History serves as a warning
Author fears official coverups still possible
Robert Harris wasn’t prepared for the anger he felt writing his latest thriller, An Officer and a Spy.
After two decades of topping international bestseller lists, he was discovering he could still jolt himself with a visceral response to his material.
So yes, he did experience a mounting rage as he worked on this fictional reconstruction of a deplorable chapter of late 19thcentury French history: The unjust spying conviction of Jewish army officer Alfred Dreyfus, an event that unleashed a torrent of anti-Semitism throughout the country.
“I must say that I don’t think I’ve ever before written a book which has changed the way I look at the world, but this one has,” says Harris who has been making international waves since the 1992 publication of his first bestseller, Fatherland, a work of alternative history in which Nazi Germany wins the Second World War.
But in the case of An Officer and a Spy, which director Roman Polanski has snapped up for his next film project, Harris kept finding disturbing parallels to the present.
He believes the political and military establishment is as capable now of the Big Lie as it was in 1895, when it went to extraordinary lengths covering up the fact Dreyfus was wrongly convicted and keeping him imprisoned on far-off Devil’s Island.
“I don’t think I’ll ever take official assurances for granted again,” Harris says by phone from his country home.
“And now, when one sees the extent to which governments and organizations can be led to this kind of coverup and lying on a massive scale, I think one can see how it happens and how they justify it to themselves. So it did change my view of things and it did make me angry.”
In fact, Harris can’t help thinking about current American outrage over whistleblowers Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden.
“My natural sympathies are with the whistleblower — always. I’m a journalist, and I believe in freedom of information,” he says. “I think most things that are kept secret and shouldn’t be are there to conceal incompetence. There’s always something profoundly undemocratic about it.”
Harris’s new novel introduces us to 19th-century whistleblower army Col. Georges Picquart, who was imprisoned for questioning the Dreyfus conviction.
Picquart’s first-person narrative plunges us into the seething inferno of 1895 Paris, to the moment when Dreyfus is publicly humiliated in front of 10,000 Parisians screaming “death to the Jew” before he’s dispatched in chains to a lifetime of solitary confinement.
Picquart is head of the mysterious intelligence unit that captures Dreyfus. But he begins to suspect the agency is corrupt, and that the government and military are refusing to acknowledge the existence of another spy in the system.
Picquart, more and more convinced that Dreyfus has been framed, starts finding his investigation blocked at every turn and eventually ends up being arrested himself as an enemy of the state.
“Picquart was more hated than Dreyfus for what he did, which was considered an outrage,” says Harris.
“So I think it’s interesting to remind ourselves that a man we would consider pretty much of a hero was absolutely hated at the time and locked up.”
It’s a story that continues to offer lessons for today, Harris says.
“I think that secret trials, imprisonment on islands a long way from prying eyes, the cruelty of detention without access to lawyers, which amounts almost to torture, the persecution of minorities, the whipping up of press campaigns, intelligence operations that are out of control and are accountable to no one — I think these are features of all ages of history.
“But the Dreyfus affair was the first great example of it, really, because it happened at the beginning of mass media and the modern state. So it has great relevance to today.”
Whether writing about ancient Rome (Pompeii), modern Britain (The Ghost) or France at the close of the 19th century, Harris says his obsessions drive him.
“Governments and power and truth and the media and conscience — all those things come together in this story, and in a way they’re everything I’m interested in writing about. They have all these resonances.”
And although he repeatedly finds parallels to the present day in the Dreyfus scandal, Harris finds other alarming portents, as well.
“What’s alarming is to see the similarities between Paris in the 1890s and Berlin in the 1930s,” he said.
“Shops being smashed, books bring burned, assaults in the street — a very virulent antiSemitism was unleashed by the affair, even if it wasn’t the initial cause.”