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...

A 'Knives' Q&A in The Big Issue North

I really enjoyed doing a Q&A with Kevin Gopal of The Big Issue North, which went into their recent print edition and can be viewed in full online. Below are a couple of snippets related to current affairs...

A non-Etonian home secretary has just become prime minister, but could a working class one from the North East?
Absolutely. If you just take New Labour’s run of home secretaries – David Blunkett, John Reid and Alan Johnson all came from working class backgrounds, and each might have been prime minister at one time. The Tories tend to more middle or upper-middle class origins, sure – but not David Davis or Patrick McLoughlin or Sajid Javid or Michael Gove, to speak only of the cabinet in recent years. Greg Clark, the new business secretary, is from Middlesbrough and I believe his dad worked as a milkman.

How has the country changed since you wrote Crusaders?
Crusaders was published in 2008 while New Labour was running out of road, as governments do. You could see the Tories had made themselves presentable again, so we were looking at another turn of the wheel, another Conservative era. The coalition and Cameron’s abortive second term were unstable, to say the least, but regrettably Labour in that time has contrived to abandon the business of real politics. So the many troubles we have afoot and headed our way will be for the Tories to contend with, I’d say.

*The* Home Secretary on The Knives: 'Fantastic'

Certain comments on certain things are delivered from positions of expertise. And some things require no comment whatsoever. Here I'll just say that I was very gratified to get this tweet while on holiday in San Sebastian last week.

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.

Philip Collins on The Knives (Times): 'Best political novel since Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty'

I count myself immensely fortunate to have provided a stimulus for this superb piece of writing by Philip Collins in today's Times on politics and the history of its depiction in the novel. His range is terrific, passionate and erudite, and I'm very much in sympathy with the thrust of his arguments, but honoured above all to be discussed approvingly in such company.

An extract:

'A new novel, The Knives by Richard T Kelly, tells the topical story of David Blaylock, an ambitious home secretary trying not to be buried by immigration and terrorism. It is an unusual book because, unlike most novels in which politics features, Kelly manages to tell a story that is dramatic and, at the same time, faithful to the facts about British politics.This is a remarkably rare feat in English letters.'

Edinburgh Book Festival 2016: Happy Days

I've had a lot of fine times in Edinburgh but this week's visit was the best, no doubt about it. Beautiful summer weather, for one, and it lasted until the morning of my departure when things took a turn back toward the dreich city we know and love. Above all, though, the events were fascinating, the company great, the sense of literary community hugely lively. The Festival Bookshop was even stocking my entire oeuvre, which I've never before seen all in one place outside of my bedroom.

My spot of Tuesday night chairing with Ian Rankin was great fun and surprisingly simple, just because Ian is a hugely assured and at-ease performer, with an audience of readers who are avidly interested in the minutiae of his work. In a world exclusive he read some manuscript pages from the forthcoming Rebus, Rather Be The Devil, which takes its title, to my delight, from John Martyn.

The R4 Open Book panel at EIBF, snapped by Jose Machado

Wednesday was a huge engrossing morning, beginning with a special recording for BBC Radio 4's Open Book, a symposium on the novel, politics and our times, with my friend and fellow Faber novelist Ben Markovits, winner of this year's James Tait Black Prize for fiction; the Festival's hugely impressive director Nick Barley; our emcee Mariella Frostrup; the recent winner of the 'Arabic Booker' Raja Alem; and your correspondent. My thanks to Kirsten Locke, Nicola Holloway and Di Spiers at Open Book for inviting me. Do listen in this Sunday August 21, 1600.

Mark Lawson, me, & Val McDermid (by Phoebe Grigor)

And on Wednesday evening I shared an author event in the Spiegeltent with Mark Lawson, who spoke feelingly and with impressive candour about the personal experiences that shaped his recent novel The Allegations. I chatted away about The Knives, and found the capacity crowd very engaged and encouraging. To my joy a French gentleman in the crowd (himself a novelist, as he revealed to me in the signing tent later) asked me to expound about Dostoyevsky.

Mark and I had the benefit of being chaired by Val McDermid, literary royalty in the locality and elsewhere, and I was quite stunned by the generosity of how fastidiously Val had prepared for the discussion, taking great care in the choice of questions and conversational linkages. A star, for sure.

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.'

The Knives reviewed for Metro by Claire Allfree: 'Pacy, propulsive, highly absorbing'.

Claire Allfree is a literary reviewer who wrote a very thoughtful and welcome appreciation of my first novel Crusaders for London's Metro back in 2008. You remember these sorts of things, I can tell you.

I'm very pleased that Claire has now also written on The Knives and found this book to be of merit, too, in a 4-star write-up for the same paper - under what I have to say is a really top-notch headline for a piece on a Westminster novel: 'The Whipping Boy.'

These are the choice bits:

'Richard T Kelly's propulsive new Westminster-set novel... fluently written... highly absorbing...  Pacy novel that captures the fast-moving pressures of government...'

The Knives & me at Edinburgh Book Festival 2016

The 2016 edition of the Edinburgh International Book Festival is now afoot, and I’m calling in next week. It’s a brilliant festival that offers a splendid time for authors: the set-up in Charlotte Square is really handsome and well-organised, the team first-rate, the hospitality lovely, and they draw terrific crowds of curious book lovers. I’m very grateful to have had invitations to present all of my novels there, this year no exception – my thanks to the festival’s first-rate director Nick Barley.

I have a hand in three different events this time round:

On Tuesday night I will be handling emcee duties for Ian Rankin’s event framed round the paperback of his most recent Rebus bestseller, Even Dogs in the Wild. That’s from 8:15pm - 9:15pm in the Baillie Gifford Main Theatre.

On Wednesday morning I’m a guest for a special recording of BBC Radio 4’s Open Book with Mariella Frostrup, involving Nick Barley and the novelist Raja Alem. I’ll be delivering Open Book’s regular author’s column, a piece I’ve written specially on depictions of politicians in fiction. That’s from 10:00am - 11:00am, again in the Baillie Gifford.

On Wednesday evening I will be discussing The Knives, and Mark Lawson his new novel The Allegations, in an authors event chaired by Val McDermid. Mark’s book is a reflection on real events, and the Festival brochure asks: ‘With such sensitive social contexts involved, what personal risks did the authors take in approaching the material?’ That event is 7:00pm - 8:00pm in The Spiegeltent, tickets £8.00 or £6.00.

So maybe I’ll see you there, do say hello, et cetera.

The Knives reviewed in the Financial Times: 'Thrilling in the truest sense.'

Dan Mitchell's art for the FT review of The Knives

This weekend's Financial Times brought a great boon: a very gratifying review of The Knives by the critic and author Erica Wagner, who clearly read the book as closely as any novelist could hope for and was also kind enough to name-check my earlier novel Crusaders (2008).

The FT also allotted a generous space and positioning to Wagner's piece and illustrated it with a drawing by Dan Mitchell that very adroitly projects the menace suggested in the titling of the review: Ministry of Fear.

Some choice extracts:

'The current political climate, with reality giving fiction a run for its money, is one in which the jaded reader might be hard to impress. Which makes Richard T Kelly’s The Knives all the more admirable... This is a sharp and engaging tale...Kelly makes lives the reader can believe in. Novels are thrilling in the truest sense when they feel as if they are built of flesh and blood; it’s Kelly’s success in doing so that makes his final twist of the knife even more shocking.'

The Knives: a Prospect podcast with Sameer Rahim

Follow this link for the audio of a 20-minute conversation I had last week at the London offices of Prospect magazine with their Arts & Books editor Sameer Rahim. For me it was very engrossing. 

Sameer's Twitter avatar is a picture of Joseph Conrad, which would be a fine thing to do at any time; but if you should cross his path at any point then the tale of why he chose Conrad at this particular moment is well worth the telling.

This is the billing on the Prospect site:

In Prospect’s latest podcast, the novelist Richard T. Kelly discusses a Conservative Home Secretary struggling to cope with a multitude of problems: terrorism, civil liberties, immigration and human rights. But Kelly isn’t talking about the former Home Secretary Theresa May; he’s talking about David Blaylock, the protagonist of his new political thriller The Knives. Through Blaylock, Kelly explores the difficulties of being a politician in the 21^st century: the knives are out for you, always.

The Knives makes The Evening Standard's Londoner's Diary: 'A big year in politics'

The Evening Standard has been a fixture of the intra-London commute for so long now that I can remember it before it was distributed for free. Around town you can certainly feel the presence of the 900,000 or so copies that go out these days. So it was a thrill to see The Knives covered yesterday in the Diary pages, a space usually reserved for Great & Good: aristocrats, moguls, beloved entertainers, and senior politicians. It's on the back of the last category, I guess, that me and my novel rode in. My thanks to Robbie Griffiths of the ES for picking up on the story.

Esquire reviews The Knives: 'A finely honed slice of modern political drama'

I'm delighted that the September issue of Esquire now on stands finds room in its cultural highlights section for a write-up on The Knives. One thing that's always lively, surprising and educational about reading reviews of your own stuff (and in a good way, I mean) is seeing how the reviewer selects from and synopsises the book's narrative. Very deftly done in this case, and with no little wit.

This is the critical conclusion the review comes to, which is very gratifying:

'What Kelly... has done so well is to craft an exciting novel set in the political arena... it grips from the off. This book could not also be more timely, with the threat to MPs' personal safety and radicalisation on British soil as alive on these pages as they are in tomorrow's headlines.'

Nick Cohen on The Knives (Observer): 'The best novel about modern politics I have read in years'.

The shrewdest observation I've ever heard said about reviews comes, if I remember right, from Roman Polanski, to the effect that if you decide to believe whatever good write-ups you're lucky enough to get then you have to believe the non-good ones, too, since there's no substantive difference that anyone can point to.

And fair play to that, but obviously one's attention tends in certain directions and not others. Nick Cohen, political writer for the Observer and the Spectator and Standpoint, author of (inter alia) What's Left? and You Can't Read The Book, reviewed The Knives for last Sunday's Observer, and I couldn't have wished for more in appreciation of the novel - in particular his assertion that it is 'the best novel about modern politics I have read in years.'

The Knives launched at Daunts Cheapside 04.08.2016

My kind of shopfront

The independent Daunts chain of bookshops is a huge boon to London and its readers and writers. If we don't have as many booksellers as we might wish in London (compared, say, to coffeehouses, where the product is hardly cheaper though its use-value is cursory), then these ones that we have are to be prized.

The City is a zone of London where the habitues could always do with some edifying reading to keep their eyes above the horizon, and that's what Daunts Cheapside offers. Like every iteration of Daunts I've seen, it's well-stocked and adroitly-staffed and all about good books.

Editor Lee Brackstone addresses the room

That's where Faber & Faber and I went to launch The Knives last Thursday night, the night of the day of the novel's publication. It was a lovely crowd, on a heady August evening when people not already off on their holidays could have been excused for choosing the pub instead. The pub, in any case, is where we ended up, but not before the speeches and toasts that are customary to wetting a book's head.

Edna O'Brien dispenses the wisdom

Obviously when you write for a living you have writerly friends, but I would hope to be forgiven for singling out the attendance of one author to whom the rest of us are naturally inclined to bend the knee in this day and age. Edna O'Brien's literary production has been enjoying a tremendous resurgence at Faber and Faber where she, like me and a good few other fortunate souls, draws on the editorial support of Lee Brackstone. So I was delighted when Edna dropped into my do, as indeed was everybody else in the room.

A few things about The Knives

1. My novel The Knives is published this Thursday, August 4. I first began thinking about its subject in late 2009, and wrote a fledgling version as a prospective short-form Channel 4 drama. My interest had been stirred by some of the very public political/moral dilemmas facing the then-Labour Home Secretary Alan Johnson. That interest deepened when I read David Blunkett’s lengthy and detailed published diaries. I wondered what it would mean to discharge such duties - to walk a mile in those shoes, imaginatively.

2. I began to plot out a long-form story about a flawed man doing a legendarily difficult job, mired in crises both professional and personal – a Home Secretary with no home of his own. Since governments come and go, and since a writer's job is to make things tough for one's characters, I soon knew that my protagonist had to be a working class Conservative, in a north of England constituency, who had served in the army. By 2010 I had a title for the piece, Homeland, but I was just too slow out of the blocks on that score.

3. Research proper on the novel, both from written sources and by going to people and places directly, went on from 2011 right up to 2015. In real life, and for all that the job is considered a poisoned chalice or gilded coffin, Theresa May endured as Home Secretary throughout those years – right up to her recent promotion. Her discharging of duties at Marsham Street was of obvious interest to me, as it has been to journalists on the Westminster beat, and never more so than now. (Andrew Rawnsley’s piece on May and her circle of advisors in last week’s Observer is a very good and insightful place for newcomers to start.)

                                                                                                                    

4. The Knives, though, is fiction. It’s not based or modelled on anyone, it’s no roman a clef. It does, though, aspire through a story to offer some plausible dramatic scenarios and imaginative truths about arguably the hardest office in politics - and its complex relation to this nation of ours and her citizenry.

5. The novel is dubbed a ‘political thriller’, essentially for shorthand purposes. I would see it as a drama that’s intended to grip: a Scandinavian boxset of a novel, if you like, with multiple concurrent plotlines and themes. I would be really pleased if admirers of the TV series Borgen found it of interest. Like my first novel Crusaders, The Knives tries to address some national themes of public interest, in a dramatic manner. Like Crusaders, it’s in the last act that the thriller elements coalesce - the clock begins to tick for the central character, and the train drives down one track to the denouement.

6. I guess there’s a certain timeliness in a novel about a Tory Home Secretary who's widely fancied to become Prime Minister appearing at this moment – amid a year of politics that has been more interesting than many of us would have liked. The book perhaps foreshadows a few things that have become reality. In at least one regard I wish they hadn’t.

7. In a time of political tumult and crisis, like this one in which we’re currently enveloped, people who read a lot can be forgiven for losing their heads in angst and dread; and fiction has a hard fight to show it’s more useful for what ails us than Twitter. But it’s a worthwhile fight, nonetheless. Of course there is a living to be had from arguing that whatever’s happening today is the definitive episode in human history. But it isn’t. Ecclesiastes got that dead right.

8. The EU referendum result defenestrated a Prime Minister and cleared out more than one of his self-styled successors. The ambitions of Cameron, Johnson and Gove, and the popular failure of the case for Britain to remain in the EU, have been shut down, shuttered and bolted: the narrative of those events has already been well told in journalism, and no doubt there will be a non-fiction book or two to follow.

9. Still, our oft-maligned political system managed to propel the most capable candidate into Cameron’s place, once the blatant hoodwinkers had fallen away. The aftermath of that referendum vote, however, will be long and painful, and will define the premiership of Theresa May. The problems that faced her as Home Secretary over six years – inter alia, levels of immigration, varieties of alienation in England’s regions, forms of English nationalism, concern for England’s identity and the threat of 'domestic extremism' in various forms – have, I think, a fair bit to do with why England voted as it did on June 23. The Knives is certainly much preoccupied with such matters. My fictional Home Secretary David Blaylock has his (invented) Westminster constituency on Teesside, where all areas voted to leave the EU by over 60%.

10. In terms of government, such deep-rooted and persistent problems appear to be the burden of the Conservative Party, since Labour has, for the time being, abandoned the business of real politics. And the troubles are not going away – we will reckon with them for years to come. Fiction, I believe, has a part to play in the reckoning, and I wrote a piece for the Guardian last week on how novelists have borne witness to politics down the years – as ‘unacknowledged legislators’, if you like - certainly as watchmen, interpreters and dramatists of our predicaments.