Nick Harkaway

I mean, yes.

So it would seem.

Certainly someone in a training facility somewhere apparently believes that.

Yeah.

I mean, with Anne specifically, I wanted to do that.

But in general, when I approached the characters and the story that I knew I was fitting into, one of the things I wanted was to have a situation where they would, on the one hand, kind of be illuminated by the story, but on the other hand, that would just leave you with more questions.

And so when you learn things about the characters in Carla's Choice, and you're going to see them again later in Tinker Tailor if you go on and read Tinker Tailor and so on, what I want is for you to feel that you know them, but somehow that just makes them more mysterious.

The more you learn about people, the more there is to know.

And so with Anne and with George, first of all, when I was talking to people about Anne and George's relationship, I asked a bunch of people who love my father's books.

And I said, does Anne love George?

And everybody said yes.

No one has any doubt that she loves him.

And no one has any doubt that he loves her.

So why doesn't it work?

They have a relationship which by any measure ought to work.

And yet it doesn't.

It's fundamentally broken by the time you get to Tinker Tailor.

And so I wanted to elucidate that.

I wanted to, you know, to kind of say why that could be.

How can that be?