‘Le Carré was a ruthlessly honest person’
Writer David Farr on his friendship with the spy novelist, and his very personal first book. By Jake Kerridge
It has taken David Farr a long time to get round to writing his first book, but, as one of our busiest cultural heavyweights, he can be forgiven. Originally a playwright and director, he ran two major theatres in his 30s while simultaneously embarking on a screenwriting career that has encompassed hit television dramas such as The Night Manager, Spooks and Amazon Prime’s Hanna, as well as the 2016 feature film The Ones Below starring David Morrissey.
But although the idea for The Book of Stolen Dreams, the first in a series of rip-snorting fantasy thrillers for children, was brewing in his mind for many years, it wasn’t just his packed schedule that stopped him committing it to paper.
As we sit down together in his handsome London flat, Farr, 51, tells me that a “mental block” was to blame. “I’d written so much drama – plays, films, television – and that’s all about what you don’t say: you trust the director and the actor to do 80 per cent of your work and intuit what’s going on underneath.
“With a book, it’s all down to you. I didn’t know if I could do it and so, like all sensible cowards, I didn’t try. But the minute the first lockdown started I tried writing it as a sort of exercise and it took on a life of its own.”
The heroes of The Book of Stolen Dreams are 12-year-old Rachel and her brother Robert, 13, refugees travelling in search of the eponymous magical book whose strange powers may aid them in toppling the hateful dictator who has invaded Krasnia, their homeland.
Despite some supernatural elements, however, the inspiration behind the story is very real. Farr shows me a photograph of three youngsters – his maternal grandmother, his great-aunt Ruth and his great-uncle Robert – taken in Dusseldorf in the early 1930s. They were German Jews who fled to England before the war.
Growing up in an English suburban family in Surrey, Farr had no idea he had any Jewish heritage. “Then when I was 10 or 11 – my grandmother had died by this time – I asked my mother, ‘Why do Uncle Robert and Aunt Ruth have those accents?’ And she told me the whole story, starting with the very dramatic moment when the family sat down to dinner one evening in 1935, and my great-grandmother stood up and told her children: ‘I’ve read his book’ – she meant Mein Kampf – ‘and we have to leave’.”
‘When my greatgrandmother read Mein Kampf, she knew they had to flee’
David’s great aunt Ruth told him about making the journey to England alone as a teenager – “that was one of the ways you could do it, get sponsorship for your children first and then you would try and follow them” – and being met by a woman who took her to Poole where she worked as a cleaner. Robert, who was younger, also made the trip alone, and was sent to school in Suffolk.
Farr did not want to write a realistic novel based on their experiences – “it’s been covered so well” – but elements of reality have crept into his fantasy. When the children are accused of being Krasnian spies, that reflects how Robert was interned on the Isle of Man after war was declared, until the government was persuaded that German-jewish refugees probably didn’t need to be classed as enemy aliens. He also wanted to capture how Ruth and Robert felt when circumstances pitched them suddenly into a strange country: “It was a mixture of extremely frightening, but also somehow freeing and exciting.”
Farr lives with his partner, Aimee; with his wife, from whom he is separated, he has two daughters who are at university. “Rachel is partly modelled on one of my daughters – I won’t say which one because it will annoy either that one or the other one.”
Despite moments of violence and tragedy, The Book of Stolen Dreams is also very funny, with a constant stream of jokes. “Once I found the right voice for the book, my mental block disappeared. And of course, it’s the voice of my great-aunt and uncle, that Mitteleuropean Jewish voice that has slightly disappeared, I think – funny, mischievous, lyrical, sentimental in a good way.”
That “voice” is also part of Farr himself; it is his Jewish heritage, he thinks, that explains the “paranoid” side to his personality.
“I’m basically an anxious person, which is why I write so much about living under oppression – in this book; my adaptations of Kafka and Dostoevsky for the theatre; and, in a more commercial way, writing in the espionage genre in my screenplays. I think I sometimes feel like a bit of a fish out of water in England because that constant sense of paranoia isn’t embedded in English culture. There hasn’t been one of those oppressive regimes where you can’t trust even your own family members not to betray you.”
And it’s true that Farr, although genial and engaging, does have a certain anxious energy. He says that a “shy arrogance” has always made him reluctant to lobby people for work.
After a very successful run of salaried positions – artistic director of the Bristol Old Vic and then the Lyric Hammersmith, associate director at the RSC – came to an end, he decided that, as he had “no skill at networking”, he would concentrate on screenwriting.
His greatest triumph in that field has been his 2015 BBC One adaptation of John le Carré’s spy novel The
Night Manager. He recalls meeting le Carré (who died last year) at a pub in Hampstead to pitch his idea for the series.
“We chatted about my Hamlet at the RSC, which his sister [the actress Charlotte Cornwell] was in, and then suddenly he turned his author gaze on me and said, ‘So what do you plan?’ I told him my idea for transplanting the novel from 1990s Central America to the post-arab Spring world, and within seconds he was all over the idea with his own suggestions; this man, in his 80s, had a knowledge of geopolitics that was unsurpassed.
“In the end, he had no problem with me changing a lot of the plot of the second half of the book. He would actually suggest changes himself. ‘Make it better’, that was his approach – ruthless with own work. He was a ruthlessly honest person, full stop.”
The two men also bonded over le Carré’s interest in German philosophy and literature (he studied German at the University of Bern).
“He had that very English obsession with manners, how manners hide corruption, but it co-existed in a strange way alongside a fascination with European revolutionary ideas,” says Farr. “We became very close, and I miss him. He and Pinter were the two older guys I worked with very closely towards the end of their lives – very similar: intimidating at first but then hugely warm and generous when you got to know them.”
Farr’s next project is an adaptation for Sky of The Midwich Cuckoos, John Wyndham’s classic sci-fi tale of alien infiltrators in a quiet English village. He sees it partly as a tribute to his father – “a downright Brit, not Jewish” – whose heritage he now feels slightly guilty for ignoring.
“This is me gravitating back to the pastoral Englishness that my dad loves – after so many years being obsessed with my German-jewish side, I’m beginning to embrace that more and more.”
The Book of Stolen Dreams by David Farr (Usborne, £12.99) is out now