John le Carré’s son: ‘People told him secrets they’d told no-one’

Nick Cornwell and David Farr discuss the return of George Smiley – and that much-awaited Season Two of The Night Manager

A grey and cloudy day, a meeting in a house on a quiet north London street. It could almost have been a setting for a scene in a John le Carré novel. Which actually was quite appropriate.
The house belongs to le Carré’s son, Nick Cornwell – le Carré’s real name was David Cornwell – who under the pen name Nick Harkaway has established a reputation of his own as a writer of gripping speculative and science fiction novels. But with his new book, Karla’s Choice, he has picked up the mantle of his late father, plunging into the world of le Carré’s greatest creation, George Smiley, and his greatest adversary, the Russian spymaster known only as Karla.
Cornwell’s visitor on the grey day was David Farr, the director and screenwriter who in 2016 adapted le Carré’s novel The Night Manager into one of the most gripping television series of recent memory, and has now written a sequel, which is presently in production and is scheduled to appear on our screens next year.
Cornwell placed a pot of green tea on the table and pondered the life of George Smiley. 
The book finds Smiley having retired but being lured back into the Circus after a putative assassin arrives at the office of a London publisher and announces to the publisher’s assistant that he has been instructed to kill her boss. That beginning was inspired, says Cornwell, by one of the several stories that his father used to tell of actual incidents in espionage that he had never managed to work into a book. “There was a Russian assassin who turned up on a doorstep in London and banged on the door, and when the lady of the house opened the door he said, hello, I am here to assassinate your husband. She said, well then, I think you’d better come inside, and he came inside, and defected.”
And was that a true story?
Cornwell smiles. “Insofar that any story that you hear from a novelist who used to be a spy about events in the Cold War can be adjudged to be a true story.”
And so we enter Smiley’s world – the place of mirrors, shadows and subterfuge – a world as unique and distinctive on the literary map as that other world created by another master, Greeneland.
Karla’s Choice is set in 1963, filling the gap in the Smiley saga between The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, written in 1961, in which there is no mention of Karla at all, and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, set in the early 70s, by introducing for the first time the all-powerful head of the Thirteenth Directorate of Moscow Centre who will become Smiley’s nemesis, “the entire authoritarian system of the Soviet Union given shape – the walking wall”, as Cornwell puts it. 
The bleak, compromised life of the spy, the moral complexity, the multiple layers of deception, the slow, inexorable ratcheting up of suspense to an almost unbearable level, along with all the arcane details about the workings and jargon of the Circus – the Cousins, the Bad Aunts, the Scalphunters – all are present and, correct and will be deeply satisfying to fans of the Smiley saga.
Karla’s Choice is not the first time Cornwell has stepped into his father’s shoes. Before his death in 2020, aged 89, le Carré had asked his son to complete any unfinished manuscripts that he had left behind. There was one, Silverview, in a box in le Carré’s Cornwall home, that had been written in 2014 but put aside. Cornwell duly polished the manuscript, and Silverview was published in 2021. 
But writing a full length novel about the world of George Smiley was an entirely different proposition. 
When the idea of a new Smiley novel was initially raised, in line with the wish of his father’s estate to keep le Carré’s work alive, Cornwell baulked at the idea of writing it himself, and had actually drawn up a list of other writers who might do the job. But it was his older brother Simon who insisted it was only logical that he should do it.
“I’d been having all the conversations in my head about why I shouldn’t do it – the massive hubris of attempting it – but the scale of the Smiley universe and its place in the cultural lexicon were all the reasons I did want to do it once someone else said, will you?”
Cornwell was born in 1972, and Smiley’s voice, he says, had been echoing in his head since he was a child, growing up in the period when his father was writing the Smiley books. 
“Every morning he’d get the manuscript pages he’d been working on and he’d read them to my ma over the breakfast table, and they’d talk about them. I was learning to speak during that time, so my understanding of how the English language was put together derives in part from the Smiley novels.
“When I sat down to write this, I realised I really didn’t have to turn the dial very far to find something in my voice which was also recognisable to someone reading a Smiley novel. So it wasn’t a question of adopting a guise, it was really a question of whatever percentage of my own voice was already there and just staying within a narrower band.”
Smiley is one of the great creations of post-war British literature.
“There’s the fact that you can’t place him socially,” Cornwell says. “There’s his brilliance, this bank of tricks that he has which imply capabilities far beyond those which the rest of us have, and which allow you to believe you’re being inducted into the spy world which is the magic of le Carré, and we all love that. Smiley, this sad, little, slightly trampled guy, who is simultaneously kind and brilliant, is also generous enough to let us be in the space behind the door with him.”
The serpentine twists and turns of intelligence work, the subtle verbal and psychological traps, seeking out and exploiting the weakness of the opponent, like playing chess wearing a blindfold – for Cornwell, authentically recreating this complex psychological world was a matter of asking what was le Carré thinking of what Smiley was thinking?
Cornwell talks of it being a matter of osmosis.
“Smiley was there waiting for me when I started writing it. I didn’t even start writing a story; I just started writing scenes out of nowhere – Smiley goes to the newsagents, Smiley at the bus-stop. And I thought, does this work? Where does this take me? And the more I did it, the closer to him I became.”
There is something particularly interesting, he says, about Smiley and pacing.
“His pacing is always frustratingly languorous. The normal urge is to act if you see something going wrong. But Smiley knows that if he just waits and listens a little longer another layer, another possibility, will be revealed, and that by going slower he will arrive before anybody else. Dramatically, you have this sense of being behind the curve all the time, but know that you will still arrive at the ending before the other team.”
Farr nods his head in agreement. “Making the Night Manager we were all keen not to rush. The obvious thing about le Carré is that you don’t want to turn it into Bond; you don’t even want to turn it into an American-style espionage thing where it’s all snap, snap, snap. It’s still got to have that languorous quality.”
Farr, who is 54, is an illustrious theatre director and writer who cut his teeth in the world of espionage 20 years ago by writing regularly for the BBC series Spooks. He first became acquainted with le Carré’s work when he was 10 years old, sitting with his father watching the TV adaptation of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, in which Alec Guiness played the role of Smiley. 
“I was like, ‘What is this?’” Farr remembers. “There’d been James Bond, which I was used to watching, and here was this shuffly, owl-shaped man who made listening an art form. He just listened and people opened their souls to him.”
“And that was my father,” Cornwell interjects. “People told him secrets they’d told no-one.”
For Farr it was the beginning of an addiction to le Carré’s novels that reached fruition in 2016 with The Night Manager, bringing to the screen another le Carré character, Jonathan Pine, a former British soldier working in a Cairo hotel who finds himself being recruited by British intelligence in their pursuit of an international arms dealer.
Le Carré took an equivocal view of his work being translated to the screen. 
“I’ve seen fictional characters that I have spent loving years writing about turned overnight into cardboard,” he once wrote. “I’ve seen two-dimensional walk-on characters from the edge of one of my novels appear magically enlarged and remade. I have watched scenes from my novels where I sweated blood to crank up the tension, fall flat on their faces for sheer want of the most elementary stagecraft. I have seen some of my dullest, least achieved writing brought vividly to life by splendid direction and acting.”
But Farr remembers he was an enthusiastic participant in turning The Night Manager into a TV series, approving Farr’s decision to shift the focus of the story from Colombia in the nineties to the Middle East at the outbreak of the Arab Spring, and to change the gender of the head of the British intelligence team investigating Roper from Leonard Burr to Angela Burr (brilliantly played by a dogged, world-weary Olivia Colman). “He was thrilled about that,” Farr says. 
Le Carré even made an appearance in the series, as an indignant restaurant customer whose meal is disrupted by a drunken outburst by Roper’s consiglieri. “He totally improvised,” Farr remembers, laughing. “He was supposed to say ‘That’s quite all right’, but he actually said ‘That’s not good enough!’ 
Published in 1993, The Night Manager, Farr says, was one of le Carré’s first sorties into the post-Soviet world, where he was addressing subjects like money-laundering or corruption in the pharmaceutical world, with novels like The Constant Gardener and A Delicate Truth.
“I think as he got older, he got more and more obsessed about the need to be politically present and controversial, and that really excited me,” Farr says.
“The other thing is that in Jonathan Pine he created this compellingly thrilling character – a kind of weird sacred knight at one level and an angel of death in another way; a very odd character – more odd than Smiley in some ways.
“He’s a sort of soldier of justice in a world where that no longer makes sense because the world is so corrupted and broken, but he’s also a dangerous person because he has an unacknowledged need for love that he doesn’t understand.”
It has been eight years since The Night Manager, in which time Farr wrote the television series Hanna, about a 16-year-old raised by her father to be the perfect assassin. But he was also wondering “What next?”. 
“Then I was in my cottage in Suffolk, and I woke up in the morning and said to my partner, it’s very strange, I’ve had an idea, I saw it very clearly, and it’s really good. And that was the weekend [le Carré] died – a very strange coincidence.”
Farr declines to give anything away about the forthcoming series, other than to say that Tom Hiddleston and Olivia Colman return in their original roles, and the series is set in Colombia. 
“It’s partly to honour the original book, although it’s got nothing to do with the original story. It’s a different world and it’s very much its own creature, and time has helped with that.”
For Nick Cornwell, writing a book about his father’s most beloved creation was “professionally and personally terrifying” and occasioned “yawning moments” of existential fear.
“There’s a group of people who would love the book even if it wasn’t great; that’s a positive commercially, even if it’s not very appealing artistically. Then there’s a group who are absolutely horrified at the prospect. If I can get them I’ll feel I’ve really done this.
“There will be some really bad-tempered people who are determined not to read the book, but whose friends, siblings and spouses will give it to them anyway, and they’re going to be cross about that. But what I devoutly hope is that at some point they dip into it, and think ‘Well, it’s alright’, and the appetite arrives in the eating.”
And what does he think his father would have made of it? 
“As a story, I hope he’d like it. I think what he would ask me is, do you know why you’re doing this creatively? Because his first instinct would be to ensure I was doing something that I wouldn’t hate.
“The only reason I would have said no to this is because he’s my dad, but I got past that. I wanted that experience of sitting in his chair operating the machine as a way of sharing one more thing with him, because I miss him. 
“There are no particular blessings in grief. But one of the things I am grateful for is that we did not have a complicated relationship. I loved him. He loved me. It’s that simple. You can’t ask for more than that.”
Karla’s Choice by Nick Harkaway and John le Carré (Viking, £22) will be published on Thursday. The Night Manager will return in 2025
‘He has his father’s gift for dry humour’
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