How does a sketch entice a reader? The gaps, rather than the details, are what engage the imagination.

Berlin 2017

The year is 1968, and we’re in Bonn, the capital of West Germany, amid the frenzy and ambiguity of Cold War diplomacy. Step into the fortified British embassy, pass the suspicious guards, then look into the offices, notice the haste, the flurry of papers and cables and unanswered phones. Find the top floor and take your seat, as the daily briefing will soon begin:

Facing them, alone at his steel desk, Bradfield ignored their arrival. He belonged to that school of civil servants who read with a pen; for it ran swiftly with his eye from line to line, poised at any time to correct or annotate.

‘Can anyone tell me,’ he enquired without lifting his head, ‘how I translate Geltungsbedürfnis?’

‘A need to assert oneself,’ de Lisle suggested, and watched the pen pounce, and kill, and rise again.

‘How very good. Shall we begin?’

With these words, we’re introduced for the first time to Bradfield, though he’s a tad busy, and not quite ready for us just yet. The excerpt comes from A Small Town in Germany, considered one of John le Carré’s more, well, minor novels. Notice how we’re given the introduction: almost mid-sentence, with the action already begun, and Bradfield makes us wait. Just by reading these sentences we’re unable to resist inhabiting the position of the characters in the room—consider yourself one more impatient person in the embassy that morning, biding time at the whim of a civil servant. The room waits, so you wait, and everyone observes Bradfield.

All of this arrives in a few lines, but it leaves us a fine example of a character sketch. Admittedly, we don’t know what Bradfield is wearing, nor could we really describe his appearance, but don’t those conclusions miss the point? It seems, in fact, that his appearance is quite clear. By “that school of civil servants who read with a pen” my mind completes the picture: I see the face, recognize the manners, and know how he arranged his childhood toys.

John le Carré has provided a minimal description, and forced our imagination to fill in the rest. It’s a dangerous, but worthwhile, balance. Too much information is obviously wordy. Too little information is incomprehensible. To forgo what might seem necessary always demands an artful touch. To leave a gap in the narration—to use Zadie Smith’s term—is to engage the reader’s imagination, but it’s also to walk on a tightrope.

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