Karla's Choice: A John Le Carré Novel
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.
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Though peppered with good things and tightly written vignettes, leaves you with an odd feeling of dutifulness shading, at times, into outright constraint.
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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.
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