John le Carré: Nick Harkaway continues father's legacy with latest George Smiley novel The Taper Man

Yet that is where he finds himself in The Taper Man, the latest novel set in his Circus universe, written by the late author’s son Nick Harkaway.

Not content with the high wire act of already taking on the famous character in Karla’s Choice, published in October 2024, after the death of his father (real name David Cornwell) in December 2020, Harkaway (real name also Cornwell) decided it would be fun to put his Cold War intelligence officer into California climes and for his colleague to infiltrate the USSR in 1965.

“I wanted to take us to a new place where we can see the world from a new angle of view, and at the same time, Roy Bland goes to Leningrad,” says Harkaway, 53, who lives in Camden, north London, and speaks to the YP over video call as the family dog, Blue, a Bedlington Terrier- Whippet cross, lays nearby.

“We're seeing Russia, which we've never seen in the Smiley books before. And so you get to compare the two a little bit. But also you get, on the one hand, George Smiley, the painstaking espionage archeology that he does, where he's brushing away layers of deception and mistakes to reveal the truth, and on the other hand, you get Roy Bland doing some real spying. He's under illegal cover in the USSR and that is a dangerous place to be.”

By placing Smiley in unfamiliar terrain – for the first time inside American intelligence – Harkaway uses him as his own Lemuel Gulliver from Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, showing us foreign lands.

“Smiley is being very Smiley,” says Harkaway. “He goes out to Los Angeles, he's very contained and...” - he makes a hunching gesture - “he's not somebody who likes big, crowded rooms. He likes single conversations. He likes quiet. He likes restraint. And obviously Los Angeles is none of those things. So it's very much a personal clash of cultures for him.”

He is on the trail of something but he doesn’t know exactly what – only that it is possibly related to his shadowy nemesis Karla’s network in California (a reference that keen le Carré readers might remember from an earlier book).

"Meanwhile, obviously, you've got Roy Bland working on the other end of the same problem and the hope is that they will meet in the middle and they will be able to pull off an espionage coup, a kind of double punch, in response to an operation that's been launched against them. But as always with these things, are they the player or are they being played?”

Le Carré’s legendary run of novels involving the Circus – short for Cambridge Circus, in London, where he placed his intellgence service based on MI6 – began with Call for the Dead in 1961. His career breakthrough was 1963’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, perhaps his most famous work, came in 1974. Hugely successful television and film adaptations including Alec Guinness and later Gary Oldman as Smiley – next year it will be Matthew Macfadyen – have helped the author’s work to remain high profile.

Harkaway, le Carré/Cornwell’s fourth son, is a novelist in his own right but decided to write more Circus books only after family said it should be him to do it – making the list of esteemed but unrevealed authors he had redundant. Karla’s Choice was critically acclaimed and praised by fellow crime authors such as Ian Rankin and Mick Herron.

He has explained before that, having grown up with these works, it was not too difficult a task to write in his father’s stead.

“I was born in ‘72, and so I grew up, obviously, in my parents' house down in Cornwall through the 70s when my dad was writing these books, the Smiley novels, Tinker Tailor… and so on. He and my mother (Jane) had this kind of extraordinary interaction, which really only broadened and deepened, in terms of writing, over the time that I knew them both. But he would write, and she would type it up, and then they would sit together, and he would read it to her. And to a greater or lesser extent, depending on the moment and the book and everybody's mood and so on, they would talk about it. So when I was acquiring language for the first time, when I was literally learning to speak and to speak in English, I was getting 90 minutes of Smiley every day. So when I came to do this, and I sat down and I was like, okay, I think I know how to do this. Let's see. Let's do Smiley goes to the bus stop, or Smiley buys a paperback book, or Smiley shines his own shoes in the morning. I did these little tiny bits of Smiley, which weren't espionage drama, they were just character studies, little paragraphs. And as I started doing that, what I found was that I only had to tune the radio just a couple of notches to the left, as it were, like an old analogue dial, before I found a way of writing about Smiley which was authentic to Smiley.”

Inevitably, with the inflammatory political situations in the USA and Russia in 2026, people will notice parallels with The Taper Man, which is set between the years of the first Smiley novels of the early 1960s and the 1970s works such as Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.

Harkaway says: “This is the civil rights period and we definitely touch on that. One of the lines from the book is: ‘There's no secret history of America, it's all right there if you care to read it.’ And that's very much the truth, I'm not breaking new ground with any of this, but the debate that they're having… one slice that you can take through what's happening is to say that this is a conversation that America is having with itself about who counts as a real American, and that is a conversation which is also happening now. Who gets to have rights, who gets to receive the protection of the state, and that's a difficult conversation because very clearly, in some ways, the protections of the civil rights movement are under siege now. So it's a live issue. I didn't expect it to be quite this hot when I started writing this book.”

Last month, Amazon Prime released an eight-part thriller series called Kill Jackie, starring Catherine Zeta-Jones, which was adapted from Harkaway’s earlier novel The Price You Pay (written under a second pseudonym, Aidan Truhen).

And the screen workings of his father’s novels were important for keeping them in the public’s mind. Another way is for them to be on the school curriculum, he says, but that will ensure those impressionable young readers hate an author forever.

“Long-form television is exquisite,” says Harkaway, a former screenwriter.

"I'm completely biased, so in my completely biased opinion, things like The Wire, which I thought was epochal television, owes some of its grammar to the John Irvin Tinker Tailor…” he says, referring to the 1979 BBC adaptation’s director who died in August this year.

"I think things like Tinker Tailor feed through into the creation of these TV shows that we love now because they're so atmospheric and so powerful, and they taught us about watching a story evolve over six or seven hours, or more, in a way that until then was really quite surprising. So I love the interplay now between book and TV.”

And decades after the Cold War ended, the Circus, Smiley and certainly spy stories keep reeling us in.

"It’s wonderful to see it continue to entice people and I always think that’s because Smiley's the guy who knows how to unbreak the vase,” says Harkaway. “He's somebody who looks at the world and sees, if not how it can be fixed, at least how it got broken. My goodness, is it an enticing idea that there might be somebody out there who can tell us what's wrong with the world and how to fix it.”

The Taper Man by Nick Harkaway is published by Penguin today. He will discuss the novel at the Creative Centre Auditorium, York St John University, on Monday from 7pm during an event organised by Topping & Company Booksellers. Visit www.toppingbooks.co.uk