The Knives: A Guardian Book of the Year 2016

Robert Harris, by me - Esquire (October 2016)

I yield to no-one in my appreciation of Robert Harris's writings but, to be fair, he has millions of readers and I wouldn't want to quarrel with all of them. Suffice to say, I had the privilege of an early read of Harris's consummate new novel Conclave, out on September 22, as well as an early sit-down with him regarding the book; and the results of that dialogue are spread lavishly over six pages in the current issue of Esquire - not online, but a snip this month at £2.50.

The interview focuses on a particular theme for the delectation of Esquire readers: by what mixture of craft and ingenuity has Harris achieved his fairly singular success in delivering a succession of intelligent and sophisticated 'high-concept' bestsellers? The mix of ambition and accomplishment leaves me in awe, frankly. It's a great tribute to Harris that he wears success so lightly round his person.

And he is, I must say, a very personable and highly fascinating man to talk to - about books, for sure, but about anything, really. The Esquire piece runs to 3000 words, for which I am much indebted to editor Alex Bilmes. There were a few exchanges that proved, in the end, not totally essential to the piece but by which I was very struck, and which might intrigue Harris fans, too. I reproduce these below:

RICHARD T. KELLY: 2016 has obviously been a big year in politics. Is truth stranger than fiction? Does a novelist have to struggle to keep up?

ROBERT HARRIS: Oh, truth is far more interesting than fiction, always. In my novels whenever there’s something outlandish, grotesque, defying the imagination – that is the truth, and around it my own second-rate prosaic imagination has provided a sort of paste-setting for these jewels of fact... Really, all I’m trying to do in my novels is to present the facts but make them more interesting – looking at them from another angle...

RTK: How important to you is that business of deciding the point-of-view from which you narrate the novel?

RH: Graham Greene said the key to any novel is deciding perspective. And if you find the point of view from which to see it, that really is nine-tenths of the job. If the subject matter is absolutely vast, sometimes you have to find your way through it by narrowing the perspective. The Cicero trilogy is 25 years of tumultuous Roman history – if you try to do it from lots of points of view you just get lost and it becomes a history book. Whereas if you make it very personal, then you can reduce it to a comprehensible level. Through one pair of eyes it becomes exciting and interesting. I think of it as like being lowered into a cave with one of those flashlights on their head, looking around...

RTK: Do you think historical fiction has a message for our own times?

RH: Popular fiction is often a bellwether of what’s on people’s minds. Historical fiction can be as contemporary as something set in Shoreditch last week, because it just reflects our current preoccupations. I wondered why I’d written three novels about the decline of the Roman republic, and then along comes the Brexit vote and all that followed, and suddenly you can see – there was something in the air about our institutions not being so sturdy as we’d like to think.

RTK: What sort of parallels do you see between Ancient Rome and today?

RH: Here and in America and all around the world, a collapse of faith in institutions and elites which inevitably finds expression in the rise of extra-parliamentary movements outside the mainstream. The Brexit vote seemed to me a rebellion against the established order. Jeremy Corbyn is a rejection not just of past Labour governments but the parliamentary process itself. The Labour Party was meant to be a parliamentary institution to make its way through the system, and that’s breaking down. Donald Trump is a rejection of ‘the system’, as is Marine Le Pen and so on. You see all that in the end of the Roman republic – the occupation of the forum, the hatred of the senate... The moment you say it’s legitimate to intimidate people and set up an alternative power centre, then the power drains away from your existing constitution.

RTK: Were there novels you read as a young person that influenced your idea of what the novel could achieve - that made you want to try it yourself?

RH: I remember the afternoon as a teenager when I read George Orwell’s 1984, that was a very big moment in life. I knew my mental horizons had been enlarged. I’d always been interested in politics, and Orwell was passionately interested in the politics of the world around him. but now this was politics plus imagination – ideas elevated to another plane by creativity, like a rocket escaping the gravity of the earth. Orwell was a brilliant journalist, probably the finest essayist in English, but I can almost guarantee you he wouldn’t be read today if he hadn’t applied creative imagination to his ideas, if he hadn’t written 1984 and Animal Farm...

My column on 'Politicians in Fiction' for BBC Radio 4 Open Book, recorded at Edinburgh Book Festival

The Open Book crew at Edinburgh, 17.08.2016

BBC Radio 4's Open Book, presented by Mariella Frostrup, is a terrific platform for literary discussion, and I was thrilled to make my first appearance on the show in 2015, discussing the centenary of Kafka's Metamorphosis with playwright Mark Ravenhill. Coinciding with the publication of The Knives, producers Nicola Holloway and Kirsten Locke offered me a treasured opportunity to write and deliver the show's regular column feature from a given writer on a personal theme; and as both Open Book and myself were at the Edinburgh Book Festival on Wednesday August 17, I got the chance to say my piece in front of a live audience.

You can listen to the full Open Book broadcast - my column (starting 00:11:30) amid a discussion chaired by Mariella, the panel being myself, Ben Markovits, Raja Alem and Nick Barley - here.

And for the boon, here is my text:

I’ve just written a novel about a politician. In idle moments I wonder if I’d have been better off making my story about a serial killer of kittens; or some job that’s equally popular with the general public – a traffic warden, say, or a bailiff.

This thought first came to me when I was describing the plot of my novel, The Knives, to a friend. As I told her that it’s about a fictional Home Secretary trying to manage the multiple daily crises that come with his job – I could see she looked troubled, somehow. And when I was done, her first question was simply: ‘Are we supposed to like him?’

Our sympathies are important to us, in our reading as in our lives. And right now, as a public, we seem to hold our elected politicians in very low esteem – lower than a snake’s belly. Routinely, they are characterised as careerists, connivers, charlatans, backstabbers – fingers in the till, noses in the trough.

This is nothing new, though. There’s never been a time when politicians were very much loved or trusted – and literature provides all the evidence we need. Take PG Wodehouse’s novel Cocktail Time in which Lord Ickenham tries to dissuade an old friend from seeking election as an MP: ‘Have you ever been in the House of Commons’, he asks, ‘and taken a good square look at the inmates? As weird a gaggle of freaks and sub-humans as was ever collected in one spot.’

If fictional politicians are not portrayed as freaks, then they’re usually villains. Which is fine in a novel such as Michael Dobbs’ House of Cards, where Francis Urquhart is clearly a murdering psychopath and we’re supposed to ‘love to hate him’; or Robert Harris's Roman trilogy about Cicero and Julius Caesar, which is brutally honest about power and corruption but, conveniently, takes place two thousand years ago.

I’m not saying that people – including writers – shouldn’t be disapproving – even cynical – about politicians. In a democracy, that’s probably healthy. And it’s the nature of democracy that you will always find a largish group of people sweating with hatred over the fact they are governed by a party they themselves did not vote for.

It is, however, a problem for writers if they lose the empathetic gift they’re supposed to possess – the gift for seeing themselves in others, and others in themselves.

Norman Mailer, politically a man of the left, spent seven years writing a novel called Harlot’s Ghost about the C.I.A. – those bogeymen and women of the liberal imagination. When asked why on earth he bothered with such people, Mailer replied, 'They really are pretty awful. But on the other hand, who isn't?’

In The Human Stain by Philip Roth – set in 1998 when President Clinton was facing impeachment for sexual indiscretions in the Oval Office – Roth’s narrator Nathan Zuckerman becomes so wearied by the widespread damnation of Clinton’s failings that he imagines a banner wrapped round the White House, labelled to remind the public: A HUMAN BEING LIVES HERE.

If that sounds a little extreme, nonetheless I think it contains a truth. In researching The Knives I met and talked to a lot of politicians – and, to put it mildly, I found them recognisably human. They do highly demanding jobs in which, sometimes, in spite of best efforts, things go wrong – just like in your job and mine. To suppose they are indifferent to the consequences of their actions or inactions is to deny their humanity – and a part of your own.

We look to fiction for a true reflection of what we’re like – what Elvis Costello calls ‘the deep, dark truthful mirror.’ As writers and readers, I think we should try to see at least the shadow of ourselves in our politicians.

The Knives reviewed by James Kidd: 'Epic political thriller... a mix of Robert Harris and Tom Wolfe'

I'm really pleased by this write-up from the literary critic and journalist James Kidd that appeared today in the South China Morning Post. Couldn't be happier, for one, to be mentioned in the same breath as two of the major proponents of the popular novel of current affairs... But I'm also really gratified by the way James Kidd has synopsised the novel's plot - the elements he's drawn attention to, and his indication of why they might be there.

For example, it's terrific that this short but detailed review winds round to the following conclusion:

'The Knives rings bells on almost every page: anyone curious about Brexit might want to read about the 'Free Briton Brigade'. The end is a shocker and, tragically, only too believable.'

Robert Harris on The Political Novel @ the LSE

In 2009 I reviewed Lustrum, the second of Robert Harris’s 'Cicero Trilogy', for the Financial Times. Praising Harris’s ‘distinctive excellence’, I wrote that he ‘understands politics and how to dramatise them: their necessary imperfection, their dependence on the embrace of lesser evils and shabby means that serve higher ends.’

Last night I went along to the LSE Literary Festival to hear Harris talk with Peter Kemp of the Sunday Times on the theme of 'The Political Novel' – an event organised in association with the Royal Society of Literature. Harris’s ability to discuss his working process, his view of the world and how he conceives his fiction is matchless in its assurance. As a huge Harris fan, and having spent the last few years writing and researching my own novel of politics The Knives (forthcoming from Faber this August) I could hardly have passed a more thoroughly engrossing ninety minutes. My notes from the evening are as follows:

1. In his early twenties, having been president of both the Cambridge Fabian Society and the Union, Harris contemplated seeking selection as a Labour MP. But he came to the view that the ‘modes of thinking’ for a politician and for a writer were too far apart, and that he preferred the latter. Having done that much hard thinking, though, he readily admits still to a ‘sneaking sympathy’, an ‘instinctive empathy’, for working politicians. He told the audience in tones of relief that it was some peoples’ jobs to get up in the morning and think about Brexit or the junior doctors, but not his.

2. He was shrewd and amusing about his early career path: how, post-Cambridge, having set himself on journalism, but having come from ‘the provinces’, he had no intention of going back there to serve a necessary Fleet Street apprenticeship; and so went for and secured a BBC traineeship. Later he was again acerbically funny in pointing out that, while his path through university and media would have made easy enough material for the sorts of English novels “that have been written by others” he felt this was inadequate material for good fiction.

3. In digression, some of his liveliest tales concerned his association, beginning at Cambridge, with the ‘controversial’ historian David Irving, who certainly knew that the so-called ‘Hitler Diaries’ were a forgery. I was reminded of Christopher Hitchens’ account of the kind of hair-raising ‘wit’ a writer will expose himself to if keeping Irving’s company.

4. Harris was fascinating on how his bestselling fictional debut Fatherland began as a non-fiction project, ‘a Baedeker guide to a world that never existed’, until he realised the freedom he needed to start making things and characters up.

5. Also v intriguing: his description of how, instead of Pompeii (2003), he nearly published – spent quite some considerable time on – a dystopian novel about an America whose politics fall under the sway of a Disney-like corporation. Clearly he chose well to jack that US-set book in and find another imaginative way to write about an empire under threat.

6. His two big tips for an aspiring novelist? 1) Have some sense of what your ending will be, where you are heading, even if you detour along the way. 2) The point-of-view of the narration determines everything.

7. An additional tip for the thriller writer: have a tight time-frame. Then shorten it.

8. Really fascinating for anyone who knows cinema (i): Harris talked about admiring and wanting as a novelist to emulate the film directing career of Stanley Kubrick, who, he felt, ‘could do any place.’ I suspect this wish is rather a common one.

9. Really fascinating for anyone who knows cinema (ii): Harris was very funny about his collaborations with Roman Polanski – to wit, how he sent Polanski the manuscript of An Officer and a Spy (the idea of a Dreyfus project Polanski had, after all, initiated), and then received copious notes on his prose from the maestro down the telephone.

10. Asked if he would contemplate a contemporary Westminster-set novel, comparable perhaps to the works of Trollope (which Harris ‘loves’), he admitted to some reluctance – that the Commons is no longer the most powerful legislator in the world as in Victorian times, that the drama and the stakes are just not the same. That said, he was surprisingly passionate – surprising even himself perhaps – when he talked of the drama he discerned in the ‘coded battle’ that had taken place in the House just the other day between David Cameron and Boris Johnson; and he evoked the ‘Shakespearean’ falling-out of the Miliband brothers and ‘what had happened to the Labour Party’ because of it.

11. Asked for his thoughts on political fiction that emphatically set itself on one ‘wing’ of a political argument, Harris was emphatic, saying that he felt for a novelist to try to ‘animate an ideology’ was a ‘fatal move.’ Though a Labour supporter still, he made clear: ‘I can’t believe that virtue is all on this side.’ This is as near as dammit a quotation from Trollope, and an eloquent gesture from one master of the form to another.

12. In my view Harris's early non-fiction works should be read just as keenly as his novels, for all that he has firmly chosen the latter camp now for his output. But at one point last night he looked a little wistful in remarking that his The Making of Neil Kinnock (Faber, 1984) is probably 'not much read these days.' It should be read by anyone interested in British politics - "now more than ever", perhaps. 

New Esquire (May 2010): RTK on Polanski's The Ghost

The new Esquire has on its cover Jay-Z, which is good news, as I might now find out just who that guy is and what he’s all about. Within, my film column is about Roman Polanski’s movie of Robert Harris’s The Ghost, in which I found much to enjoy while also finding myself unable to get past one mountainous error, namely the drama’s daft imagining of a Blairesque Prime Minister played by Pierce Brosnan – 'Adam Lang', as Harris calls him, an international statesman shown to be utterly devoid of qualities. As I write in the mag:
"Pierce Brosnan unsurprisingly flounders in trying to fill this cursory outline of a person. In Harris’s novel, the ‘Ghost’ decides finally that Lang is just ‘not a psychologically credible character.’ Quite. But while Harris intends us to read Lang as a pliable phoney, all that comes across is Harris’s consuming hatred of Tony Blair, whom Lang resembles in every respect but for the ones that actually matter..."
Admiring John Rentoul’s political writings as I do, and finding myself mostly in agreement with him about the rationale for and legality of Britain’s involvement in the invasion of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, I suspect he would not be taken with my piece were he to read it, since he’s been vocal in his criticism of The Ghost and its makers (without having seen the movie); whereas I devote a fair few lines to my admiration of Polanski as a filmmaker, and attribute my overall liking for the film to it being so recognisably un film de Polanski.
As I say in the piece, it has ‘the quite inimitable Polanskian mood: a sense of creeping unease, of the slow-but-steady workings of fate, the unfussy, commonplace presence of evil in the world.’ Moreover, Ewan McGregor in the lead is ‘a classic Polanski hero in distress, naïvely courting trouble and yet, on some level, asking for it.’ And like so much of Polanski, The Ghost plays on the menacing theme of ‘the double’ – two men sharing a moral/physical resemblance and, possibly, a fate. Location-wise Polanski makes the North Sea island of Sylt ‘double’ as Martha's Vineyard, and it’s a great swap, because scenically the film has that mood evoked by Norman Mailer in his New England-set thriller Tough Guys Don’t Dance: the ‘cold sea air filled with the bottomless chill that lies at the cloistered heart of ghost stories.’ Those who treasure how Polanski shot the island of Lindisfarne in Cul-de-Sac will feel those embers warmed by The Ghost.
I must say, I don’t think Polanski undertook the filming of Harris’s novel on the grounds that he wanted to play his own part in dragging Blair up before The Hague. Rather, Polanski had been at work with Harris on a movie of one of the author’s earlier successes, Pompeii, but then the funding collapsed. As Harris tells it (or as reported by Michael White the other week) he then “offered [The Ghost] as an alternative to Polanski, who is not interested in politics. ‘This Gordon Brown, he’s schmuck, yes?’ was the limit of [Polanski’s] conversation.” That certainly sounds like Polanski’s diction, at least as Martin Amis once aped it in a famous appraising interview piece.

FT today: RTK on Robert Harris's Lustrum

My short-ish write-up of Harris's second Cicero novel runs in the Financial Times today. This was my first real encounter with Harris's bestselling storytelling, though I've long been a big fan of his non-fiction, especially his books on Neil Kinnock and Bernard Ingham, both of which evoke brilliantly a world of British politics that now feels like aeons ago - albeit not so far-distant as 63BC, where Lustrum begins.
So wryly skilful is the novel's use of ancient history that I wish it had been around in those years when I was studying Classics for 'O' and 'A' Level (years when Kinnock still had his tin hat on, trying to lead Labour out of the trenches, while Ingham was browbeating the press corps Yorkshire-style on behalf of his beloved Margaret.) Still, at least in the late 1980s I had Gore Vidal's scurrilous Creation to help me inject some irony into the 'Golden Age of Athens' part of the examination paper.
Had I the word-space in the FT I would have added of Lustrum that it clearly extends Robert Harris's compulsion to explore the mindset and behaviour of Tony Blair through fictive means. Throughout, there are meaningful if toga-clad allusions to things Blair has said and done, sometimes expressed through the vehicle of Cicero, other times through Gaius Julius Caesar - in other words, sometimes in a reasonably sympathetic manner, other times with the sort of animus that John Rentoul has instinctively deplored.