Robert Harris Janice Butler meets the author

Robert Harris gave up a career as one of the UK’s most influential political commentators to write best-selling fiction but the currently political climate weighs heavily on him. Janice Butler meets the author to talk about his latest compelling novel, The Second Sleep

Robert Harris seems like a very worried man: worried about Brexit, worried about the political landscape and worried about our over-reliance on technology. In fact, all this worry is the basis for his latest novel, e Second Sleep, which has been six years in the making and given him many sleepless nights. e author, who once worked as the political editor of the Observer and as a columnist for the Sunday Times is best known for his novels Fatherland, Munich and An O cer and a Spy.’

When we meet, he’s sitting in a Dublin city hotel, smartly dressed and coming to the end of his day chatting to journalists. is is his rst work that doesn’t hang on a historical period and it seems more personal, an expression of concern about society and the path we’re on.

e Second Sleep is set in 1468, or so we are led to believe in the rst few pages. e story is that of a young priest, Christopher Fairfax, who is sent to a small village in England to oversee the funeral of the local priest, Fr Lacy. While the costumes and candle-lit settings create an air of years gone by, we quickly learn that there’s something a bit o about the novel’s timeline. While he’s staying in the dead priest’s house, Fairfax comes across relics from the ‘ancient’ past: “coins and plastic banknotes from the Elizabethan era”. e most striking object collected by Fr Lacy is a slim black sheath of metal: “On the back was the ultimate symbol of the ancients’ hubris and blasphemy – an apple with a bite taken out of it.”

So it is revealed that the past of this medieval world is in fact our present and that our technological civilisation has been destroyed, leading the reader to work out, with the help of Fairfax, what happened.

Robert Harris talks about the triggers that led to him writing this novel, why he doesn’t miss being a journalist and his dismay at how this generation is living.

is is your rst book not set in a particular historical period – did that make things more di cult for you?

It was de nitely more challenging because I had to create a world that was both far in the future and far in the past – or felt like it was in the past and that was technically quite di cult. And of course, it’s clearly about the modern age and what happens to us but the discovery of it has to be done by people far into the future. I had to create a new landscape and language and I had to make it all up which was a little bit alarming. I normally have the historical references to weave in and out of.

Did you enjoy the challenge of creating a world?

I did – it took me longer to write than most of my books and I was more uncertain about it. But it was also a really interesting project and I’ve been nervous about the reception to it because with this book I’m asking the reader to swallow something, to take a leap of faith and you never know whether people will feel it works.

e ‘bitten apple’ revelation that we are reading about a future a er our world has gone comes early in the book – were you tempted to drag this out a bit?

No – I think I could have done it earlier actually. I felt the novel worked best if people were instantly interrogating the past and what happened. I’ve had complaints already from people on Twitter that they thought this was a historical novel.

e theme of the fragility of our world is very timely, given our concerns about Brexit, the new nationalism and climate change – do these things worry you?

e original idea was an archaeologist looking into the past and we’d realise that the past he was looking into was ours and not the Romans or another time. So that idea sat in the back of my mind for quite a while and it began to throw up other ideas and what might have caused our civilisation to fail. But there’s de nitely a lot of uncertainty in the air at the moment, there’s a lot of unease growing. I just wonder where we’re going with these immensely powerful things called phones and what they’re doing to our lives – everything is digitalised, our information, our music, our books;

none of us buy a map any more. We’re becoming different people and I’m not sure it’s for the better.

As a former political journalist, did you anticipate the uncertainty and polarisation that Brexit has created?

No never – I always thought there was a well or subterranean good sense in a democracy like we have in the UK. I believed there was a wisdom in the masses but I’ve lost that faith now and I find there’s so much irrationality; a sort of destructiveness and a desire to smash things up that have served us well for a long time. It’s like we’ve become bored with order and peace and want to test the institutions a bit. It’s a very strange time. It feels as though something’s coming and the likes of Trump and Johnson aren’t the final stage, I think they’re just the early riders of what’s coming.

Do you ever miss being a political reporter?

No, I much prefer writing novels. I wasn’t one of those journalists who happen to write a novel but they continue to be a journalist – I realised that I was really a novelist who was masquerading as a journalist. I’m really glad I did it although most of my friends are journalists; I’m not so much at ease with novelists but I think I found a way of expressing myself through imagination and that’s much more satisfying to me. It gave me great training though, to ask questions, to look outwards and most importantly the understanding of the importance of a deadline.

Roman Polanski’s adaptation of your novel An Officer and a Spy had a controversial reception at this year’s Venice Film Festival – how did you feel about that?

I saw the movie and it’s very good – he’s a brilliant film-maker. I first worked with him over 12 years ago not long after he’d won an Oscar [for The Pianist] and everyone wanted to work with him. That obviously all changed when there was the documentary about him and he sued the State of California, which reactivated the US warrant for his arrest. It’s left me quite stranded because he’d become a friend and I’ve learned a lot from him so I can’t bring myself to suddenly denounce him. I don’t believe in censorship – if this movie shouldn’t be shown, then all his movies shouldn’t be shown?

How do you think this generation will be remembered?

If an age is judged on its art, architecture and literature that they leave behind, then I think ours is pretty crappy to be honest and I don’t think we’re leaving much behind apart from concrete embankments, plastic bags, straws and nappies. I don’t feel we’re producing great art or literature but there’s a sense that we’re on a trajectory upwards and that the novelists of today are building on the novels of the past.

The Second Sleep by Robert Harris is in bookshops now, published by Penguin

It’s like we’ve become bored with order and peace and want to test the institutions a bit. It’s a very strange time