An Officer and A Spy
Robert Harris, 2014
Knopf Doubleday
448 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780385349581
Summary
Robert Harris returns to the thrilling historical fiction he has so brilliantly made his own. This is the story of the infamous Dreyfus affair told as a chillingly dark, hard-edged novel of conspiracy and espionage.
Paris in 1895. Alfred Dreyfus, a young Jewish officer, has just been convicted of treason, sentenced to life imprisonment at Devil’s Island, and stripped of his rank in front of a baying crowd of twenty-thousand. Among the witnesses to his humiliation is Georges Picquart, the ambitious, intellectual, recently promoted head of the counterespionage agency that “proved” Dreyfus had passed secrets to the Germans.
At first, Picquart firmly believes in Dreyfus’s guilt. But it is not long after Dreyfus is delivered to his desolate prison that Picquart stumbles on information that leads him to suspect that there is still a spy at large in the French military. As evidence of the most malignant deceit mounts and spirals inexorably toward the uppermost levels of government, Picquart is compelled to question not only the case against Dreyfus but also his most deeply held beliefs about his country, and about himself.
Bringing to life the scandal that mesmerized the world at the turn of the twentieth century, Robert Harris tells a tale of uncanny timeliness—a witch hunt, secret tribunals, out-of-control intelligence agencies, the fate of a whistle-blower—richly dramatized with the singular storytelling mastery that has marked all of his internationally best-selling novels. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—March 7, 1957
• Where—Nottingham, England, UK
• Education—B.A., Cambridge University
• Awards—Cesar Award for Best Adapted Screenplay
• Currently—lives near Newberry, England
Robert Dennis Harris is an English novelist. He is a former journalist and BBC television reporter. Although he began his career in non-fiction, his fame rests upon his works of historical fiction. Beginning with the best-seller Fatherland, Harris focused on events surrounding the Second World War, followed by works set in ancient Rome. His most recent works centre on contemporary history.
Early life
Born in Nottingham, Harris spent his childhood in a small rented house on a Nottingham council estate. His ambition to become a writer arose at an early age, from visits to the local printing plant where his father worked. Harris went to Belvoir High School in Bottesford, and then King Edward VII School, Melton Mowbray, where a hall is now named after him. There he wrote plays and edited the school magazine. Harris read English literature at Selwyn College, Cambridge, where he was president of the Union and editor of the student newspaper Varsity.
Early career
After leaving Cambridge, Harris joined the BBC and worked on news and current affairs programmes such as Panorama and Newsnight. In 1987, at the age of thirty, he became political editor of The Observer. He later wrote regular columns for the Sunday Times and Daily Telegraph.
Personal
Harris lives in a former vicarage near Newbury, with his wife Gill Hornby, herself a writer and sister of best-selling novelist Nick Hornby. They have four children. Harris contributed a short story, "PMQ", to Hornby's 2000 collection Speaking with the Angel.
Non-fiction (1982–90)
Harris's first book appeared in 1982. A Higher Form of Killing, a study of chemical and biological warfare, was written with fellow BBC journalist Jeremy Paxman. Other non-fiction works followed: Gotcha, the Media, the Government and the Falklands Crisis (1983), The Making of Neil Kinnock (1984), Selling Hitler (1986), an investigation of the Hitler Diaries scandal, and Good and Faithful Servant (1990), a study of Bernard Ingham, Margaret Thatcher's press secretary.
Fiction
• Fatherland (1992)
Harris's million-selling alternative-history first novel Fatherland has as its setting a world where Germany has won World War II. Publication enabled Harris to become a full-time novelist. HBO made a film based on the novel in 1994. According to Harris, the proceeds from the book enabled him to buy a house in the country, where he still lives.
• Enigma (1995)
His second novel Enigma portrayed the breaking of the German Enigma code during World War II at Bletchley Park. It too became a film, with Dougray Scott and Kate Winslet starring and with a screenplay by Tom Stoppard.
• Archangel (1998)
Archangel was another international best seller. It follows a British historian in contemporary Russia as he hunts for a secret notebook, believed to be Stalin's diary. In 2005 the BBC made its story into a mini-series starring Daniel Craig.
• Pompeii (2003)
In 2003 Harris turned his attention to ancient Rome with his acclaimed Pompeii, yet another international best-seller. The novel is about a Roman aqueduct engineer, working near the city of Pompeii just before the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD. As the aqueducts begin to malfunction, he investigates and realizes the volcano is shifting the ground and damaging the system and is near eruption. Meanwhile, he falls in love with the young daughter of a powerful local businessman who was illicitly dealing with his predecessor to divert municipal water for his own uses, and will do anything to keep that deal going.
• Imperium (2006)
He followed this in 2006 with Imperium, the first novel in a trilogy centered on the life of the great Roman orator Cicero.
• The Ghost (2007)
Harris was an early and enthusiastic backer of British Prime Minister Tony Blair (a personal acquaintance) and a donor to New Labour, but the war in Iraq blunted his enthusiasm. "We had our ups and downs, but we didn't really fall out until the invasion of Iraq, which made no sense to me," Harris has said.
In 2007, after Blair resigned, Harris dropped his other work to write The Ghost. The title refers both to a professional ghostwriter, whose lengthy memorandum forms the novel, and to his immediate predecessor who, as the action opens, has just drowned in gruesome and mysterious circumstances.
The dead man has been ghosting the autobiography of a recently unseated British prime minister called Adam Lang, a thinly veiled version of Blair. The fictional counterpart of Cherie Blair is depicted as a sinister manipulator of her husband. Harris told The Guardian before publication: "The day this appears a writ might come through the door. But I would doubt it, knowing him."
Harris said in a US National Public Radio interview that politicians like Lang and Blair, particularly when they have been in office for a long time, become divorced from everyday reality, read little and end up with a pretty limited overall outlook. When it comes to writing their memoirs, they therefore tend to have all the more need of a ghostwriter.
Harris hinted at a third, far less obvious, allusion hidden in the novel's title, and, more significantly, at a possible motive for having written the book in the first place. Blair, he said, had himself been ghostwriter, in effect, to President Bush when giving public reasons for invading Iraq: he had argued the case better than had the President himself.
The New York Observer, headlining its otherwise hostile review "The Blair Snitch Project," commented that the book's "shock-horror revelation" was "so shocking it simply can't be true, though if it were it would certainly explain pretty much everything about the recent history of Great Britain."
• Lustrum (2009)
The second novel in the Cicero trilogy, Lustrum, was published in October 2009. It was released in February 2010 in the US under the alternative title of Conspirata.
• The Fear Index (2011)
His novel, The Fear Index, focusing on the 2010 Flash Crash was published by Hutchinson in September 2011. It follows an American expat hedge fund operator living in Geneva who activates a new system of computer algorithms that he names VIXAL-4, which is designed to operate faster than human beings, but which begins to become uncontrollable by its human operators.
• An Officer and a Spy (2013)
Harris's latest novel is the true story of French officer Georges Picquart, who is promoted in 1895 to run France's Statistical Section, its secret intelligence division. He gradually realizes that Alfred Dreyfus has been unjustly imprisoned for acts of espionage committed by another man who is still free and still spying for the Germans. He risks his career and his life to expose the truth.
• Third Cicero novel
Harris has said his next novel will be his long-promised conclusion to his Cicero trilogy.
Work with Roman Polanski
Harris wrote a screenplay of his novel Pompeii for director Roman Polanski. The film, to be produced by Summit Entertainment, was announced at the Cannes Film Festival in 2007 as potentially the most expensive European film ever made, set to be shot in Spain. Media reports suggested Polanski wanted Orlando Bloom and Scarlett Johansson to play the two leads. The film was cancelled as a result of the actors' strike.
Polanski and Harris then turned to Harris's bestseller, The Ghost. They co-wrote a script and Polanski announced filming for early 2008, with Nicolas Cage, Pierce Brosnan, Tilda Swinton, and Kim Cattrall starring. The film was then postponed by a year, with Ewan McGregor and Olivia Williams replacing Cage and Swinton.
The film, retitled The Ghost Writer in all territories except the UK, was shot in early 2009 in Berlin and on the island of Sylt in the North Sea, which stood in for London and Martha's Vineyard respectively, owing to Polanski's inability to travel legally to those places. In spite of his incarceration, he oversaw post-production from his house arrest and the film premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in February 2010, with Polanski winning the Silver Bear for Best Director award. Harris and Polanski later shared a Cesar Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.
Harris was inspired to write his most recent novel, An Officer and a Spy, by Polanski's longtime interest in the Dreyfus Affair. He has written a screenplay based on the story, which Polanski is set to direct. The screenplay is titled D, after the initial famously written on the secret file that secured Dreyfus's conviction.
TV and radio appearances
Harris has appeared on the BBC satirical panel game Have I Got News for You in episode three of the first series in 1990, and in episode four of the second series a year later. In the first he appeared as a last-minute replacement for the politician Roy Hattersley. He made a third appearance on the programme on 12 October 2007, seventeen years, to the day, after his first appearance. Since the gap between his second and third appearance was nearly 16 years, Harris enjoys the distinction of the longest gap between two successive appearances in the show's history.
On 2 December 2010, Harris appeared on the radio programme Desert Island Discs, when he spoke about his childhood and his friendships with Tony Blair and Roman Polanski.
Harris appeared on the American PBS show Charlie Rose on 10 February 2012. Harris discussed his novel The Fear Index which he likened to a modern day Gothic novel along the lines of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Harris also discussed the adaptation of his novel, The Ghost, directed by Roman Polanski.
Columnist
Harris was a columnist for the Sunday Times, but gave it up in 1997. He returned to journalism in 2001, writing for the Daily Telegraph. He was named "Columnist of the Year" at the 2003 British Press Awards. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 2/26/2014.)
Book Reviews
Robert Harris, in his fine novel An Officer and a Spy, lucidly retells the famous, bizarrely complicated and chilling story.… Drawing on the vast trove of books about the [Dreyfus] affair and some newly available materials, Harris tells a gripping tale.
Louis Begley - New York Times Book Review
(Starred review.) [E]asily the best fictional treatment of the Dreyfus Affair yet, in this gripping thriller told from the vantage point of French army officer Georges Picquart.... Picquart pursues the truth, at personal and professional risk.... Harris perfectly captures the rampant anti-Semitism that led to Dreyfus’s scapegoating, and effectively uses the present tense to lend intimacy to the narrative.
Publishers Weekly
Maj. Georges Picquart, a rising star in the French military circa 1895....is a fascinating protagonist and narrator, personally flawed but determined to pursue the truth even when government resistance threatens his career, his life, and everyone around him. His story draws an uncomfortable parallel to current events; as Valerie Plame, Edward Snowden, and Julian Assange can attest, 21st-century governments still resent troublemakers who reveal embarrassing truths. —Bradley Scott, Corpus Christie, TX
Library Journal
Col. Georges Picquart...begins to have doubts about [Drefus's] guilt and is fairly sure espionage is continuing.... [But] much of the population, inflamed by the popular press, already sees Dreyfus as a traitor and delights in conveying their virulent anti-Semitism. Espionage, counterespionage, a scandalous trial, a coverup and a man who tries to do right make this a complex and alluring thriller.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also, consider these LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for An Officer and a Spy:
1. Describe the Paris of the late 19th century, with its demimonde decadence, pugnacious press, and political enmities. How well does Harris do in bring the ambience of the city to life? Are there any parallels to our current time?
2. What is the effect of France's loss of Alsace and Lorraine to the Germans? How does that set the stage for the events that occur in the novel?
3. Talk about France's anti-Semitism. How deeply does it run permeate the culture and why?
4. What made Dreyfus such a satisfying target for the French public? What does Picquart mean when he reflects, after the Dreyfus's conviction, that it is "as if all the loathing and recrimination bottled up since the defeat of 1870 has found an outlet in a single individual"?
5. Why does the military stonewall Picquart's later finding of Dreyfus's innocence? Why is is so difficult for institutions to admit to wrong doing or mistakes?
6. General Gonse asks an interesting question of Picquart: "I know your views on the Chosen Race—really, when all is said and done, what does it matter to you if one Jew stays on Devil's Island?" Exactly, Does it matter...in the larger scope of events? Why or why not?
7. What happens when institutions place their own survival above all else? Does this occur today? Do we have institutions in government, business, religion, education that are concerned with their own preservation at the expense of their integrity—that place their continued existence over what is morally right?
8. History is rife with "cover-ups"—we've seen them time and again. Why is it so difficult to follow a moral path in public life?
9. What do you think of the final scene (no spoilers here) between Picquart and Dreyfus?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)