In the close darkness of that basement, I think I may even have persuaded myself that I felt some throb of recognition. It was only much later that I saw how quick I’d been to bend the facts to fit my preferred story. Read them again: the list of names explicitly denies that any of the swimmers was Leonard. But I’d instantly turned that evidence into its opposite, on the basis of a hasty typist, in whom there is no reason to believe, and some conjectured facial similarities.

*

I WATCHED THE FILM Philomena with my wife last night. Its mainspring is another page from the secret books – regret about an absent life. Everything was slightly muted and underplayed, and yet the film never felt small or insignificant. The combination of Steve Coogan and Judi Dench in the main roles seemed to hark back to an archetype: head and heart, intellect and wisdom. And while it was clear that she had found a surrogate son in him, and he a mother in her, that was never made explicit in the film. I admired that restraint.

And I thought, while watching it, that what’s so far lacking in this book is that anima, the feminine principle, which Dench embodied. The best stories have an inevitable shape. The smart-aleck boy must find his complement in a grounded image of the eternal mother.

Authenticity and enchantment are the twin poles that generate a story’s vital energy. Authenticity is the sense that a story bears witness to reality, that the storyteller has some privileged insight into an aspect of life, a world, a particular set of circumstances. At a minimum, authenticity demands that the experience described is real for someone. Even in nonsense literature, the whimsy of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear is redeemed by an obscure sense of real feeling, by Alice’s tears, by the broken heart of the abandoned Dong.

The other pole is enchantment: the power to persuade us both, you and me, that something which is not real truly exists. It’s a magic spell we generate together. The reader conspires with the enchanter. I would say surrenders to but its connotations are too passive. The casting of this spell is something we both participate in.

Adults are suspicious of this aspect of writing. They are uncomfortable with the notion of make-believe. It’s childish. It’s also frightening – because who knows what you might be revealing about yourself in your fantasies? But enchantment is the only magic we have that might unlock the secret books.

To accomplish this magic – to cast this spell – demands technique and patience: careful word choice, attentiveness to the rhythms of the prose, the ability to fill the reader’s five senses with the illusion of life, an intuition about pacing and the push–pull rhythm of a satisfying structure. It requires the co-operation of a gifted accomplice, a reader who can see through the words the way a conductor hears the black dots of a musical score: this is a string section, this the melancholy quack of an oboe, this celestial brass. Some of it, of course, is simply sleight of hand and confident patter – and this too is craftsmanship. But there is also deeper magic at work: there is necromancy, the summoning of the dead.