It is spring in 1963 and George Smiley has left the Circus. With the wreckage of the West's spy war against the Soviets strewn across Europe, he has eyes only for a more peaceful life. And indeed, with his marriage more secure than ever, there is a rumor that George Smiley might almost be happy. But Control has other plans. A Russian agent has defected in the most unusual of circumstances, and the man he was sent to kill in London is nowhere to be found. Smiley reluctantly agrees to one last simple task: interview Szusanna, a Hungarian émigré and employee of the missing man, and sniff out a lead. But in his absence, the shadows of Moscow have lengthened. Smiley soon finds himself entangled in a perilous mystery that will define the battles to come and set him on a collision course with the greatest enemy he will ever make.
What a treat it turns out to be to wander anew the fusty, crumbling warren of the Circus ... The prose of Karla’s Choice is not an absolutely perfect exercise in ventriloquism of the master, nor does it try to be. There may be a few seeming anachronisms...but there is a satisfyingly cold tone throughout, recalling the way that le Carré’s own furiously tamped-down moralism (in the novels of the 1960s and 70s, at least) could approach nihilism ... He demonstrates superbly, too, how suspense can arise from the patient accumulation of detail, and the brilliant climactic scene is nothing so vulgar as an action-movie shootout but rather a sequence of ordinary bureaucratic peril: the attempt to cross a border when one’s papers are not quite in order.
Though peppered with good things and tightly written vignettes, leaves you with an odd feeling of dutifulness shading, at times, into outright constraint.
Harkaway writes with great worldliness and dash, and his sense of tradecraft is impressively convincing ... Tightly and cleverly plotted, but as the car chases accelerate and we race toward a propulsive conclusion, we’re reminded that le Carré’s books were never about the action ... Gripping and expert, clearly the work of a professional, but the one thing it’s not—and never could be, alas—is a John le Carré novel.
