Writers’ colab like a shotgun marriage

ONE has to be suspicious when well-known writers suddenly find a writing companion. You wonder if this marriage was entered into with mutual respect and admiration. Maybe it's one of those with the heavy smell of gunpowder in the air. Were the two forced to get married?

Any writer who has embarked on a major writing project with other writers will tell you that bloodshed is often not excluded. I've always been lucky where this is concerned. Not everyone is.

Upon reading Lee and Andrew Child's new Jack Reacher novel, In Too Deep, I began to have the weirdest reaction as I went along. It's like kissing someone wearing a gum guard. You don't get hurt, but something isn't right.

The story is, within the Reacher paradigm, not half bad. The big man wakes up in a dark room, handcuffed to a table. His head hurts a lot, and he can't recall how he got there. In the process of getting his memory back, many people make errors of calculation and end up the worse for wear. One guy, a certain Zach Kane, is bigger than Reacher, sadly. He is also in the sights of Jenny Knight, a law enforcement officer with a bee in her bonnet. Kane killed her father, and she wants justice.

The entire novel leads to a scene in which Reacher and Kane get physical.

Punches and headbutting

Why did Lee Child enlist his brother's help in writing it? Because he feels he's too old to do Reacher any longer? Why did he approach Andrew in particular? Because he's a writer in his own right but has never been as successful as his elder brother? However, they do understand each other, and so Reacher too.

In Too Deep is mainly Andrew's writing. Towards the middle, the book loses momentum. The gearwork of the Reacher novel starts showing. The choreographed fight. The dialectic of punches and headbutting. The story has surprises, but they're not earth-shattering. Because Jack Reacher remains Jack Reacher and Andrew Child doesn't yet know how to think outside the box. You set the Audible playback to 1,5 times the normal speed. Need I say more?

In Too Deep by Lee and Andrew Child is published by Transworld Publishers Ltd and costs R395 at Exclusive Books.

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Nick Harkaway's novel Karla's Choice is his own creation – but a ghost is lurking over his shoulder. His father, John le Carré, had told him over the years that there really should have been a lot more novels with George Smiley as protagonist, he just hadn't written them. Potential stories and developments were discussed by father and son. Karla's Choice fits in between The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. It precedes The Honourable Schoolboy and Smiley's People.

Actually, it was easy for Harkaway (The Gone-Away World, Angelmaker, Tigerman, etc.) to master Smiley. In addition to his father's books on Smiley, the audiobooks in which Michael Jayston, Alec Guinness and Le Carré himself did the readings, helped Harkaway to get into Smiley's head.

Even though it was at Le Carré's insistence that his son would one day take the Smiley history further, I was sceptical over the prospects for Karla's Choice. Le Carré's last novel, Silverview (2021), was anything but a resounding success. And Harkaway had guided its publication. Had Le Carré run out of steam towards the end of his life?

No. Absolutely not. If Karla's Choice were a calculated gamble, one could only admire Harkaway's powers as a statistician. It is a creation that deserves the tag “A John Le Carré Novel" on the cover. A gift to his admirers who had thought everything was over, a little nostalgia that makes one long for the time of the Cold War.

Learn how to think like a spy

The story itself is about a Soviet spy who works in London as a literary agent. After a failed attempt on his life, George Smiley is asked to come out of retirement to try to recruit the man as a British agent. Ann, Smiley's wife, is still a whirlwind who causes him no end of inconvenience, but otherwise Harkaway has made an almighty effort to drag the women in a Le Carré novel into the new zeitgeist in this era of transformation and realignment.

All our attention is on Susanna, a Hungarian who is assistant to the literary agent. She's a similar figure to Ricki Tarr in Tinker Taylor Soldier Spy, or Jonathan Pine in The Night Manager. Susanna has to learn how to think and act like a spy, and that provides the great pleasures of this novel.

Harkaway's continuation of his father's oeuvre bears the stamp of quality. It is very reminiscent of John Gardner's wonderful continuation of Ian Fleming's James Bond novels. To my mind, Gardner ended up being a much better writer of Bond books than Fleming. I'm not sure Harkaway will ever overshadow his father; that he sounds like his father is all we could ask for.

Karla's Choice by Nick Harkaway is published by Penguin and costs R239 at Amazon.

♦ VWB ♦

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