said, okay, I'm going to give this a go.
- [07:07]
Gilbert Cruz
You wrote in the afterword to your father's book, Silverview, that before he passed away, there was a moment when you were walking on Hampstead Heath and he asked you to, as you write, quote, carry the flame. How did you take that at that time? And how did you incorporate that charge into the writing of this book?
- [07:27]
Nick Harkaway
At the time, I wanted very much not to talk about it. What we were effectively talking about was his mortality, and I didn't need to continue that conversation, he had some kind of medical toing and froing, and he'd been very upset by it, and it had become quite a dark cloud. And we were actually just emerging from that. And I thought, I don't really want to go back into this conversation. It already burns you enough. So I said yes, and moved on. He said, will you finish something if I leave something unfinished? And I said, yes, and I didn't really think very much about it. Then when we came to Silverview, I thought, oh, this is great. Here is a finished novel that needs the lightest of authorial touches. As part of the process of getting a typescript to publication, I get to discharge this obligation with kind of minimal skin in the game because the assignment there was to disappear, to be invisible, just to bring. Even though he would have re edited and re edited, because that was his process, all I could do was bring the book as it was to the market and let people decide whether it was the authentic Le Carre, which I think everybody did. And so that was easy by comparison. But when I came to this, it was a different conversation. Although I did realize, belatedly after I'd written the book that the implication of him saying, will you finish a book I leave unfinished? Is the belief that I was capable of writing into his world.
- [08:54]
Gilbert Cruz
You talk briefly about the priceless, but I'd love to dig a little deeper. Did you start by going back and rereading all of the sources, Smiley books, or just the Carla Trilogy, and that's Tinker Taylor, the Honorable Schoolboy and Smiley's People.
- [09:08]
Nick Harkaway
I went through. I actually read the early ones. I read Call for the Dead, A Murder of Quality and the Spire, Cameron from the Coal. And then I went on and reread the trilogy. I didn't actually go on to Secret Pilgrim, I skipped that because those are beautiful vignettes of Smiley's life, but also commingled with Ned's, which I didn't want to get into. And I did read Legacy of Spies. Legacy of Spies, from a continuity point of view, is very difficult. He did not reread the previous Smiley novels before writing Legacy of Spies. And one of the things that he does, which is very appropriate if you're the author of origin, but not if you're the other person, is he takes the characters in Tinker Tailor, and he essentially sets them back 10 years into the same roles and locations and so on, which is not how they are in the rest of the continuity. I had to take the events in Legacy of Spies as real, but Shift the timeframe around and go with the original architecture of where people are. Because otherwise nothing joins up with Tinker Taylor.
- [10:10]
Gilbert Cruz
I'm curious as to what you think your father would have thought about the word universe as we use it now in terms of intellectual property. The Smiley universe, the George Lecrae universe. You talk about how he wrote a book at a time and sometimes the events didn't line up, and to him that was okay. But now we live in a moment where, as you were doing, you're having to match stuff up and make it all make sense, because the expectation of a reader is. This was all one grand intention.
- [10:38]
Nick Harkaway
Yes. I think he would have looked askance at Universe in that sense and continuity and my thoughts in any of these terms. I think, having said that, his creation is self sustaining. It feels continuous. It works. And the reason that it works is that it's tonally complete. The emotional content flows through, the vibe of the Cold War flows through. And so the first thing that I had to do was preserve that. And I get into a completely different hat when I start talking about the continuity and the intellectual property as a body. That's a different part of my role in the process of taking this stuff forward. When I'm writing, I think about the.
- [11:23]
Gilbert Cruz
And the tone in rereading it. I imagine you were rereading it for consistency's sake, of course, but also for the tone for the voice. What were you trying to absorb?
- [11:34]
Nick Harkaway
I wanted to swallow the tone. I wanted to immerse myself in the tone. I wanted the act of writing Smiley to be instinctive rather than cognitive. And that should be something I can do. One of the strange things about this process for me is that I was born in 1972. My father was writing the Smiley books through the 70s, and he would write in the early mornings, and then he'd come to the breakfast table with sheets of paper, handwritten sheets of paper, and read to my mother. And then she would type and they would go through them again. And while I was absorbing language, while I was learning to speak at all, I was getting 90 minutes of smiley every day.
- [12:16]
Gilbert Cruz
I'm trying to imagine a young Nick Harkaway talking like George Smiley.
- [12:22]
Nick Harkaway
I wonder if I could possibly have the roster. It's weird, but it's also true. So when I came to write this book, I didn't have to turn the dial on my own voice very far to find a version of me, an authentically me voice that is also. That reads as Smiley. That reads as a voice my father could have had and critically for this enterprise, this is not me putting on a kind of fake. This is me just finding the part of myself that is in the Smiley universe all the time. And so what I wanted with the process of rereading all the books was to heighten my grip on that instinctive knowledge.
- [13:00]
Gilbert Cruz
Tell me a little bit more about George Smiley, this character that, when he was first presented to the world and really when people started attaching themselves to him, was presented as, and certainly accepted as the alternative to someone like James Bond, another British agent who presented a view of spycraft that was beautiful, exciting, extremely violent, very fast, and probably unrealistic in the extreme. Whereas George Smiley and the spies at the Circus are slow, are deliberate, they're often disappointed, they're disappointing themselves, and oftentimes not much happens other than talking and investigation. How does Smiley represent this counter to a model we still see today with people like Jason Bourne and stuff like that?
- [13:56]
Nick Harkaway
I mean, the first thing we know about Smiley is that he's in some way translucent. The first thing we hear about him is that he looks as if he could be almost anyone. That he is hard to label. And the very opening of our relationship is about the fact that actually we can inhabit him, we can be him. And then, of course, yes, he's thoughtful rather than active. There's a great moment in Tinker Taylor where he picks up a gun and then puts it down again and puts it away, because if you shoot someone, there'll be a frightful row. It's very much spying as a long, slow process. It's much more like the wireless than it is like Jason Bourne. Smiley himself is several things. First of all, he's the guy who has the ability to put the pieces of the broken world back together, first of all, to understand it, and second of all to repair it. And when we look around at the world around us right now, we do see a world that has fracture lines in it, that's very broken. And so it's still incredibly appealing to us to have somebody who first of all sees the brakes and second of all knows how to fix them, or at least to fix them enough that something good can happen. And so I think the first thing about Smiley is that he's somebody you can put your faith in to fix what fundamentally feels wrong. And then there's the fact that he's a little bit empty, so you can travel with him, you can be inside him. And finally, he's terrifically vulnerable. He's emotionally naked, even as he is impossible to find in a crowd. Even as he's incredibly elusive as a spy, as a person, he's right there for us on the page. And so we can follow him, we can be him and we can believe in him all at the same time, which is great. And then, of course, he also becomes our teacher in the ways of spycraft and in a very real way. It's funny that it's Guinness. For many people who embodied Smiley, Alec Guinness was also Obi Wan Kenobi. And just as when you watch the Star wars movies, you feel that Obi Wan Kenobi can teach you to be a Jedi, so George Smiley can teach you to be a spy, you're being inducted into these powers and abilities far beyond those of ordinary people. And if you ever, you too, would know how to steal a file or shake a tail.
- [16:06]
Gilbert Cruz
I have to admit that I came to George Smiley and your father's books after having seen the Gary Oldman film. And I see him now in Slow Horses. I've gone back and watched the Alec Guinness, certainly the first one, the first miniseries. I have a completely different view in my mind that is suffused with everything that is Gary Oldman. He presents a very different view of George Smiley. You have written, or you said that your father, for a time, you also said you didn't know if you believed that this was true, that your father, for a time had a little trouble writing George Smiley because he had been overwhelmed by the presentation of the actor Alec Guinness as his character, and it messed with him for a bit. Do you think that's actually true? And I'm curious as to what you think that means about the way people interpret character on screen versus in a book.
- [17:02]
Nick Harkaway
Guinness was in our lives. He was this very sweet, slightly overwhelming, gentle presence for a little while. And the phone would ring. And I, as a child, had been schooled now to answer the phone. We never admitted my dad was in the house, gave out the number in case someone had misdialed and they somehow got the number from you. It was all very clandestine in a very sort of gentle way. But Guinness would ring up and you would get that voice. Hello, I wonder if I could possibly speak to Mr. David Cornwall. And I would say to my mom across the room, it's Alec Guinness is on the phone. And then you'd get, how did he know it was me? But every time my dad had the same thing, he'd pick up the phone and say, hello, Alec is extraordinary surveillance operation. You must run. But so that was. He was part of our world. And with for dad Seeing Guinness do this extraordinary performance as Smiley overwhelmed his ability to hear the character. And I get that because if you read the books and then you have Gary Oldman as you're smiley, there are people who have Denim Elliott or Simon Russell Beale and so on. But if you read the books, you find a slightly different voice. He's slightly more brittle, he's slightly younger than Guinness was, and so on. And when my dad came to write after seeing Guinness, the cadences of Guinness voice came into his head rather than the cadences of the original. And if I'm skeptical about it, it's because it's writers. So the reason you can't work is obviously because a brilliant actor has played your main character. It's not because you're thinking about something else or, you know. But when I came to do it, I didn't have that problem, because the authentic smiley is the smiley that we get from all these people. From my dad, from Guinness, from Michael Jayston, who read the audiobooks when I was a kid, from Simon Russell Beale who reads them now, from Denim Elliot who played him in Murder of Quality, and from Gary Oldman. And so all of those people have been smiling. Even James Mason was almost smiling. And so in the movie the Deadly Affair, which was an adaptation I would.
- [19:00]
Gilbert Cruz
Have loved to have seen Call for.
- [19:01]
Nick Harkaway
The Dead, it's still out there. And so I felt that what I was doing was partly writing my smiley and obviously reaching for my father's, but also that I was inheriting this melange, this mixture of smiley, portmanteau, smiley. And everybody had to be able to feel that their smiley was on the page. So that was easier, but harder.
- [19:38]
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This episode is supported by Merrell, with a dedicated Merrell Advisor. You get a personalized plan for your financial goals. And when plans change, Merrill's with you every step of the way. Go to ML.combullish to learn more. Merrill, a Bank of America company. What would you like the power to do Investing involves risk. Merrill Lynch, Pierce Fenner and Smith Incorporated. Registered broker dealer, Registered Investment Advisor member, SIPC.
- [20:07]
Gilbert Cruz
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- [20:32]
Gilbert Cruz
Polestar 3 is a new generation of electric performance. Book a test drive@polestar.com welcome back. This is the book review podcast and I'm Gilbert Cruz. I'm joined this week by Nick Harkaway, author of Carla's Choice. I think one of the appeals, Nick, of spy books of any sort, as you briefly referenced, is the idea that the reader is also getting a view into spycraft, into tradecraft, into the little ticks that people who are in the business have to make part of their own. And you talk early on when George is very briefly away from the circus about now he can buy a coat because it looks nice and not because it makes him look like every other person. Or he can go to a restaurant and order food the way that he wants. That might be a little weird and maybe the waiter will remember it as opposed to when he's doing his job. He has to be as blank, as anonymous, as forgettable as possible. There's a point later on in the book where Connie, maybe or another character is trying to explain to a young woman who's been inducted into the ways of tradecraft how to hit people that I found particularly fun. And not that I ever want to do that to someone, but I might memorize it and just use it in the future. As a writer. How fun is it to speckle these things throughout a book?
- [21:58]
Nick Harkaway
It's great fun working with the tradecraft of the circus and with Smiley. The difficulty that I have is that I was never a spy. I have to keep reminding myself of this when I'm doing interviews about the book now, because everybody asks me spy questions to which I have no answer, none at all. And the instinct, because you want to be helpful, is to go, spies do this. And it's like, actually, I just have to hold my hands up and say, no, I have no idea what spies do. I was never there. But with Smiley, we had these pieces of wonderful fake tradecraft which my dad made up for him, like the two splinters of oak above, below the lock in his house, which was never intended to be a real thing. And in the interim, in the intervening years, Smiley fans around the world have worked out how you can do that piece of tradecraft. So now it exists as a thing, albeit I don't think actual spies do it because I don't think it makes any sense. But people have worked out how to do it. And so what I would love to have is a situation where people now start going, I think I can do that thing that they do in the book.
- [22:54]
Gilbert Cruz
One thing that you do know that I just talked about, I believe, is martial arts. Is this correct?
- [22:59]
Nick Harkaway
I'm the world's worst martial artist.
- [23:01]
Gilbert Cruz
Okay, I will say the advice. Don't use your fist to punch or you'll crack your knuckles. Pick up a lump of wood. Use your elbows, the heels of your hands, your knees. This is all great advice. I feel like it comes from practice, from lived experience here. Why are you the world's worst martial artist?
- [23:19]
Nick Harkaway
Ah, because it turns out I have not only a glass jaw, but a glass fist. I knocked someone down in a kickboxing class, oh, my goodness, 25 years ago. And I was so appalled that I immediately leant down to help him get up and he knocked me out. And that was the moment at which I knew, just in my bones, I knew at that moment that I was never going to be that guy.
- [23:41]
Gilbert Cruz
Someone, of course, who has worked there for ages that I'm fascinated with is Control. Is this, as you say, the spider at the center of the web? The person who never gets a name across any of these books? The person who holds all information, loves to compartmentalize, loves to silo. You never know why he's doing what he's doing, but you know that you have to follow him anyway. How do you write someone who is at the center but maybe has no center?
- [24:10]
Nick Harkaway
The thing that I realized about Control when I reread my father's books is that he's a real monster. Control does terrible things in two books that I can think of and actually quite a bad thing in a third. And that's just before you get into the sort of incidentally bad things that he does. Here's our wicked good guy. He's the spider in the web. He's the bad man who does the right thing for the right reason or the wrong thing for the right reason. And so that's already very compelling. That's an enjoyable character to work with. And so he should be, in my understanding of how you tell that story. He should be inaccessible. He should be slightly imponderable. We should suspect his motives all the time. He can be petty, he can be annoying, he can be catty. Those are all great things to represent. And you only need very brief flickers of him because ideally, he is this kind of long shadow in the hallway rather than a character we get to know.
- [25:07]
Gilbert Cruz
Any office life has employees that are complaining about their boss. And one of the ways that you could definitely look at Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, for example, is just a wonderful thriller about bureaucracy and people try to move up in at an office and betraying each other in that way. What do George and Jim and Percy and all these people think of Control. Do they also think he's a monster? Are they just, ah, he's a boss? Bosses suck. I think they everywhere.
- [25:37]
Nick Harkaway
I think they know he's a monster. I think they don't think they know. They have seen him be monstrous any number of times, but they also know that insofar as anything that they do is necessary, he is the necessary evil they have to follow. And this is the great question that runs through the Smiley corpus is how much can you do before you become the bad guy? And how bad do they have to be? And how good do you have to be for it all to be worth doing? And this is actually very much the question in Carla's choice is how does Smiley find his center again, having been part of something he now regards as a wrong action? What can he do to reset, to retrieve his sense of self and his way of being in the world, his way of being Smiley?
- [26:18]
Gilbert Cruz
Several years ago, a documentary came out called the Pigeon Tunnel. It was directed by Errol Morris. It was based on your father's memoir. And in that film he says, in writing about George Smiley, of course, I'm writing about the ideal father I never had. What did he mean by that? For anyone that watches that movie, there's a whole history that he has told and that he has portrayed in one of his books of his father, his fraught relationship with his father, who was a man who's very complicated morally and criminally. What do you think it is to think of this character as a father figure?
- [26:52]
Nick Harkaway
So the first thing is his father was not complicated. He was absolutely awful.
- [26:57]
Gilbert Cruz
You know, I was waiting for you.
- [26:59]
Nick Harkaway
To say that we don't have to step around that Ronnie Cornwall was not a good man. And my father, I think, still, even in the Pigeon Tunnel, kind of soft pedals how bad he was. But anyway, so he invents Smiley as the perfect father figure and then of course, also inhabits him. And so there's a whole conversation in kind of Le Cariography, of which I am not really a part, where they talk about Peter Gwillim as being my father and Smiley as being the sort of perfect father figure, which is obviously the case. There's also a kind of Grail knight quality to it. Smiley is the sort of almost supernatural helper, and Gwilym is the young man of action trying to set the world to rights and so on. From my perspective doing this book, Smiley was the me character, my dad, my dad's perfect version of a dad. There's a whole layered series of things happening. And I think that complexity is helpful. I think it's necessary to bring off a project as hubristic and insane as this one.
- [28:02]
Gilbert Cruz
Father, son, relationships are fraught. I imagine they're differently fraught when you're in the same line of work. So tell me about you telling your dad, hey, I tried being a screenwriter. Now I'm going to do this thing that you've also done for a very long time.
- [28:16]
Nick Harkaway
My relationship with my dad actually was not fraught. When I told him that I had started writing a book, he sat back in his chair and said, good luck. Because not everybody who writes a book comes out the other side with the product that they want. And when he died, I realized that we had no unfinished business, he and I. And you can't ask for more. I loved him, he loved me. That was unequivocal between us. It was known, it was voiced. So, you know, given that you have mortality, that's all you can do.
- [28:50]
Gilbert Cruz
As I said, the Pigeon Tunnel is based on your father's memoir. You are his child. You are aware of many of the events of his life. But what was it like to read those events and then to see them presented in this way?
- [29:02]
Nick Harkaway
It was weird. But, I mean, everything in my life, in a sense, is slightly odd and off kilter. I have this thing that people ask me what it's like to be John Le Carre's son. I'm like, I have no idea, because I've never been anyone else's son. I'm my mother's son. But that's not what you're asking. What was it like? He's sitting in the film, in a house that they rented to make the film. And I kept worrying that people would think it was our house, which is not relevant, but that was what was in my head.
- [29:30]
Gilbert Cruz
I want them to think we live in a castle.
- [29:33]
Nick Harkaway
No, because it's a castle anyway. And I'm seeing my dad talking, and he's talking, as I know, because I wasn't part of making the movie, but I heard him talking about it. He's talking to a lens. Errol's not in the room, and he's in a kind of conceptual interrogation. He's a little bit spiky about that, and he's not always as forthcoming as he might be. At the same time, the picture that the film produces is a somber but recognizable picture of him, of his life. The weird thing about seeing him there and then about talking about him after he died, when he died. When someone you love dies, you feel the world should stop like it should crack, it should stop turning, the weather should freeze in place and so on. And it doesn't. That's not what happens. Except that in a weird way, for us, it slightly did, because people around the world, in their actual millions, were upset. So I spent however long talking to Jim Nochti for the BBC about my dad. And it was just me and Jim in a room talking quietly to two and a half million people or whatever it was. And that was my therapy. And so the whole process of seeing the emotional aspect of his life, of our lives, reflected in a public setting is odd, familiar, what it's like not to have that.
- [31:02]
Gilbert Cruz
You have written this book and as you note in the acknowledgments, your wife is the director now of Le Carre Limited.
- [31:11]
Nick Harkaway
She is.
- [31:12]
Gilbert Cruz
Is that the actual name of the company or was that it?
- [31:14]
Nick Harkaway
It's John Le Carre Limited. Okay, so we didn't go for a clever name.
- [31:17]
Gilbert Cruz
Yeah, Best to play it straight. What does that mean? And what does that mean for the future? Does that mean you too are responsible, along with the rest of the family, for managing the estate, managing future books, managing film adaptations? What are the ins and outs of that?
- [31:33]
Nick Harkaway
To some extent, yeah, it means all of that. So the films are made by the Ink Factory, which is my brother Stephen and Simon's production company. Actually, they're making TV of the Night Manager at the moment, the second Night Manager series. And that company is of itself an incredible achievement. And then, yes, Clare is the managing director of the company. She is in charge of broadening the reach in many ways. So we're doing various other Le Carre things which I'm not sure I'm allowed to talk about yet, so I'm just gonna say things. But yes, she did notionally commission me to write this book after we as a family, kind of decided that. So she is my boss. I sit on her board, so I am her boss. There is nothing uncomplex about the interweaving of the professional and the personal in the Lucario state. But it's also. It all works painlessly and seamlessly. So it's very simple. But yes, it's become a family firm.
- [32:32]
Gilbert Cruz
Are you writing another book in the series?
- [32:36]
Nick Harkaway
Not yet. So before the review coverage in the UK landed, which was on the 19th, 20th, 21st of October, I had this very easy answer to that question, which is, we'll see how the book goes. If it's a success, then obviously we'll have that conversation now. I can't really hide behind that anymore. Because the review coverage was very positive. And so I have to say, yeah, I'd really like to. We haven't really talked about that yet, but the implication is fairly strongly that I will do another book. And I have notes towards another book. In fact, I have notes towards two more. So we'll see where that goes. But my hope would be, although it's even more terrifying the second time around, because the first time around I didn't really appreciate how hard it was going. It was actually joyful and relatively straightforward. It was just also, as I think about it in retrospect, a high wire act, which I would never have attempted if I'd thought about it. Now I've thought about it and the idea of doing a second one is petrifying. But that's also the gig.
- [33:30]
Gilbert Cruz
You screwed yourself. I think I did.
- [33:33]
Nick Harkaway
I did. That is something I have a history of doing, creatively speaking. When I wrote Gnomon, I was like, this is going to be a short book with some kind of some Borges vibes to it. And it turns out that it was a mammoth tome with five interdependent plot lines that took three years to write. I am terrible at recognizing where creative projects are overwhelmingly difficult.
- [33:54]
Gilbert Cruz
This is one for me. I have to ask this question, which is. IMDb lists you as a production assistant on the classic to me 1995 film Hackers. Is this true?
- [34:04]
Nick Harkaway
It is true, actually. I was a production runner. But yes, I think that's called a production assistant on IMDb.
- [34:10]
Gilbert Cruz
What did that mean? What did you do on that movie? Which I hate to admit it because I don't know how it makes me look. I think I've seen 25 times. I don't know, back when I wanted to be a hacker in my teenage years.
- [34:21]
Nick Harkaway
So I made a lot of cups of coffee. I did a lot of photocopying. I think that's almost all of it, really. I ran around the place. I worked all the hours that were on the clock. I slept almost nothing. I drank a great deal of Jolt Cola. I'm still mildly over sensitized to caffeine on that basis. And I remember going out to my car at three in the morning or something and seeing Richard Gere and a troop of mounted knights of Camelot walk past me in the parking lot. And I went straight back into the production office and went to sleep under the desk because I didn't know whether it was real or not.
- [34:58]
Gilbert Cruz
I think you're referring to the movie First Night in which Sean Connery plays King Arthur.
- [35:03]
Nick Harkaway
It's exactly right. And they were filming it at the same time. And it was the most hallucinatory experience of my life.
- [35:10]
Gilbert Cruz
I'm curious about that. That movie certainly came at a time when it felt as if technology obviously could be used for ill purposes, as is displayed in that movie. But also it allows communities to be formed. And I'm curious about the work that you have done before Carla's choice here, which is very focused on technology, the intersection between technology and the human and the ways in which those can be used for both good and ill. It's really. You have written several sci fi books and you've been very clear about your slight annoyance with the idea that fiction that is taken seriously about the modern world, that does not engage with technology, is not necessarily doing its job. And I wonder what you think about having to go back 60 years and write in a time when it takes two days for a telefax to go through.
- [36:08]
Nick Harkaway
It's weirdly different and it's differently difficult. My pitch about technology in writing is just that there is a perception sometimes that the kind of clear stream of the human experience has to be unmediated by technology, which is inaccurate. Just as a matter of fact, on so many levels, we are nothing if not our society is nothing if not the product of our interaction with our tools. And that's true in Shakespearean times, It's true in 1963, and it's true now. The whole east west conflict of the Cold War is about the distribution of access to industrial power. In the Marxian analysis, the whole process of economics, industry and so on is a reflection of our interaction with our tools. Now we have digital tools and once again they are redefining everything. I think the idea that you can say, oh, I want to write about the humans, so I'm not going to engage with technology on a personal level. That drives me up the wall. I understand what you're driving for, I really do. It's the emotional experience, it's the interiority. But the notion that you can write about humans and say this is definitive and none of that technological stuff is important, that drives me crazy. So here we are, me going back to 1963. The weird thing is that the same conversation is operative. There are conversations about fax machines, there are conversations about cellophane as a kind of new technology. The odd thing is that everybody in every era thinks they're living at the forefront of technological development and the interaction is still there between people and technology. It's just different. It's different technology. My dad celebrated his own inability to understand technology, but for the Looking Glass War, he was actually rather good at radio technology. When he was writing after the Cold War, I can't remember which book he was writing. One of them, he went and sat with intelligence officers who worked with sound recordings and could map the room from a sound recording taken from a telephone. So actually, the technological progress is inherent in the spy world as well as it is anywhere else. And I can't use, for example, encrypted phone calls in the world of the circus because they didn't start to come on stream until later in the 60s. So I have to work around that. And that itself produces drama, produces the way the narratives work. So I think you bounce off the technological constraints and you find the human again.
- [38:23]
Gilbert Cruz
If you find yourself writing more smiley novels in the future, can you see yourself popping back and forth between a smiley novel and the types of books that you've been writing for the past decade and a half?
- [38:37]
Nick Harkaway
That is exactly my plan, and it's actually the deal that I cut with my family when I said I would do this. And the consequence of that is that I have a Nick Harkaway not Le Carre book coming out in the uk, at least coming out next year. And I've just given to my agent the book that I started writing in 2019, 2020, and then put to one side because I was doing other things, which I've now finished, which is about human cloning. And so I'm very excited about that. There's still going to be Harkaway me interspersed with this, and how we'll manage the publishing schedule and how I'll find the time to do everything, I have no idea. But being busy is great.
- [39:13]
Gilbert Cruz
Nick Harkaway, author of the Gone Away World, Titanium Noir and many others, as well as this year's Carla's Choice. Thank you for being on the Book Review podcast.
- [39:23]
Nick Harkaway
Thank you so much.
- [39:25]
Gilbert Cruz
That was my conversation with Nick Harkaway about his new novel, Carla's Choice. I'm Gilbert Cruz, editor of the New York Times Book Review. Thanks for listening.