March 12, 2025, 1:28pm
For our Villains Bracket week, a few Lit Hub staffers wrote a bit about their favorite villain from our initial group of 64. Here’s James on Karla, who first appears in John le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.
In hindsight, Karla never stood a chance.
He’s a little too obscure and a phantom even in the le Carré books where he’s a main character. Plus he was up against Sauron in the bracket’s first round — tough to face a character made popular in books, but then made doubly popular in films, which I suspect was more consequential.
They are well-matched though. Both are tacticians and influencers, who other characters feel through their henchmen. Importantly they’re also both basically without bodies — they exist as a felt presence, a menace in the minds of their foes. Sauron’s cultural stickiness owes a lot to Peter Jackson visualizing the character. In the books, Sauron never speaks, there’s no description of him having a cool helmet, and he doesn’t have that eye on top of Barad Dur. Maybe Karla’s fame could be boosted with a handy visual mnemonic, like a giant ear atop the Kremlin.
Le Carré’s books have made for wonderful screen adaptations, but Karla is a literary villain. We rarely encounter him in the flesh, and to the British agents of the Circus, he’s “Smiley’s Black Grail,” a nearly mystical figure, always passing in shadows just out of reach and one step ahead. He’s a talented and ruthless spy, but what seems to frighten the Circus’ operators most about Karla is his ideological purity — they can’t fathom that he actually believes in the dream of the Soviet Union. Karla’s devotion chills the jaded and doubtful Circus, where espionage is a taxing career for spies who are often torn between their personal and institutional loyalties.
And when the roles switch in Smiley’s People and Karla’s human vulnerability is revealed, it’s not felt as a triumph. Pressing on Karla’s wound makes Smiley feel cruel, a reversal that only leaves him more doubtful.
Smiley doesn’t seem to be especially surprised at this outcome, as painful as it is — le Carré’s protagonists always seem to sense the gloomy catastrophe barreling towards them. As a villainous foil, Karla heightens the extremes. He is dangerous, but also individually destabilizing, especially for the brilliant but constantly stepped-on Smiley.
Karla know what he’s doing, and more naggingly, he knows why. On the other side of the curtain, the Circus is haunted by a sense of futility. Without the shield of Karla’s fanaticism, their work never seems to answer the nagging question: what is this all for?
And here’s James’ full bracket:
