The Interpreter: The Third Voice in Every Room

In a great many novels the most important person in the room is the one nobody is looking at. He sits half a pace behind the man who matters, angled slightly away, with a notebook he rarely uses. He holds no rank worth printing. When the meeting is written up he appears at the foot of the page, if he appears at all: interpreting. And yet not one word spoken in that room reaches anybody until he has said it again.

The interpreter is a gift to a novelist, because he quietly breaks the oldest assumption a reader brings to dialogue: that when a character speaks, we have heard him. In an ordinary scene, speech is evidence. In a scene with an interpreter, every sentence arrives twice, and it is the second version that has consequences. The first is only weather.

The four seconds that do the work

Watch what the delay does. A negotiator says something unforgivable, and there follows a pause while it is carried across into another language. In that pause the man who said it can study the face of the man who has not yet heard it. Suspense is very often nothing more elaborate than information traveling slower than feeling, and a translated conversation builds that lag into the architecture of the scene. The writer does not have to manufacture the wait. The room supplies it.

It also hands a novelist two speeds of truth inside a single exchange. Words leave one mouth hot and arrive at the other ear cooled, tidied, made diplomatic. Somebody in that room is being protected, and it is rarely the person who believes he is in charge.

The witness who cannot be called

The second gift is stranger. An interpreter hears everything and is permitted to own none of it. The convention that gets him into the room is the same convention that turns him into furniture: present, fluent, party to nothing. He knows the price that was refused, the name that was let slip, the exact moment a man decided to lie. He is the finest witness in the building and the least usable one, because the instant he reports what he heard, he has broken the only rule that got him near it.

A man paid to be invisible has heard everything worth knowing, and has no standing whatever to say so.

That is a character in a permanent bind, which is another way of saying a character worth writing. He can be bought, and he knows it. He can shade a phrase by a single degree and nobody present will ever be able to prove it happened. Fiction worked out a century ago that the most dangerous person at a negotiation is the one with no stake in the outcome and complete access to it.

Not only a spy's problem

Strip away the passports and the role turns up everywhere. In the country-house mystery it is the servant who explains the family to the visitor, editing as she goes. In a probate story it is the solicitor, who takes forty untidy years of a life and renders them as an inventory with values in the right-hand column. In documentary science fiction it is the clerk who writes an event into the register in the register's own cold syntax and thereby decides what the event was. Each of them stands between something that happened and somebody who needs to know it, and each of them makes choices the reader is invited to catch.

The Marcus Vane novels take their names from five foreign cities, which is a promise of a kind: a man working where he is outnumbered by the language, never hearing a room quite first-hand. The Thrushmere Inquests do the same work in English, where the dialect being translated is legal rather than national and no less able to bury a thing in plain sight. The Threshold Bureau makes the whole apparatus its subject, since a case file is only testimony that has passed through somebody's hands.

Reading with double attention

Scenes like these ask a particular pleasure of a reader. You have to hold two versions at once and keep an eye on the distance between them, which is the closest fiction comes to letting you watch the machinery of trust. We take almost everything on relay, from a witness, a report, a translator, a friend who was there when we were not. The interpreter simply makes that relay visible for the length of a scene.

The next time a novel puts a third person between two speakers, stop and count what goes missing. The plot may well be elsewhere. The book, more often than not, is right there.