It’s ludicrous to say I can’t write about a woman
Author Robert Harris blasts back at the woke warriors
This is a hill worth dying on,’ says thriller writer Robert Harris, defending his right to create a character of any colour or gender, whatever the woke warriors may say. ‘We have to have the artistic freedom to imagine and write about other sexes, other times. I think that is very important. Are you saying a woman can’t write a book in which there’s a male character? It’s ludicrous.’
Harris is a white-haired 63-year-old man but the heroine of his brilliant new novel V2 is a young English intelligence officer called Kay Connolly, trying to stop the giant German rockets falling on the British capital. That puts him in direct conflict with the literary world’s increasingly loud, self-styled arbiters of political correctness, who say men can’t write women characters convincingly and that writers should only tell stories based on their own experience and identity – just as actors should only play people who are like them in real life.
‘It’s a monstrous concept,’ says the author of rip-roaring, best-selling historical thrillers including Fatherland, Enigma, Pompeii and Conclave. ‘I have written about German staff officers, Ancient Romans and been inside the mind of a candidate for Pope. That is the pleasure of writing, to inhabit the thought processes of someone else.’
His last book, The Second Sleep, was about Britain after an apocalypse and appeared to predict the chaos of the coronavirus outbreak a year before it happened. Now, V2 features Kay in wartime Belgium, armed with only a slide rule and paper, engaged in a desperate race against time to work out where each terrifying V2 rocket is coming from and send RAF bombers to destroy the secret launch site.
Harris was inspired by the obituary of a Women’s Auxiliary Air Force officer called Eileen Younghusband, who actually did this vital wartime work.
‘Kay is the strongest female character I have ever written,’ he says. But does he really have the right to write her?
‘If we can only live in our own time, race, gender, sexuality and life experience, then all poetry, all artistic endeavour withers into [nothing]. There would be no point in doing it. I don’t want to write books about myself.’
Would he dare to write a lead character with a different race to his own?
‘Yes. I don’t know whether I would do it very well, but I would regard it as a right to be able to try. I would certainly not say to a black man or a black woman: “You can’t write a novel about a white man or woman.” That would seem to be crazy. There is no hope for humanity if we start to advance that as a point of view.’
Harris also sees a serious problem looming with the so-called cancel culture – the ‘vogue for public shaming and ostracism’, as writers including
J.K. Rowling put it in a recent open letter – that follows when someone is deemed to have said or even thought the wrong thing. ‘There is a lot of intolerance.
There is also a generational divide, particularly with issues of sexuality, gender and so on. The two generations look at one another and they just can’t comprehend what the other believes.’
He thinks the pandemic may widen that gap. ‘Young people are always more radical than their parents, but never before has there been such risk of huge ructions, because so much economic power resides with the old and so much anger and frustration lies with the young.’
Harris was a political journalist, so what does he think of what’s going on in America and the forthcoming election?
‘I think Trump can win. It’s as plausible that he will win this time as it was in 2016. He was behind then.’
What happens if Trump wins? The answer Harris gives is troubling. ‘Political systems don’t endure. They collapse. Very sophisticated systems that have gone on for centuries do falter and fall and it may be that after the next election it will happen.
‘Everyone is focusing on what happens if Trump refuses to accept a Biden win, but a potentially more threatening scenario is that Trump wins and the Democrats refuse to accept it. Then liberal states like California, Washington will secede, withdraw from the union. They no longer feel represented by the federal government and the crazy system. That is a plausible nightmare scenario.’
He’s absolutely serious. ‘By and large, countries last about 100 years as the dominant world force. America is coming up to around 100 years. The British had 100 years, the French, the Spanish the same. History suggests this is the case.’
Harris had just begun working on V2 when Boris Johnson announced the lockdown. ‘I thought: “OK, I am going to try and emerge from this surreal period with something to show at the end of it.” I knuckled down and worked seven mornings a week, from 7.30am. Eight hundred words a day. I have to admit that by noon I would be opening a drink.’
The fevered atmosphere of lockdown found its way into the prose, with vivid descriptions of V2 rockets exploding on launch or falling on London. ‘You wouldn’t be able to see a V2 with the naked eye. You would hear the sonic bang as it broke the sound barrier coming over London, then the boom of the impact. Those double bangs were terrifying.’
On the other hand, the V2 launched the Space Age and the scientists who created it were snapped up by the US at the end of the war. ‘It’s no exaggeration to say the Americans would not have got to the Moon in 1969 without the massive resources Hitler put into the V2 rockets.’
Harris has created a sympathetic German scientist called Willi Graf as well as the heroic Kay, because he’s an expert at inhabiting the past as if it was happening now. That’s what he does best and what he defends, passionately. ‘The whole point in writing a book is to try and experience what someone else might feel. You may succeed or you may fail, but one has to have the freedom to try.’ V2 is out on Thursday
‘There is no hope for humanity if we say you cannot write a character of a different race to your own’