Agnes Nutter asked Nick Harkaway:

You have a cadence to your writing that can make it slow going getting into your books (at least for American readers), but which I love once I get into the rhythm of it. Almost a cant for the written word. Is this deliberate, and if so, what inspirations do you draw on for capturing it?

Nick Harkaway Mmmmm, tricky, because it's hard to see the back of your own head, as it were. I know that I draw on Conan Doyle for my sense of the language, because I read his books at a formative moment in my life. I also know that I sneak in flavours of Gravity's Rainbow when I think I can get away with it, and that I admire Jeanette Winterson, E. Annie Proulx, William Gibson, Michael Chabon, and Jorge Luis Borges. What I don't - can't - know is where that takes us. I also think that my style has varied a fair bit between books: TGAW was more machine-gun geek, Angelmaker was a little bit contemplative, and Tigerman used as few Latinate words and classical constructions as possible; linguistically speaking I was very restrained most of the time. Lester Ferris is a not guy who would say something was transparent, he'd say you could see through it.

And this new one I'm doing now? God only knows. It's dense, but I hope also transparent. We'll see. It's a complex thing to write, in part because I want it to be as easy as possible to read while at the same time it's got some really mindbending stuff going on. We'll see what happens.

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