Nick Harkaway pictured at home in north London for the Express (Image: Jonathan Buckmaster / Express)
Nick Harkaway can barely recall a time when George Smiley wasn’t part of his life. Growing up in the seventies, if his parents weren’t reading his father’s latest work in progress across the breakfast table, Alec Guinness, who starred as the lugubrious spymaster in two iconic BBC adaptations, would be on the telephone. “I can still hear him, ‘I wonder if I might speak to Mr David Cornwell?’” recalls Nick today. “They were buddies for a long time.”
His father was, of course, best known as John le Carré, creator of The Circus and its short, bespectacled and perpetually disillusioned (yet utterly relentless) agent George Smiley – the antithesis of Ian Fleming’s superspy James Bond. “I would hear his name across the table as if he was someone we knew, as if he was a friend” Nick continues “Later, when they were shooting the TV show, I’d get to go and see it happening. I was the child falling asleep in the corner of the screening room.”
While his father’s most memorable character clearly became implanted in his own psyche via osmosis, it was also, he acknowledges, an apprenticeship. For having worked as a screenwriter before publishing several novels of his own, he has now taken on the mantle of what he wryly terms the literary “Smileyverse”.
Alec Guinness as George Smiley in BBC adaptation of le Carre’s work (Image: BBC)
After promising his father, who died aged 89 in December 2020, that he would complete any unfinished works – subsequently “polishing” the posthumously-published Silverview – Nick dived head-first into the world of Smiley with 2024’s Karla’s Choice. Set in the decade between two of his dad’s best-loved books, The Spy Who Came In From The Cold and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, it was hailed by Slow Horses creator Mick Herron as a “note-perfect tribute to le Carré” and widely admired.
Aside, that is, from a few purists who would clearly prefer le Carré’s Cold War world – he published 26 novels, nine starring or featuring Smiley – to remain preserved in aspic. “All the reviews of Karla’s Choice basically began, ‘I really expected to hate this, and I didn’t’,” says Nick, 53, shaking his head. “It was only then I realised quite how bad it could have been if it had gone wrong!”
No surprise then to learn he was initially “very reluctant” to get involved in the books, despite being steeped in Circus lore. Not only was there the risk of being seen as a “nepo-baby”, but by then he had his own flourishing career writing high-concept science fiction books including The Gone-Away World, Gnomon and Titanium Noir.
He’s also flying high right now thanks to the new Catherine Zeta Jones series, Kill Jackie, based on his book The Price You Pay, written under the pseudonym Aidan Truhen. “You will laugh at things you absolutely know you should not laugh at,” he says. “I always said it was a morally disimproving crime novel and the TV show’s the same. The audience has found it, and they’re loving it, so that’s been a huge positive for me. I just love the fact it happened and it makes me feel like my own man.”
But back to his dad.
Nick with his father and mother, Jane (Image: Courtesy Nick Harkaway)
“When we inherited the estate, it came with a letter of wishes saying, ‘Keep my name alive’. My dad wanted to have a legacy, that much is clear,” he continues. “And one of the things we’re doing, obviously, is new books. But I said no and I meant it.”
Fortunately, he grins: “I’ve got a track record of saying, ‘No!’ and then going, ‘Yeah’.” But had Karla’s Choice bombed?
“I would have been very embarrassed,” he admits. “It was a one book deal and, if it hadn’t gone well, that would have been that and I’d have felt like a complete idiot. But it didn’t go that way so, obviously, the reward for a job well done is…”
Which brings us to date and the publication earlier this week of his second Smiley book, The Taper Man. I suspect fans will be eternally grateful for Nick’s change of heart. If anything, The Taper Man is even better than its predecessor – its author evidently sharing more with his late father than simply the same bushy eyebrows.
This slow-burn masterpiece puts Smiley on the trail of a traitor at the highest levels of US intelligence, with gripping set-pieces in America, the Soviet Union and Helsinki. It’s a thrilling, tension-building read, genuinely difficult to set aside, and more than earns its spurs in the existing Smiley pantheon.
Le Carré had originally planned to write about Smiley and his Soviet counterpart Karla in different theatres of the Cold War. Then came Perestroika and a thawing of relations between East and West and suddenly The Circus didn’t feel so relevant.
Now with geopolitical relations at their lowest ebb since the Cold War, and espionage fiction enjoying a revival with the likes of Mike Herron, David McCloskey and others, Smiley and his ilk are enjoying an Indian Summer. There are plenty of gaps in le Carré’s timeline and back stories waiting to be filled out. The Taper Man brings Roy Bland – a thumbnail sketch in Tinker Tailor – to the fore.
John Le Carré with Gary Oldman playing George Smiley in film version of Tinker Tailor (Image: Unknown)
“Because it’s my dad and it’s a really good thumbnail sketch, you feel Roy comes alive but, actually, you know almost nothing about him,” says Nick, who lives in north London with wife Clare, their two children and dog, Blue. “The opportunity to spend some time with these characters is great fun.”
However, he admits he needs to be careful in changing perceptions of characters – and hence how new readers will feel about them – in prequels. But he’s planning to write more about Circus boss Control, which will be a treat, and believes there are rich pickings in the wake of Tinker Tailor when Smiley takes over.
“One of the things you like about Smiley is that he’s a man under authority,” he says. “But if he’s the head of The Circus, he’s dealing with ministerial customers and committees. So, of course, he’s still under authority – just a different, irritating authority.”
Talking of authority, Le Carré’s own father, Ronnie, was a conman and a fantasist who starved his son of affection and beat his mother, Olive, forcing her to flee the marriage and her young son. Unsurprisingly, Nick is protective of his father’s reputation (and, apropos of nothing, the new book is dedicated to the missing Olive).
In 2023, le Carre’s official biographer, Adam Sisman, revealed he had conducted a number of longstanding affairs behind the back of his second wife, Nick’s mother Jane Eustace, who died shortly after her husband. Was the family aware?
“I wasn’t aware of specifics. I can’t speak for my brothers,” says Nick. “The difficult part of it is I don’t really understand why anyone would care. My mother is the person who gets to comment and her comment was that she stayed married to the guy, she fought for him, she loved him and she kept him.
“Forgive the cod-psychology, but my dad’s mum left him with this monstrous dad when he was five. She did that for good reason. But you can argue that, for the rest of his life, he tested his relationships with women to destruction, and the question was always, ‘Will you leave me if I love you?’ And my mother didn’t.”
Le Carré at work the study of his villa in Cornwall (Image: Mondadori Portfolio/Archivio Marco Piraccini/Marco Piraccini/Mondadori via Getty)
Le Carré has also come under fire from the odd former colleague. Richard Dearlove, head of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) from 1999 until 2004, has described the books as “a perverse inversion of the truth”, stating: “Intelligence organisations are based on trust between colleagues. His books are exclusively about betrayal.”
“Dearlove keeps saying he can’t understand what it was that could possibly have happened to make my father so cynical,” says Nick. The answer, he believes, is simple. “He went to Germany in the early sixties when the Berlin Wall was going up and he was running up and down the border between East and West collecting defectors, trying to persuade them to go back or bring them home for debrief.
“All that time, as it transpired, he was already blown by the Cambridge Spies. So you’ve got a guy who was basically a runaway from school, finishing his training with this organisation in which he’s put his trust, and he’s already been betrayed. He doesn’t find out until he’s sent a few people back across the border who are potentially already marked. That would make you pretty cynical I suspect.”
Equally, Nick rejects claims his father became curmudgeonly or anti-West in his outlook. Ironically, one critic was Germany’s former spy chief August Hanning, 80 – recently arrested on suspicion of betraying his country – who questioned le Carre’s criticisms of the War on Terror in the wake of Guantanamo Bay and ill-treatment of captives.
“Dad wrote back and said, ‘The intelligence services reflect a society and its government. And, sure, you have a duty to protect, but you also have a duty to conduct yourselves within the bounds of human decency. You can’t be doing this Guantanamo stuff’. As he saw it, the moral obligation takes front and centre. You have to do the right thing in this conflicted environment with different demands – survival, decency, your job, your private life – you have to reconcile those and be a good human being.”
He also rejects claims le Carré took against Britain in any way.
“He loved the UK and was passionate about it, but when we fell short of the mark he felt it was part of the writer’s or journalist’s job to say so,” he insists. “He certainly wasn’t perfect, but the idea that he was this angry curmudgeon who was satisfied by nothing – no, he was unsatisfied by specific things that were bad.”
The Taper Man by Nick Harkaway in out now (Image: Penguin)
And his dad was far from humourless. As Nick reveals, he liked nothing more than a good Bond movie – the sillier the better – especially those starring Pierce Brosnan.
Much of today’s language of espionage was invented or popularised by le Carré – from “pavement artists” to “scalphunter” and “lamplighters”. In a lovely example of life imitating art, he came up with the term “honeytrap” and popularised the use of “mole” to describe a long-time undercover agent. The Taper Man itself is a bit of a made-up lore by Nick himself, a “le Carré-flavored backstory”, as he puts it, alluding to a participant in the Gunpowder Plot whose job was to carry a narrow wax candle in a shuttered lantern as a back-up source of fire and now – in Circus argot – a stay-behind agent. Pure fiction, naturally.
“But now I’m worried people will start assuming that there really was a Taper Man in the Gunpowder Plot,” smiles Nick. “It would be a compliment, but if you’re a historian of the period, you’d be like, ‘Oh, damn you, Harkaway!’”
Anyway, there’s plenty more for Smiley fans to look forward to.
Le Carré’s two surviving eldest sons, Stephen and Simon, run the production company behind two hit series of The Night Manager with more adaptations in the works, including a new TV series, Legacy of Spies, starring Matthew Macfadyen as a younger George Smiley. “And there’s an intention to go onwards through the whole Smiley sequence, which would be amazing,” says Nick. In the meantime, he has another book on the go and then plans to alternate between his own work and his father’s universe. Smiley, it seems, is very much in from the cold.
The Taper Man by Nick Harkaway (Penguin, £22) is out now
