Culture Society, Identity and Belonging
Putin’s sabre-rattling seems to have renewed our cultural obsession with the Cold War. Dr Strangelove is in the West End, Mick Herron’s Slough House novels are back on TV and Nick Harkaway, son of le Carré, has brought George Smiley out of retirement to assist in a case involving a young female Hungarian emigree, a missing literary agent and a Russian assassin in 1963.
Harkaway proves an attentive pupil in this satisfying addition to the Smiley canon, which slots between The Spy Who Came In From The Cold and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy with canny nods to both.
A leisurely plot with the odd gripping set piece is steeped in the lugubrious Englishness of the original but avoids pastiche.
Its strength is in belonging to a vanished era while reminding us that nothing in politics and, it seems, in literature is ever over: as one character tartly points out, “This is the English mistake, to separate then from now.”