Nick Harkaway’s novel Karla’s Choice is an arresting addition to the world of his father’s character, the spy George Smiley.
The Guardian wrote of the book:
“John le Carré’s son does him proud in an excellent spy thriller about a Soviet agent that faithfully bridges two of his father’s classic tales. . . Harkaway reproduces his father’s rhythms at the level of sentence and plot alike, with slow-burn tension giving way to agonizing jeopardy as cat-and-mouse games explode into crunching hand-to-hand combat or street gun battles. . . [Karla’s Choice is] a loving tribute to a complicated father (as Harkaway’s dedication seems to acknowledge) as well as an excellent novel in its own right”
In his own words, here is Nick Harkaway’s Book Notes music playlist for his novel Karla’s Choice:
Karla’s Choice is a huge moment in my life, probably in ways I don’t yet understand. Melancholic Cold War spy George Smiley is in simple terms the Sherlock Holmes of espionage, though without Holmes’s delighted ego. A thoughtful, self-effacing everyman, Smiley here finds himself chasing after a missing foreign agent, either to capture him or to rescue him from his own side, and in the process confronts for the first time the Soviet masterspy who will become his nemesis: Karla. And of course, Smiley is one of the iconic figures of Twentieth Century fiction, his universe the defining portrayal both of a dimished Britain and a Cold War that was less martinis and fast cars and more the betrayal of friends, morning-after ashtrays and a desperate struggle to hold the line when you can’t even be sure you know where it is. No small task, even if the author of origin, John le Carré, were not also my father.
I loved every second of it. I hope you will too.
All right, I have to tell you something crazy which I found out about ten seconds ago: I played this first song over and over while I was writing Karla’s Choice, without ever registering what it was. I had the whole album on repeat because it was track one on the CD in my dad’s CD player when I was clearing out his office. I went to put it on the list and burst out laughing, because it’s called –
It literally means “the patricide”, and that’s what the song’s about. I speak German, and if it had been anything other than deep mood music – Dad loved Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and so do I – I would have caught the words, but I never did. I can’t tell you whether that’s a sign of my reconciliation with my father’s life and death, or something more toothily Freudian. (Wow.)
(My actual favourite is either Eins kam der Bock als Böte, which is about publishing, or Erlkönig, which is a sad fairy tale.)
I use music as a way into writing; it’s a bit of Pavlovian self-programming, and particularly handy if you’ve got a full day and only narrow windows in which to write. You teach yourself that a particular piece of music means work, and your brain will generally go along. It makes the transition from shopping list to fiction much faster and smoother, at least for me. Csíkszentmihályi (he apparently used to tell people it was pronounced “chick sent me high”) might have said it’s a doorway to the flowstate. I pick appropriate music – well, we already know that – and let it take me where I need to go.
Yes, I know, that’s a big change of pace. It’s not remotely period-appropriate, but I needed something to give me happy vibes for a few sections of the book – not least so that I could crash them into the wall later. Laszlo Bánáti, who goes missing in the opening of the book, is a man who enjoys life. I sat at my desk listening to tracks by Humanos (on my headphones, because I share the space with my wife, Clare, who has to have very serious online meetings while I’m bouncing like a happy toddler in the other chair). The band is fascinating because it was created with an expiry date: they were playing unreleased music found in a shoebox after the death of António Variações, and after they’d released it all the project came to an end.
Allegro from Kozeluch’s Concerto for Bassoon and Orchestra
I don’t remember how I got here. There was some sort of text process around music, Smiley and Control, and in the finished book there’s an absolutely shocking drive-by on Muzio Clementi, but poor Jan Antonin Kozeluch got edited out. I started listening to him because I wanted something Mozart-ish but not actually Mozart (again, I’d just like to apologise to everyone involved) and then I couldn’t use this for work because it recalled The Marriage of Figaro and by extension the intro to the movie Trading Places, and I started writing broad, sassy dialogue.
I have The Well, by Chava Alberstein and the Klezmatics, in my standing playlist from another book. I actually came to them via the Süperstar Orkestrar of Stockholm, who played at the Olof Palme Prize ceremony in January 2020. My father joined an absolutely extraordinary list of recipients honouring Palme’s politics of furious compassion, and the Orkestrar played music from the Balkans, from the frenetic to the mournful. Later, doing this same process of finding music to write to for a book I’m still working on about human cloning, I tripped over The Well.
We used this for the video slot for the book, and when I saw the finished product cut together with the visuals, that was the first time I was seriously terrified. It was exactly right: authentically le Carré-ish. The Tinker Tailor Solider Spy television show, which went out in 1979, used Nunc Dimitis. Two bits of trivia: the recording got to 1956 on the UK Singles Chart; and the show, when it was shot, was so shadowy that the execs, viewing the first scenes on a Steenbeck editing table (which made everything look about 25% darker) were concerned that the camera hadn’t actually been able to capture any visuals from the scenes at all. In the end, that darkness was part of what made Tinker Tailor iconic.
Anyway: the Requiem is my answer to the Nunc Dimitis and – of course – unfinished, which made it feel very suitable.
We’re getting into the grain now; I had this and In The Cold, Cold Night on repeat for some of the sequences in Berlin. They’re not actually right for a movie soundtrack – for that you’d want something more jittery and probably instrumental – but they were perfect as background identity music for the more nervous, energetic scenes. I did try Mingus’s Solo Dancer, from The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady; it’s actually from 1963 and it would be perfect in a dramatisation of what I was writing, but it’s too fizzingly nervous and frenetic for my purposes – my fingers couldn’t keep up with the rhythm. More typos per line than is acceptable even for me.
Another proper bit of 1963 music which I leaned into is Time Is On My Side. I cheated a bit, to be honest: I listened to the Irma Thomas version (recorded in 1964) because she’s amazing and I couldn’t get along with the Kai Winding original, which was the version the characters would have been listening to in Karla’s Choice. One of the curious things about the Smiley novels is how disconnected their world is from the vibrant rainbow of pop culture in the sixties, and I wanted to bring that life in on the periphery of the story so we’d have some contrast with the silver nitrate monchrome espionage world. This song always brings to mind the creepy and underrated Denzel Washington movie, Fallen (if you’re a John Constantine fan and you haven’t seen it, run don’t walk etc) but somehow that association didn’t get in the way.
Patsy Cline, of course, and this is both about the Smiley marriage – I wanted to hear from Ann – and something else that I won’t spoil here. Again, nicely contemporary, and I had to stop playing it because it made me sad. Fortunately I took refuge in the equally aposite Bye Bye Love from the Everly Brothers, which might be the most upbeat misery ballad ever written.
This one might seem a bit on-the-nose – it’s the song that serves as a comedic shorthand for the USSR almost everywhere, after all – but there’s a reason it’s here. Paul Robeson’s recording from 1938 played every Christmas with my parents when I was a child; my father admired him for his activism as much as his astonishing voice. (And so apparently did Albert Einstein, who counted him a friend for two decades.) The digital remaster is obviously a better musical experience, but I prefer the old, crackling recording on vinyl.
Last one: a song from my dad’s childhood, this, which he and my mother sang together occasionally (though he’d always stop and listen to her, because he couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket and she could). It wasn’t part of my Karla’s Choice rotation, but it’s always playing somewhere in my head, and it belongs here because somehow – though I don’t think it’s ever mentioned directly – it’s in the Smiley universe at a base level, perhaps even in the narrative DNA of my father’s original Smiley. In a sense, it has to be, because it was in Dad, as it is perforce in me.
also at Largehearted Boy:
Nick Harkaway’s playlist for his novel Tigerman
Nick Harkaway’s playlist for his novel Angelmaker
Nick Harkaway is the author of five novels, Titanium Noir, The Gone-Away World, Angelmaker, Tigerman, and Gnomon, as well as a nonfiction work about digital culture, The Blind Giant: Being Human in a Digital World. He is also a regular blogger for The Bookseller’s FutureBook website. He lives in London with his wife, a human rights lawyer, and their two children.