After John le Carré's death, his son faced the 'daunting' task of reviving George Smiley

DAVID BIANCULLI, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm David Bianculli. John le Carre wrote spy novels that transcended the genre. Philip Roth called le Carre's 1986 novel "A Perfect Spy" the best English novel since the war. 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.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR CONTENT)

SAM BRIGER: "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.

And 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 (ph) 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.

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.