New George Smiley novel will not be glamorous like Bond, says Nick Harkaway

Glasgow Times

28-05-2025

The 52-year-old, from Cornwall, is the son of John le Carre, who died in 2020 aged 89, and wrote the original spy series about an intelligence officer who works for The Circus, Britain's overseas intelligence agency.
Harkaway, whose real name is Nicholas Cornwell, published his first continuation novel, Karla's Choice, last year.
Speaking to the PA news agency, he said: 'Last time I was kind of deliberately unaware of how much pressure there actually was.
'I sort of sat down (to write) and didn't really think about it. And then, after I finished, and as the reviews started to come out and they were positive, I got retrospective terror.
'I realised… and particularly when you read the reviews, what you realise is that all of them begin with 'I really expected to hate this book, and I don't'. And I thought 'Gosh, that would have been really awful'.'
He continued: 'There's a lot of reasons why it shouldn't work… So I think everybody had sort of legitimate fear, and I have great respect for that.'
In the new novel, The Taper Man, George Smiley is sent, for the first time, on an operation to America to pursue an old communist network across the West Coast.
'We have Smiley going to America, to the United States, for the first time, into the kind of culmination of the Civil Rights decade,' said Harkaway.
'It's a period of massive, massive, tumultuous change, and not all of it peaceful, you know – there's some quite extraordinary acts of domestic terrorism in the early '60s, around desegregation.
'It's a deep dive, and I'm kind of daunted by it, but you do these things with respect, and you feel your way, and you learn,' he said.
The novel is set in 1965, 18 months after Karla's Choice, and amid the backdrop of the Vietnam War as well as the Civil Rights era.
'I'm not just writing to the 1960s, I'm also writing to the world of George Smiley and he's not the guy who shows up at a Beatles concert,' said Harkaway.
'We're not going to see the kind of glamorous '60s that you see in a James Bond film from the period; we're going to be looking at, always, the shadows and the grey spaces and the places where things have potential to go seriously wrong.
'And looking for somebody who can potentially make them go right, and will that person be heard? It's always about ambiguity, rather than the kind of acid orange of the '60s.'
It has also been announced that Harkaway's father's global best-selling thriller, The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, is to be staged in London's West End for the first time in November.
Harkaway told PA: 'I am excited about that… I have seen the play. I saw it at Chichester, and it runs on rails towards the kind of inevitable, staggering conclusion of the story… It's incredibly powerful.'
Gary Oldman and John Le Carre arriving for the UK premiere of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy at the BFI Southbank in September 2011 (Ian West/PA)
Le Carre, whose real name was David Cornwell, wrote best-selling novels including Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and The Night Manager.
Prior to his career as a writer, he worked in British intelligence throughout the 1950s and 1960s.
Career intelligence officer Smiley became the author's best-known character and was made even more famous by Alec Guinness in the TV series of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy which aired in the late 1970s.
Film versions of Le Carre's novels include 2001's The Tailor Of Panama, starring Pierce Brosnan, Geoffrey Rush and Jamie Lee Curtis; 2005's The Constant Gardener, starring Ralph Fiennes and Rachel Weisz; and 2011's Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, starring Gary Oldman, Colin Firth and Tom Hardy.
Harkaway has written novels including The Gone-Away World, Angelmaker, Tigerman, Gnomon and The Price You Pay (as Aidan Truhen).
– The Spy Who Came in From the Cold will play at Soho Place from November 17 2025 until February 21 2026.