‘Oh God, what have I done?’: John le Carré’s son Nick Harkaway on bringing back George Smiley after his father’s death

Until recently, Nick Harkaway had gone to some considerable effort to distance himself, professionally speaking, from his father. As Harkaway says at one point in his new book, echoing his father’s sentiments: “The best intelligence work is slow”. Terrified Nick Harkaway “I think what I’m trying to say,” he adds, “is that when I came to write Karla’s Choice, I didn’t have to turn the dial very far to find him in myself.” After his father’s death – and in a plot development that would please most fiction writers – a letter was discovered. open image in gallery Gary Oldman as George Smiley in ‘Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy’ “Mostly, I needed to get the tone right,” he says. That,” he stresses, “was how she chose to affect the world.” open image in gallery Nick Harkaway’s new book ‘Karla’s Choice’ Le Carré’s wife, Jane, died two months after him, from “a broken heart”, according to a family spokesperson at the time.