A Novel

The Great Pretender

I have been loved by a great many people. Not one of them ever met me.

S Y Kelake

Chapter One

It was worse than that. It was recognition.

I want you to sit with that before we go any further, because everything I am about to tell you turns on it, and because you will be tempted, as everyone is tempted, to hear it as self-pity. It isn’t. A man pities himself only when he believes he deserved something he didn’t get. I never believed that. I got precisely what I was built to get, which was applause I could hear through a wall, from an audience that would never be permitted to know my name. That was the arrangement. I signed it, in a manner of speaking, before I was old enough to sign anything.

You should understand that almost nobody goes to the two o’clock on a Tuesday. That is the entire point of the two o’clock on a Tuesday. It is a service held in a nearly empty church, and I attended it the way some men attend early Mass, not for the sermon but for the quiet, for the specific and holy hush of a large dark room built to make you feel things on cue. I loved cinemas long before I understood why. Later I understood exactly why, and loved them anyway, which I think is the more honest kind of love.

And here is the thing, the thing I have turned over a thousand times since, because it is the hinge on which the rest of my life swung open. She did not smile at the charm. I have watched ten thousand faces receive charm; I know the exact muscles, I could draw you the map. She didn’t do that. What she did was narrow her eyes a fraction, the way you do at a word in a foreign language that you almost recognise, and she looked at me, not at the performance of me, which was flawless, I promise you it was flawless. She looked past it, at whatever was standing behind it holding the strings.

Nobody had ever done that before. In thirty years of being looked at by everyone, nobody had ever once looked behind.

Inside the story

Masks, and who made them

We all wear masks to get along safely in the world. This novel asks what happens when a child is handed masks that were never his own, and taught that wearing them is his whole worth.

ThemeMasks as social armour

Everyone performs a little: the guarded coat, the managed face, the tea turned a quarter-turn before it is trusted. The book treats these everyday masks as ordinary protection, and then shows a man who has nothing else.

ThemeTalent spotted young

It begins with a school nativity play and a teacher who goes very still at the back of the hall. A gift is noticed, praised and quietly steered, and the steering feels like being loved.

ThemeThe made actor

The merely gifted get the screen. The truly extraordinary are kept for the shadows, so the narrator's failure to become famous is offered to him as proof that he is the best of all.

CharacterClaire, the level room

A forensic psychologist who assesses men for the courts and reads remorse for a living. She is the one audience his performance cannot move, and the first person to ask what is standing behind it.

CharactersHis Amanda and his Bob

The woman who taught him the surface and the man who has met him in the white room after every role, both named after figures in a film. He calls them family. Claire starts to wonder who is watching whom.

ImageThe crooked tree

An old Chinese story of a tree left standing because its wood was useless sets Claire thinking that usefulness is the wound, and that safety might lie in becoming of no further use to anyone.

Chapter Fourteen

The Still Face

She came off the carriageway and sat at the lights and made herself find the floor of it, because a person cannot live long standing over a drop like that, and she found it, and it was thin, and it held, and it was the truest thing she knew about herself and about him both. She performed outward. She did not perform inward. The face she had given that man in the assessment suite was a made thing, chosen and controlled, but the ledger she kept behind it, here, now, alone in the car with no one to show it to, was not managed at all. It was merciless and it was honest and it did not spare her, and the proof of that was that she was, at this moment, using it to convict herself.

That was the whole of the difference, and it was everything. She wore a mask, on purpose, and took it off when the door closed, and told herself the truth in the dark. He had worn his so early and so long that there was no longer any inward for the mask to be taken off in front of, no private room where a self sat keeping honest accounts, only rooms behind rooms behind rooms, faces all the way down, and at the bottom, where the honest ledger should have been, a cold clean nothing that had never once been shown the truth because there was no one left in there to show it to.

She was a person wearing a mask. He was a mask that had misplaced its person.

The shape of the book

Fifty short chapters, told in turn by the narrator in his own voice and from Claire's side in the third person.

Contents

Chapter One: An Afternoon Showing
Chapter Two: The Level Room
Chapter Three: Runner
Chapter Four: Water or Ice
Chapter Five: The Nativity Play
Chapter Six: The Crooked Tree
Chapter Seven: Repair and Prepare
Chapter Eight: The Understudy
Chapter Nine: The Tickets
Chapter Ten: The Board
Chapter Eleven: The Levers
Chapter Twelve: Show Me
Chapter Thirteen: Possession
Chapter Fourteen: The Still Face
Chapter Fifteen: The Repertoire
Chapter Sixteen: La Reina
Chapter Seventeen: The Family Man
Chapter Eighteen: Collateral
Chapter Nineteen: Both Sides
Chapter Twenty: The Beaches
Chapter Twenty-One: The Handler
Chapter Twenty-Two: Final Cut
Chapter Twenty-Three: International Waters
Chapter Twenty-Four: The Currency
Chapter Twenty-Five: Going Under
Chapter Twenty-Six: Between Seasons
Chapter Twenty-Seven: Persona
Chapter Twenty-Eight: The White Room
Chapter Twenty-Nine: The Loyal Son
Chapter Thirty: Access
Chapter Thirty-One: The Legend
Chapter Thirty-Two: The Last Job
Chapter Thirty-Three: Leverage
Chapter Thirty-Four: The Brick House
Chapter Thirty-Five: The Martial Man
Chapter Thirty-Six: The Darker Shadow
Chapter Thirty-Seven: Extraction
Chapter Thirty-Eight: The Fairground
Chapter Thirty-Nine: Substance
Chapter Forty: The Magnet
Chapter Forty-One: An Audience of Machines
Chapter Forty-Two: The Curtain
Chapter Forty-Three: Theory of Mind
Chapter Forty-Four: The Lucky Ones
Chapter Forty-Five: The Truly Departed
Chapter Forty-Six: Light Lunch
Chapter Forty-Seven: The Stolen Boy
Chapter Forty-Eight: The Sign
Chapter Forty-Nine: Synchronicity
Chapter Fifty: An Audience of One

Worth keeping

You perform. I watch. Those aren’t the same job. They’re the same skill pointed in opposite directions.

Chapter Two

The merely gifted get the screen. The truly extraordinary get the shadows, because a face that can become anything is wasted on a poster and beyond price everywhere else.

Chapter Five

Not a kidnapping. A recruitment so gentle it felt like being, at last, loved.

Chapter Five

The crooked tree lived because nobody wanted it.

Chapter Six

Look inside

Read from the book

Read how it started, from Chapter Five

The Nativity Play

It started, the way most catastrophes do, with a compliment.

I was six. You already know something of the kitchen, because it fell out of me earlier without my permission: the yellow light, the toast gone too far, the hand that came down not to hold me but to still me, the reasonable voice saying that’s enough now. I want to be fair to them, my parents, insofar as I can still find the feeling that fairness is built on. They were not cruel. They were frightened people who had been taught that feeling was a kind of weather you battened down against, and they battened me down, and they believed they were keeping me safe. What they were actually doing, without the first idea of it, was teaching a very small child the single most valuable skill in the covert world: how to take a true feeling, a real and rising one, and put it away, cleanly, on command, and show the room a different one instead. By the time I was six I could cry and stop. I could stop and cry. I could produce the exact face that would make the trouble end, and I understood, without the words for it, that the face and the feeling were separate objects and that only one of them was ever any use to me.

Then there was a play.

She was, I know now, the first scout I ever met, though I would not learn the shape of the thing for years. There is one in every good school. Sometimes in the drama department, sometimes teaching mathematics, or art, or the violin, placed there to watch for exactly the stillness I had just caused in her. She wrote to my parents. She used the word gifted, which to my parents meant income, and respectability, and their difficult child converted at last into a form of use they could understand. There were tests that did not feel like tests. There was a scholarship. There was a school.

Read from Chapter Two

The Level Room

I should explain what is supposed to happen. There is a moment, when I am working, that I chase the way other men chase money or God. It comes when the character I have built grows heavier than the man standing inside him, and the person across the table stops dealing with me and begins, without knowing it, to deal with the story. You feel it in the body. The floor of the room tilts, very slightly, toward you. After that you can do anything at all.

With her, the floor did not tilt. I set down my best and most economical work, the small self-deprecations, the flicker of managed vulnerability, the timing, and the room stayed perfectly, horribly level. She received the performance the way you receive weather. She did not lean an inch. And a man who has spent his whole life as the largest thing in every room he enters does not, it turns out, know how to sit in a room that will not tip. I felt the way you feel on a staircase when you reach for a step that isn’t there. I have infiltrated a cartel and a cabinet and a marriage. I had never once, until a café on a Thursday, been in a level room, and I did not know it was a thing a room could be.

The book

About this edition

Cover of The Great Pretender by S Y Kelake

Title: The Great Pretender
Series: A Novel
Author: S Y Kelake
Publisher: SYK Publishing Ltd and SYK Publishing Ltd
Genre: Psychological thriller with forensic psychological themes
Length: About 85,000 words, 50 chapters
For: Readers of psychological and spy fiction who like a slow, close look at how a person is made, and what is left behind the performance

Walk on from here

Forensic Psychology: Fictional Character AnalysisThe non-fiction companion in spirit, reading Bond, Bourne and other made operators through attachment and trauma psychology.Mugged OffFor readers who want the real-world side of the levers and handles in this novel: how to know when you are being played.ZhuangziHome of the useless tree that Claire remembers in Chapter Six, and of the idea that being of no use can keep you whole.