Saturday Links

In praise of Shiva Naipaul, the return of George Smiley, the search for Henry Orlik's paintings, a forgotten Bram Stoker story, and more.

Henry Orlik, Defeat (Aeroplane Over LA)

Good morning! John le Carré’s son Nicholas Cornwell, who writes under the pseudonym Nick Harkaway, has published a new George Smiley novel. Alex Clark asks him why he wrote it:

When le Carré died at the end of 2020 at the age of 89, Harkaway explains, he left a letter of wishes to accompany his will, and asked that his family make efforts to secure and broaden his readership now and in the future. Those efforts may include adaptations, already a success – in 2010 Harkaway’s elder brothers Simon and Stephen founded The Ink Factory, the production company responsible for the TV adaptation of The Night Manager, and The Pigeon Tunnel, the documentary based on le Carré’s memoir. But another way would be to provide more books, “and so that conversation began, and I sat there very quietly and said, ‘Well, you know, there are lots of very talented people we should get to do this. We could get very interesting voices from around the world to write into different locations, because the cold war wasn’t just in western Europe. From a creative and literary viewpoint, those are absolutely fascinating projects.’ And then there was a pause, and my brother Simon said something like, ‘Well, I mean, there’s one person who very obviously should write it, and that’s you.’”

It was an idea that Harkaway had previously ruled out. “I had said to myself, ‘I’m not doing this’ – not in a kind of horrified or aggressive way, but just like, no: I’ve spent however long, 16 years or something, putting clear water between myself and my dad in terms of creative work, and I’ve been very successful at doing that. You know, people occasionally find out and go, ‘God, I had no idea. That’s extraordinary. How does that work?’” Indeed Harkaway’s novels, from 2008’s The Gone-Away World through to Gnomon in 2017 and his most recent, Titanium Noir, are fuelled by fantasy and futurism. Despite their interest in espionage, surveillance and the digital world, they tend towards the absurd, moving easily, as Harkaway points out, from loop quantum gravity to jam and scones. That kind of thing, he says with bravura understatement, can’t happen in a George Smiley novel.

But something about being asked by his family rather than suggesting it himself took the hubris out of the idea, and despite “the eye-watering fear”, Harkaway took himself off for a couple of weeks and “noodled around” to find out if he could do it. “And very quickly, I realised that I could. That you don’t have to turn the distortion dial on my normal writing voice very far before you get to something that feels quite comfortable in my father’s universe.

David Sexton reviews the novel in The New Statesman and finds that Harkaway has “quite successfully imitated” his father’s style: “The novel is set in the missing decade in Smiley’s life, shortly after The Spy Who Came in from the Cold of 1963, before his return in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy of 1974 and his long career thereafter. Guilt-stricken by Alec Leamas’s death in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, Smiley has resigned from the Circus in early 1963, and appears almost happy in his private life with Lady Ann. Then, like Cincinnatus, he is called back to serve once again . . . Harkaway has made a pretty good job of this imposture. The story is intricately interwoven with the existing books, looking back constantly to The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, artfully playing on the possibility that Róka may be connected with the mole in the Circus that we know about from Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. His back-story expertise is impeccable. He has also quite successfully imitated Le Carré’s roundabout method of narrative delivery and nicely pastiched his prose style.”