One of the gifts fiction gives us is the ability to break down all pretensions. Under the gaze of the critical authorial eye, something of the complexes that underpin each life can be given free rein. Through fiction, we find that translators and interpreters (who we may assume lead lives of some glamour given their proximity to power) are too busy exerting mental energy on their craft to take much in. The people they work for, politicians, parliamentarians, diplomats, heads of state, are built to regurgitate the ceaseless flow of recommendations and advice from their underlings, ending up as a mosaic of others rather than an independent whole. Translators, those detail-oriented scribes whose every decision can be dissected to the nth degree, resent the interpreters, who are asked to think fast and decipher two languages faster, who in turn resent translators for their airs of erudition. A job that for most of us seems completely foreign, and thus exotic, to the everyday turns out to be just as unsexy as any other.

It goes deeper than that, of course. Today we are not surprised to find out that the rich are depressed, the famous depraved, the powerful dire — why should those who translate the words of others be exempt from the laws of humanity’s physics? A good work of fiction only gets started when it tears away visible trappings. Having exposed something of the truth, the task of dissolving the whole artifice to base components and examining them ever further begins.

Take, again, the translator. We have discovered through the author (who likely translated themselves, knows a translator, or did plenty of research) that mundanity has a comfortable perch in the halls of power. Fine, fair enough. But if that is the case, what does that say about translators? What does that say about their purpose and consequences of what they do? To have mastered a language to the point of being trusted to decipher it into another means the polyglot stands at the precipice of nearly unlimited linguistic possibility. Instead, they must foreswear any independent line — to guarantee the functioning of international relations we are indebted to a corps of experts who willingly submit their ability to speak to a rotating cast of others.

The dynamics at play immediately catch the reader’s attention. In a great work of fiction, we’ve begun with the layman’s excitement of the “real story” of what goes on in an interpreter’s head, quickly had our illusions dashed, and are moved onwards in a journey that can use the premise to dig up any number of abstract themes for us to examine. That is what good reading and writing is all about.