Fred Langley: A Man Who Arrives Too Late and Too Early in Original Echoes

Fred Langley is a difficult character to introduce without explaining the thing that makes him difficult to introduce.

Which is useful for a character, if slightly inconvenient when trying to write a blog post about him.

If you have read Fractured Echoes, you have already met Langley. I am not going to explain much more about where, when or under what circumstances. There are several perfectly good spoilers sitting in that sentence, and I would rather leave them there.

What I can say is that Fred has become one of the people I most enjoy writing.

Part of that comes from the fact that he never quite belongs in the room.

A man who watches first

At the start of Original Echoes, Langley is in 1962. He has lived through the war, spent time around people who kept secrets for a living, and learnt that an official explanation and the truth are not always close relatives.

He is sent to Blackpool to observe something.

Even that word bothers him.

Fred is not a man who walks into a room and takes charge. He watches. He listens. He notices who looks at whom before answering a question. He checks doors, windows and reflections. He notices when an object has moved. He notices when somebody is being too helpful.

He also likes things in their place.

That combination was fun to write because it gives him a kind of control without making him powerful. He can read a room, but that does not mean the room is going to behave itself.

And in these books, rooms have a bad habit of not behaving themselves.

The problem with being in the wrong time

The title of this post is not accidental.

Fred is a man who often seems to arrive too late. He carries habits that came from events other people would rather put away. He knows what happens when people decide that an unpleasant act can be justified by a pleasant phrase. He has seen enough to distrust certainty, especially when it arrives in a government file.

But Original Echoes also takes that sense of being out of time rather more literally.

I shall stop there.

What interested me while writing him was not simply what happens when a person finds himself somewhere he should not be. It was what happens to all the small things he normally relies on.

Clothes. Money. A hotel. A watch. The way you speak to a stranger. The assumptions you make when you walk into a building.

Most of us move through the day carrying hundreds of bits of knowledge about how the world works. We hardly notice them because everybody around us shares them.

Take that shared knowledge away and even buying a coat can become complicated.

For Fred, that is worse because observation is his defence. He survives by noticing when something does not fit.

Then he has to consider the less comfortable possibility that the thing that does not fit is him.

Why Fred matters to the Echoes books

Alice Whittaker and Fred Langley give me two ways into the same fictional world.

Both notice gaps. Both distrust neat answers. Both have a tendency to keep going when a more sensible person might decide they had done enough for one day.

They do not, however, approach the problem in the same way.

Fred brings a different rhythm. He waits more. He gives people room to make mistakes. He has learnt that silence can sometimes tell you more than another question.

That does not make him safer.

Probably the opposite.

One of the themes running through the Echoes books is what happens when the world stops matching what you remember, expect or have been told. Fred gives me another way to explore that. What happens when a man who depends upon observation can no longer trust the rules behind what he observes?

And what happens when he discovers that being right about something does not necessarily help?

That is about as far as I can go without ruining somebody's reading.

Original Echoes gives Fred much more room than Fractured Echoes did. You get to see the man before some of the questions raised by the first book have answers. You also get a few new questions, because apparently I am incapable of leaving well enough alone.

Fred would probably disapprove.

Then again, he has the same problem.

Look out for more on Fred Langley in Original Echoes.