The Man Made of Smoke

John, a point-of-view character in the novel, is a recently retired police officer and Dan’s father. Seen through Dan’s eyes at the beginning of the novel, John is big, strong, and light-hearted. As an adult, Sarah describes John as a man who has always been kind to her. However, as Dan grew up, John seemed diminished in his eyes, and Dan’s teenage self thought of his father as an angry, frustrated man. John’s narrative shows that he’s consumed by guilt and regret and considers his life a series of failures. Through all these differing perspectives, the picture that emerges is of an empathetic, just police officer, weighed down by the pressures of single parenthood and performative masculinity. The narrative shows that John has superior investigative skills, yet he has been professionally overlooked all his life. Domineering, arrogant officers like Liam Fleming have run down John, mistaking his empathy for weakness. John also feels like a failure because his wife, Maggie, left him and Dan. In the aftermath of Maggie’s departure, John grew depressed and isolated.

A symbol of John’s isolation is the home renovation that he undertook after Maggie left. Dan recalls that John converted an entire floor of their house into a single room, installing a punching bag at one end and a desk at the other. John locked himself into his space for hours, pounding away at the punching bag to relieve his frustration. The sense of isolation persists in John’s behavior in his recent timeline, with him refusing to call Dan even when he wants to because he doesn’t want to impose on his son. John feels lonely and purposeless at times and often thinks about ending his life. Despite the pervasive sense of despair, John continues to take action, such as investigating cold cases he finds online, probing the disappearance of Field, and leaving clues for Dan to find. John’s act of identifying James and visiting Abigail’s grave twice a year—on her birthday and James’s—shows his deep sense of empathy and respect for other human beings. John’s drive to keep taking action, using “brute force” despite all the challenges thrown at him, shows that he’s a well-rounded character with a dynamic arc.

A major point-of-view character in the novel, James is a tragic, heroic figure who symbolizes resistance to evil. James is 11 years old when he’s taken by the Pied Piper and 14 when the Pied Piper kills him. The pre-Pied Piper section establishes that James is a quiet, introspective boy who loves his mother, Abigail, deeply and feels emotionally responsible for her. For instance, knowing that Abigail can sense his disappointment at the bleakness of the beach, James puts on a brave face and tells his mother that the shore looks great. James takes his stuffed lion, Barnaby, everywhere with him since Barnaby gives him comfort and courage. He’s aware that people may consider him too old to be carrying the toy but refuses to give it up, which is an early foreshadowing of James’s individualism. The novel suggests that James’s mother lives in poverty and has mental health conditions; despite this, she does her best for James. James’s father, revealed to be Craig Aspinall, isn’t in the picture, though James does long for him, writing him a letter and drawing him a sketch for Christmas.

After his abduction, James undergoes unspeakable trauma, with the Pied Piper grooming him as some sort of protégé; he makes James dig the graves of the children the Pied Piper tortures and kills. It’s unclear why the Pied Piper singles out James as a recruit. James senses that the Pied Piper keeps him locked in a room and makes him witness and photograph torture and murder because he wants to kill something in James, the part that makes him empathetic. However, despite all the torment that James undergoes for three years, he refuses to comply with the Pied Piper. In a sequence that constitutes a battle for his soul, James decides to walk out through the door that the Pied Piper deliberately left open, set a fire in his cellar, and help Robbie. James’s narration when the Pied Piper catches him helping Robbie highlights his courage during moments of absolute, consuming terror. He notes that he’s going to die, but that doesn’t mean the Pied Piper will win. Thus, James sacrifices himself to save future children from the serial killer, emerging as a hero. Because he grows up to realize that the Pied Piper isn’t a monster but just a human, James has a dynamic character arc.

Sarah is a major character in the novel and, like Dan, a “witness” to the Pied Piper and James at the service station. She was Dan’s childhood best friend, “loved animals more than anything” (5), and worked at an animal charity before moving to the island to care for her dying mother. In the present timeline, she works as a server at the local pub, often doubling up as a singer during slower hours. Dan notes that Sarah had a challenging childhood, with her mother raising her as a single parent with limited resources. Sarah is resourceful, interested in nature, and naturally curious; she often turned up at Dan’s doorstep to play and asked him, “Want to go on an adventure, Dan?” (3).

Seen through Dan’s eyes, Sarah is beautiful. When Dan saw her at an end-of-high-school party, he realized that she transcends the usual good looks. Dan’s view of Sarah is colored by his love for her. Though the narrative doesn’t delve into Sarah’s point of view, the novel suggests that, like Dan, she was deeply affected by the service-station incident, feeling guilty that she didn’t notice the killer or the little boy along with him (it can be presumed that Sarah was sitting in the food court with Dan’s parents). This can be inferred from the knowing way in which she recognizes that Dan still carries guilt from the incident. Like Dan, Sarah feels stuck on the island in the present timeline. However, she doesn’t let that stop her from taking action, joining Dan in his investigation, and digging up the address of Michael Johnson. For Dan, Sarah represents hope, as she urges him to confront his emotional numbness. With Sarah’s encouragement, Dan allows himself to be vulnerable and silly.

The novel’s eponymous antagonist, the Pied Piper, embodies cruelty and sadism. He’s called the “man made of smoke,” as people know little about him, despite the sensational evidence of his crimes. The Pied Piper is also associated with smoke since he moves almost invisibly through crowded spaces, coexisting with busy, ordinary life. Furthermore, like smoke, he slips undetected through the cracks in society. Eyewitnesses describe him as wearing a long, green coat and mud-crusted boots and “having brown tufty hair and a sun-weathered face” (1), but no one can pinpoint his features since there is something off-putting about his visage, defying perusal. James, however, notes that the Pied Piper is perfectly ordinary looking, with “unremarkable” features (359). The Pied Piper uses accoutrements to project an air of menace, such as his dirty, long coat and his habit of whistling a tune. The whistling, emitted also when he’s committing a crime, is meant to show his victims how little he cares about them. This whistling earns him the tag of the “Pied Piper” killer since he supposedly uses music to lure the children to him, like the fairy-tale figure. The parallel is flawed since the killer’s whistling doesn’t attract children but shocks them with its eeriness, giving him enough time to act. However, the moniker “Pied Piper” does evoke a hopeless dread associated with fairy-tale monsters. The Pied Piper killer’s catchphrase is “Nobody sees and nobody cares” (3), intended to make his victims feel small, worthless, and invisible.

The investigation in the present timeline reveals that the Pied Piper is possibly William MacGuire, who inherited a farm from his father. This farm is where the Pied Piper brought his victims and chained them in pens until he ultimately killed and buried them. For reasons unknown, the Pied Piper keeps James Palmer alive, possibly grooming him as an accomplice in crime. James describes the Pied Piper’s cellar as the place he keeps many of his tools of torture, his fake IDs and passports, and his cash. The documents are burned in a fire that James himself starts. The Pied Piper dies of burn injuries from the fire, but not before he kills and buries James. James’s end can be inferred from the fact that his remains are found at the farm. Although the motives behind the Pied Piper’s murders aren’t specified, the elements of torture and voyeurism make it clear that he derives pleasure from the pain of others. The most terrifying symbol associated with him is the camper van, the floor of which he has hollowed to make a pit for his victims. That the camper van carrying children’s handprints and opaque windows is never investigated by the authorities is an indictment of the law-enforcement and justice systems.

Aspinall is the novel’s other antagonist, the man behind the present-day murders in the novel, and the father of James. At the beginning of the novel, Aspinall appears as an innocuous figure, and Dan barely recalls him. A man in his seventies, like John, Aspinall has gray hair and a weather-beaten complexion. He moves around the island, picking up litter from its forest trails and fixing broken fences. Though Dan doesn’t know until the very end, Aspinall has a troubled past. John notes how Abigail Palmer’s file indicates that she dealt with domestic violence, suggesting that it may have been at the hands of Aspinall, her partner. Aspinall was incarcerated for robbery when James was a little boy. He learned of Abigail’s and James’s deaths only after his release from prison. After the tragedy, Aspinall moved to his father’s house on the island, drowning his grief through maintaining the wilderness.

In a twist of irony, Aspinall’s return to crime was catalyzed by his discovery of the book that John left at Abigail’s grave. Realizing that James’s murder wasn’t even recognized, Aspinall turned his anger toward the witnesses at the service station, blaming them for rendering his son invisible. Consumed by the search for redemption, Aspinall decided to give his intended victims a similar fate to what he imagined happened to James. He searched for the site of James’s murder for years, was drawn to the Pied Piper’s farmhouse by a supernatural hunch, and prepared it as a murderous lair. Aspinall’s trajectory illustrates the theme of Survivor’s Guilt and the Search for Redemption as the drive for atonement took him into extreme, bleak places. Ironically, in his desire to avenge James, Aspinall ends up mimicking his son’s killer. Like the Pied Piper’s known victims, Aspinall’s victims also number five. The victims’ description of Aspinall as a man whose face one doesn’t want to glimpse also skirts eerily close to the description of the Pied Piper. Aspinall’s use of fairy lights to dress up the trees near the farmhouse is supposed to recreate James’s sketch of a Christmas tree; the bizarre recreation shows his altered state of mind.