Under deep cover: The Taper Man, by Nick Harkaway, reviewed
Writers who have famous authors for parents might view it as an inhibiting burden, but Nick Harkaway, the son of John le Carré, has seen it as an opportunity, which he has seized with a confidence that has proved entirely justified. Karla’s Choice was the first in what promises to be a family of fictional stepchildren featuring George Smiley. The novel took advantage of the chronological gap in the existing Le Carré oeuvre, between the erection of the Berlin Wall at the height of the Cold War and, more than a decade later, the hunt for a mole in the Circus, Le Carré’s imaginative reworking of MI6. Now The Taper Man follows after little more than a year. It is set in 1965 and begins when a British operative is shot and wounded in a confusing melee in the middle of Helsinki.
