ATDTDA (9): Double agent, 242

[Paul Nightingale]

Lew returns to London and tells the Cohen that Renfrew
has offered him a job. He wonders if this makes him a
“double agent”: which would mean some kind of split
identity. He is, it seems, the only one not
“intimately familiar with” the GBH case. Meeting the
Cohen he suspects “a practical joke ... about to
unfold” at his expense; and thinks he can hear “an
invisible roomful of laughter, and some applause as
well”. In this chapter he has transformed his
appearance (from the “narrow black overcoats” and
“trimmed black moustache” on 232 to the ironic
suggestion of a “fake nose” on 242) and continued to
experiment with a range of drugs: he does so in the
company of the Ns, so the activity is no longer
covert. He is apparently working for the TWIT, but we
see little of this; on the page he seems to fade in
and out of different scenes centred on others, which
might well “the residual effects of Cyclomite abuse”.
Perhaps we can read his progress as an illustration of
the way, up the page, Renfrew has described Werfner’s
take on “the primary geography of the planet”.