A conversation about non-speaking parts in The Archers this weekend led to a far longer, more involved discussion of fiction's great unseen characters: literary creations who never make an appearance on the main stage, but whose presence nevertheless hovers over the text, influencing thoughts and actions.



A childhood immersion in Middle Earth meant that, for me, the high-watermark for maximum influence/minimal screen-time was set early, by JRR Tolkien's baleful antagonist, Sauron. In fact, I can recall conversations with my father, who read the books to me, on this very subject. Why didn't we get to see Sauron at the end? I asked. Well, he said, isn't it much more frightening not to see him at all? If he turned up you might find out he was quite ordinary. At the time, I was agnostic, but the merit of his argument is now clear: just as Jaws is terrifying up to the moment he lurches out the water and the Close Encounters aliens are awesome until they waddle out of the spaceship, so, if you want to create a truly menacing evil-doer, you'd do better to keep him under wraps. Your own imagination is far better placed to scare you sideways than anyone else's.

On the surface the device would appear to offer authors just as great an advantage when applied to everyday folk as to wicked ones. By withholding characters from our scrutiny, their creators theoretically allow them to achieve far greater resonance than if they were delineated on the page: all amorphous potential rather than reductive detail, they loom large in the minds of the other characters, as well as our own. You'd think, therefore, that examples would be 10 a penny – but in fact, after setting down the rule that characters who are simply deceased didn't count, given their excellent justification for failing to make an appearance, we struggled to come up with more than a handful. There's a rash of absentee fathers in 19th-century children's literature (Mr March in Little Women and Mr Waterbury in The Railway Children, although both of these do finally hove into view in the closing pages), but beyond that we foundered, finally coming up with Varguennes, the eponymous lieutenant of The French Lieutenant's Woman, who abandons the novel's heroine before the opening pages, Leo Duffy, Sy Levin's incorrigible predecessor at Cascadia College in Bernard Malamud's A New Life, and the redoubtable Mrs Churchill, who exerts her influence over her adopted son Frank from a distance, before finally succumbing to one of her many ailments in Chapter 45 of Emma. And, of course, the greatest ghost-hero of them all: Godot.

We figured there must dozens of examples in Dickens, (and indeed in Victorian literature in general, where the exigencies of travel provided the perfect excuse for keeping characters at arm's length) but in the event we couldn't call any to mind. So please: help us. Can you think of any more? And how do you rate their effectiveness as literary tools?