Focus is essential in NEA work. The word limits you have to work within may seem extensive at first sight, but — especially if you are dealing with more than one text — once your response begins to take shape you may find it difficult to include all your prepared material unless you have established a very sharp focus from the beginning. This focus may be achieved in several ways. The study of character (or characters), for instance, can prove productive if it offers more than simple description or narration and is used to explore such literary features as narrative perspective, voice, elements of genre, and the wider ideological world of the text.
As an example of the possibilities opened up through an analysis of character, this article will consider a pair of characters from the genre of spy fiction: John le Carré’s George Smiley and Mick Herron’s Jackson Lamb. Smiley first appeared in Call for the Dead (1961), and Lamb followed him nearly 50 years later in Slow Horses (2010). The relationship between these two authors has been widely commented on. The crime writer Val McDermid’s claim that Herron is ‘the John le Carré of our generation’ is prominently displayed on the cover of Slow Horses, and in that novel River Cartwright, one of Lamb’s long-suffering subordinates, reveals that his grandfather — himself an ex-spook — bought him le Carré’s collected works for his twelfth birthday. The gift was delivered with the dry observation: ‘They’re made up. But that doesn’t mean they’re not true’ (Ch. 6).
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