“But I think the real tension lies in the relationship between what you might call the pursuer and his quarry, whether it's the writer or the spy.”
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More particularly, having a largely German-oriented education has made me very responsive to 19th-century German literature.
A spy, like a writer, lives outside the mainstream population. He steals his experience through bribes and reconstructs it.
It's part of a writer's profession, as it's part of a spy's profession, to prey on the community to which he's attached, to take away information - often in secret - and to translate that into intelligence for his masters, whether it's his readership or his spy masters. And I think that both professions are perhaps rather lonely.
The monsters of our childhood do not fade away, neither are they ever wholly monstrous. But neither, in my experience, do we ever reach a plane of detachment regarding our parents, however wise and old we may become. To pretend otherwise is to cheat.
