Nick Harkaway

And then obviously, you know, the book ends where it does.

And that leaves you with kind of, yeah, but how come, you know, surely there must be something they can do.

No, it's not.

Well, and I don't think it's a secret that my dad was abandoned by his mother at the age of five.

And his relationships, you know, I mean, by the way, for good and sufficient reason, because his father was a monster.

You know, so his relationships were shaped by that, as you would expect.

I mean, and he was, you know, he was in a traumatic environment for an extraordinarily chunky part of his young life and eventually kind of ran away from school and ran away from the UK and found himself a place to exist in Bern and so on.

But, you know, so...

Without wishing to be kind of armchair psychologist about it, it's not hard to see why, particularly in his earlier writing, the female characters tend to be absent and offstage or inaccessible because that's what he knew.

So lots to unpack there.

First thing is my father's style is inconstant across his writing.

I mean, of course it's not because it's a huge career.

But with the Smiley books particularly, you have the first three, Call for the Dead, Murder of Quality, and Spy Came from the Cold.

And they are, as you described, short sentences, quite declarative.

They're almost noirish.

They have quite simple plot lines.

and they obey this dictum that he had that he liked to trot out from civil service telegrams and civil service reports, 400 words, no adjectives.

They're very clear and stark.

And then by the time you get to Tinker Tailor, you've had a couple of books in between, you have a different ethos at work.

The language is much more roving, much more illusory.