Book Review Corner!

Two books down this week. Firstly, Michael Palin’s new volume of his diaries, covering 1999-2009, and Nick Harkaway’s Karla’s Choice, the first foray into extending Le Carré beyond his death.

Considering I spent a good deal of this year reading the older volumes when I discovered that Palin was releasing this book in September, I couldn’t help feeling a little disappointed. It feels shorter than the previous entries, and a bigger sense of things and threads missing. Since 80 Days, there’s always been sections in the diaries that are basically “you should probably go and buy the book of the relevant series to find out what happened here”, but this time around, even things like a trip to India for Conde Nast and trips to film festivals are reduced to ellipses. This time period is also the point where the first volume of diaries is published and so things get a little meta…and I think some of the reaction of other members of Python to the first volume¹ might be a reason why it also feel likes a lot (not all, but a lot!) of arguments and discussions that would have been present in the first few decades are no longer surviving the editing process. In fairness, it’s not like Palin owes us anything, and the series continues to be a revealing and honest account of a comedy and travel legend, but perhaps less essential than the earlier books.

Karla’s Choice opens with an apologia for everybody who thinks this is a really bad idea; Harkaway is at pains to point out he understands if you think he shouldn’t be adding to his father’s work. And yet the book mostly works — he’s got the mannerisms of all the characters correct, from Esterhase’s excited Hungarian-English to a pitch-perfect version of Beryl Reid doing Connie Sachs. There’s a spy plot, the rise of Karla, some papering over the continuity between the loosely-connected books. And of course, the Lady Ann.

I say mostly works because every so often you come across a section which screams “Look! This! Is! A! Reference! Do! You! See?!!” Does the book really need a gossipy aside early on from Roddy Martindale, for instance? But, considering I thought the entire concept of the book was a bad idea and that is was going to be a disaster, it is in fact, a good Smiley story. And that’s enough. Not essential, but for those of us that have exhausted Le Carré, a nice little addition. I imagine there will be more.

As is now tradition, I’ll be putting up my “books read in 2024” page in December. You’ll be able to tell when I idly googled Games Workshop’s Black Library and discovered the Horus Heresy sequence was finally over…