Three characters in search of an author

Posted on: 28 May 2026

Three characters in search of an author

In business class on a long-haul BA flight you sit far apart, and from one seat over you can observe quietly. The woman had her book open on her lap and was reading without tilting her head, the way one reads after fifty years of disciplined posture, her glasses fixed on the bridge of her nose, her hair lacquered into shape with the precision of someone who leaves nothing to chance. She wore a vintage elegance that belonged to no decade in particular, that slightly nineties register that has stopped being fashion and has become identity. You looked at her hands, manicured and weathered in equal measure, resting on the cover of the book, and you found yourself wondering how she would handle lunch, what wine she would order, in which order she would eat. When the tray arrived she did exactly what one expected. She unfolded her napkin with two measured movements, placed it on her lap, separated the meat from the side dish before starting, buttered her scone from the centre outwards. Not one gesture out of place, not one detail improvised. She was the character down to the scone, and the scone had been buttered that way five thousand times before.

At baggage reclaim, a few hours later, there was another one. You could recognise him from his posture before you even saw his face, the shoulders slightly forward, the jaw set, the eyes measuring the monitor the way one measures an opponent. The monitor said the bags were arriving and the bags were not arriving. For anyone else it would have been a quarter of an hour's wait. For him it was the daily confirmation that the world is populated by incompetents, by people who do not do their job and who must be forced into it. He started speaking loudly to no one in particular, loud enough that everyone could hear, vague enough that no one could answer. Then he went to the lost luggage desk, where the woman behind the counter told him with the tired courtesy of someone who repeats the same sentence three hundred times a day that he would have to be patient. And there the tired courtesy of the woman became the opening he had been looking for all morning, perhaps since the day before, perhaps forever, an opening to unload everything on her, with that rhetorical precision that belongs only to those who have been performing the same scene for thirty years and know the script by heart. She lowered her eyes and waited for him to finish. That too was predictable.

In Canary Wharf, at lunchtime, there was a third one. He was walking towards the supermarket with the same attention an actor gives to crossing a stage. The t-shirt too tight, the gym bag carried in a way that left the veined biceps exposed, the gaze moving not to check the road but to intercept the gaze of others. In front of the shop window he slowed by half a step. Inside the supermarket he bent down to pick up a box from the bottom shelf, and he bent the way models bend in sportswear advertisements, not the way one bends when one simply wants to reach for a box. He was twenty-five, perhaps twenty-eight, and he already moved with the choreography of someone who knows his body is the only thing he has learned to display. In twenty-five years the body would be gone, but the choreography would remain.

Three different figures, three of the same thing. The woman had become her own class, the man at the airport had become his own anger, the young man at Canary Wharf had become his own body. In all three cases the person had been eaten by the character, with no margin left for difference, no possibility that they might wake up one morning a little unlike how they had gone to bed the night before.

None of the three, in all likelihood, had ever decided to become this. Each had started with a face, a posture, a predisposition, and then for the whole of their life the world had looked at them the way one looks at someone who already is that thing. Glance by glance, confirmation by confirmation, the character had grown faithful to the reading others made of it. The woman had been treated as a lady until lady was what remained, the man had been treated as a difficult man until difficult was the only thing he knew how to be, the young man had been looked at for his body until body was the only thing he could offer. Pirandello had it right, but perhaps he did not see how far it goes: the characters are not searching for an author, the author is everyone else, and the work has been underway since we were twelve.

You only notice the ones in whom the process has been completed. The others, those still halfway, ride the Tube without anyone seeing them.