Nick Harkaway

And when I started doing it, yes, it was terrifying.

But it also became something that I loved.

I mean, some nonspecific things.

I wanted a literary apprenticeship with my dad because I watched him write.

I learned writing from him by osmosis, but we never really talked about writing very much.

And so the idea of sitting down and holding the controls of the machine

and operating it the way he did and working with those characters was a way to learn, which I wanted.

I think he wanted, I mean, I think first of all, it was because he wanted to say that the spy world is not the world of James Bond, the one that he knew.

Yeah, and, you know, in the UK you had James Bond, you had Bulldog Drummond, you had these very, you know, very much action hero type spy stories.

And his experience was not that.

It wasn't these sort of,

incredibly energetic, combat-orientated people, you know, sort of flawless heroes.

It was ordinary people doing a hard, endless, possibly slightly futile thing and banging up against their own flaws.

And he wanted, you know, to show the humanity.

Showing the humanity so that you can understand it and feel compassionate about it is a big part of everything he wrote.

So I think that's where it is.

And Smiley is in many ways the epitome of that.

He's just this guy.

And yet at the same time, of course, he's this tremendously intelligent reasoner and he's empathic and he understands people before they understand themselves.

For Smiley, the experience of returning to the circus that evening was like a willed drowning.