Le Pagad
Was
it John Le Carré's Smiley?
An agent - a nervous agent - feared abduction, so he went into the centre of the town at its quietest. I seem to remember Smiley remarking: 'He mistakes quiet for security.' He would have been better off in a crowd.
The Pagad - the Magician, the Bateleur - seeks a crowd. Some call him a mountebank, an old word derived from the market showman's habit of climbing on a bench to call out to the throng, flog his snake oil and bemuse with his sleight of hand.
Of course, the Pagad needs props something for the audience to covet, something around which to weave his - or her - spontaneous, creative, original mysteries. Often, the Pagad appears at the centre of the story, weaving its threads like John Fowles' Magus, casting a decisive fatal pall like Margaret Atwood' Crake.
Yes, masterful. But what if it is all show? What if there is nothing but the sleight of hand, the mundane deception of the gullible by the specious, the meretricious? That is the reverse. What value, what accomplishment is there in deceiving those most liable to be deceived?
None, of course. And the choice of insignificant victim betrays the reversed Pagad's weakness of will, insecurity and prevarication. The supposed magician's skills and insights turned to destructive ends.
Crake, again ...
