Hassan Ahmed
Who they are
A nineteen-year-old Business Studies student from Leeds who wanted to be a comedian. Snatched in Headingley by masked men and held in a cellar. His uncle is Mahmud Gul, a hardline general in Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence — the fact that makes him valuable, and the fact he does not know is being traded.
What they want
To survive, then to do the stand-up set he had planned. The novel gives him an interior life — routine, memory, jokes — which is what stops him being a plot device.
Book 1 — Slow Horses
- C02 — Jumped in a back lane; wakes bound and hooded.
- C04 — Understands this is not a prank and he will be killed for who he is.
- C06 — Drifts out of his body and rehearses a routine nobody will hear.
- C08 — Talks himself towards calm, then loses it; remembers he is nineteen.
- C10 — Hopes the noise upstairs is a rescue or his uncle’s people; is dragged into the kitchen to die.
- C12 — In the boot of a moving car, works through the severed head he was shown and concludes the threat is real.
- C15 — Hallucinating in the boot, hears a woman’s voice and wonders why Joanna Lumley is talking to him.
- C16 — In Epping Forest, Larry deserts and Curly hits him with the axe handle. He runs, takes the axe, and spares Curly.
Tells
Comedy as a coping mechanism: he narrates his own captivity as material. The mercy at the end is the book’s only unambiguous moral act.
Open questions
What he knows about his uncle, and whether he ever learns what the Service planned to do with him. The last chapter does not say.