Nick Harkaway on Writing a George Smiley Novel

Silverview was the gateway drug. I didn't know it at the time – I suppose that's how these things work – but that's where I began to realise I could slip into my father's voice, even if, in that moment, it was only for a short time. 

To recap: when he died, David Cornwell (John le Carré) left an unpublished manuscript in the form of Silverview. He'd written it, argued with it and fallen out with it, flirted with it, ignored it, and at last quite deliberately passed the question of its fate to us. It was complete but not finished. There's a process between typescript and publishable book which features queries, tweaks and copy editing, and I was elected to the task. It was in some ways an anti-climax; I'd made a rash promise to finish any orphaned stories he might leave behind, and this wasn't what I'd had in mind; not three-quarters of a story with notes towards an ending, but a book that needed the less exciting work of polishing done before it could go out. 

All the same, nothing is ever perfect in the first breath, and here and there in the body of the book, there were stray steps along roads not taken that had to come out, and therefore also paragraphs to be sutured. There is, I think, only one place where I actually wrote an additional few sentences, and I was gratified to find them quoted approvingly by one reviewer as the echt le Carré. My job was to vanish, and it seemed I had.

But there was something creatively and personally compelling in following the narrative footsteps of another writer, and one I knew and loved. It wasn't at all like walking along the Cornish cliff together in companionable silence, with the wind loud enough that when you turn your head you could be alone for a mile in any direction, but it also wasn't entirely unalike. I have no religion; I'll take what I can get. 

For me, finding the strange and new is never the hard part in writing. In the main, my fretful question as I approach publication is not "will they think this sufficiently original?" but rather "will the readership follow me down this new, more bizarre rabbit hole?" Everything I do is different from everything else. It makes me hell to market; I like to think it makes me interesting to read. But the corollary is that very often in my work I'm looking for boundaries, not ideas. I'm fond of saying that heroes are defined by their villains, but it's also true that fictional worlds are defined by their limits.

So, then, when my oldest brother posed the question direct, I found myself thinking "yes, I suppose I could write a Smiley novel". That was a surprise, because I had very firmly decided not to volunteer. I've spent most of my career as a novelist putting clear water between myself and my father, and I wasn't going to mess that up. Except that now, apparently, I was at least considering it. On a creative and a personal level, it was attractive: an apprenticeship of sorts, under a master I knew but who had never really sat me down and taught me his trade. Appropriately enough, I learned by watching.

I would get, at the very least, a lesson in something I had begun to suspect I sorely needed: how to colour inside the lines, how to follow a rubric set out by an external convention. My instinct, if you give me a prompt, is to subvert it. If you asked me to make up a Star Trek captain I'd choose a warlike blowhard, a misfit in Rodenberry's utopian Federation relegated to a tiny science vessel, simultaneously learning the value of gentleness and fighting tooth and nail to save the crew using improvised weapons made out transporters and replicators. 

If I took this on, I'd be doing the opposite: playing my songs in the silvertone shadows of Control and Karla; telling my story – putting myself – into my father's world, and not breaking the rules but celebrating them. Would it work?

I sat down and began to find out. What were the rules? First, the universe was melancholic. Just as Indiana Jones inhabits a world which at a very basic level is winking at the audience, Smiley's universe carries the mid-Twentieth Century weight of fatigue and sorrow. Second: George loves Ann and vice versa, and they're both terrible at it. But why? Well, my parents' marriage was – from an external perspective – strange, and in some moments painful, and yet it was indestructible as well. There are fragments of each of them in the Smileys. Third, Karla is the Wall. He's the Soviet system given flesh, or it's the extension of Karla by other means. The reason we rarely see him directly is that he's all around us, all the time. And finally: you can win and you can lose, but ultimately the whole secret conflict is only a step to gaining advantage elsewhere. Resolution can come, in the end, only from the daylight world, and the spy war is – inevitably – just a reflection in a looking glass.

Are those hard and fast rules? No. They are approximations after the fact. I swallowed down the novels once again and let the Circus occupy the empty warehouse inside me which holds my professional fantasy landscapes, and it settled gently into place. The architecture was almost purpose built - which, in retrospect, is an inevitable consequence of my life. I learned by watching, yes, but more specifically: I learned by watching this. I am the child who grew up thinking that Obiwan was a very strange thing for George Smiley to do with his free time. At the age of ten I knew the Circus as I knew Middle Earth. I always thought Roger Hargreaves' Mr Strong had a bit of Jim Prideaux about him – or perhaps it's the other way around. (I looked it up: Prideaux made his debut two years earlier, so there.)

When I started writing Smiley, I conjured first my father, then Alec Guinness and Michael Jayston, Gary Oldman and Denholm Elliott and Simon Russell Beale, and all of them together become one voice I'd heard all along. So I said yes to writing what became Karla's Choice, and here we all are, about to find out whether you hear it too.