Britain is wracked with anxiety about national decline, Russians are meddling, and relations are strained with the UK's American cousins.
Cold War tensions with modern parallels ripple through The Taper Man, a new spy thriller set in the world created by the late John le Carré, and written by his son, Nick Harkaway.
The novel sends British spymaster George Smiley to the US in 1965, chasing a Soviet agent and negotiating a culture clash with "The Cousins,” le Carré’s fictionalised CIA. Its title refers to a deep-cover agent left behind after a spy ring is busted, to bide their time and await instructions.
Harkaway says writing a Cold War story in 2026 is like "writing in the mirror.”
He said the global situation is "weirdly the same in some slightly alarming ways, it’s weirdly different in some alarming ways.” And "many of the same discussions are carrying on.”
Published last week in Britain and Nov 17 in the US by Viking, The Taper Man is Harkaway’s second le Carré novel since his father’s death in 2020. Karla’s Choice, published in 2024, reintroduced readers to Smiley, the masterful, methodical spymaster of "The Circus,” le Carré’s version of MI6.
Smiley is second only to James Bond in the annals of iconic fictional spies, and Harkaway was made acutely aware of the risk he was running by messing with a beloved universe.
"Every review of Karla’s Choice began with the words, ‘I really expected to hate this novel, and I didn’t,’” he said.
In his father’s footsteps, and his father’s chair
Harkaway, whose real name is Nicholas Cornwell, is the youngest of the four sons of David Cornwell, an MI6 agent turned author who used the pen name John le Carré.
Drawn to writing but keeping a distance from his father’s world, Harkaway made his name with sci-fi thrillers, including The Gone-Away World, Gnomon and Titanium Noir.
But perhaps he was fated to enter what he calls the "Smileyverse.” George Smiley’s voice was one of the first he ever heard as a child, when his father read aloud passages from his works in progress.
"While I was acquiring language, I was getting Smiley 90 minutes, two hours a day,” Harkaway said during an interview at his north London house, where he writes in a small back office, sitting in his father’s "very uncomfortable” chair.
It’s unclear whether the chair has anything to do with it, but Edward Kirke, Harkaway’s editor at Viking, said The Taper Man is infused with the le Carré spirit.
"It is profoundly intelligent and has this beautiful moral murkiness,” Kirke said.
George Smiley goes to America
The Taper Man, set two years after the events of le Carré’s breakthrough novel The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, takes Smiley to California. That lets Harkaway give the unobtrusive spy a "mouse-eye view” of Los Angeles, whose scale, landscapes and attitudes seem as alien to him as the moon.
Harkaway contrasts the watching-and-listening role of British intelligence with the aggressive ethos of The Cousins, who are "warriors in this Cold War, not shadows,” and are prepared to move fast and break things, including moral boundaries.
It’s a view that chimes with the outlook of le Carré, who became a strong critic of US foreign policy in the post-9/11 "war on terror” years.
"My dad’s relationship with the US, and US intelligence, was tempestuous, as it was with everywhere that he loved,” Harkaway said. "Obviously, inevitably, his greatest scorn is reserved for the UK, which he adored.”
The book brings back Circus stalwarts, including the spy chief Control, and fleshes out minor characters from his father’s books, notably Roy Bland, a left-wing firebrand turned MI6 agent who appeared in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.
Harkaway says he was helped by the fact that "there are no throwaway characters” in his father’s writing. "The taxi driver, the bellhop, everybody has an interior life that you can return to.
"That was also his experience in life,” Harkaway said. "People told him secrets.
"If you traveled with my dad, you found yourself having a 25-minute conversation with the cab driver after you’d arrived at where you were supposed to be going. … And this guy would be pouring out his life story to a total stranger and a cab full of people.”
Espionage meets office politics
Many le Carré fans adore the books as an antidote to the glossy, high-octane adventures of Ian Fleming’s superspy, James Bond.
The Circus is a place of diligent work and office rivalries as well as risk and treachery. It’s a gritty, grubby view of espionage pushed even further in Mick Herron’s Slow Horses series about a group of damaged MI5 misfits. Herron has acknowledged his debt to le Carré.
"One of the things that my dad was always in trouble for in the UK was demystifying intelligence work,” Harkaway said.
"Taking away the James Bond glamour and saying, these guys who try to reshape nations - they’re just us. And sometimes they’re hungover and sometimes they’re divorced, sometimes they are stupid and sometimes they’re clever. Sometimes the stupid ones overrule the clever ones, and intelligence work is a lottery, is a cock up, is a mess."
The le Carré world continues to expand. Harkaway’s brothers run a film and TV production company behind The Night Manager and the upcoming BBC/MGM+ series Legacy Of Spies, in which Succession star Matthew Macfadyen plays Smiley.
Harkaway is writing "at least one more” Smiley book, again set in the 1960s.
Then, other writers may be invited to the party. Harkaway says there are "internal discussions” in the family about it, but no future authors have been chosen.
He says candidates would have to have "great prose” and ideally "be a little bit angry,” and he agrees with a suggestion that, in the male-dominated world of spy thrillers, it would be refreshing to have a woman take the pen.
"Much as I like to think I’m a very special boy, the world is full of talented writers,” he said. "And if one person can do it, someone else can do it.” - AP
