The Face in the Window

A photograph can catch us looking thoughtful at the very moment we are wondering where we left the car. Most of us have met that small distance between an image and the life happening behind it. Adrian Cole has made a profession of managing the distance.

An actor seemed a natural person to meet at the end of the Masked series. Adrian knows that a pause, a glance or a change of posture can alter what an audience believes. His skill is real. So is the pleasure his work can give. The difficulty begins when the habits that serve him in public travel home with him.

I wanted to explore the difference between being admired and being known. An audience may be satisfied by a convincing expression of affection. Someone close to us may need a phone call returned, an agreement remembered, or our attention for longer than the conversation is convenient. The scale is smaller, but the request can be much harder to meet.

There is an awkward freedom in a public image. We can select the generous moment, tell the well-shaped story, and leave out the untidy afternoon. We all do a little of this. Adrian has more practice, better lighting, and people whose job is to help. That makes his life unusual without making him entirely unfamiliar.

I hope the people around him feel fully present in this book. They have work, loyalties, frustrations and choices of their own. Their lives continue beyond the parts they play in his account of himself. Paying attention to that can change a story, including the story a person tells about his own goodness.

Across these four novels, I have been interested in the roles we learn to inhabit and the values we bring to them. Danny, Isabel, Thomas and Adrian have different ways of meeting the world. Each must live with the effects of those ways on other people. A new understanding is only a beginning; an ordinary day will soon ask what it changes.

As this final book opens, I invite you to enjoy Adrian's talent and keep an eye on the moments when there is no applause to guide him. There is a particular kind of possibility in discovering that a moment can matter without anyone recording it.

Thank you for coming this far with the series. I hope something of these people stays with you when the last page is turned.

Stuart Corlett