Robert Harris

Harris was born in 1957 in Nottingham. His father was a printer and while he says "we had very little money, but I had no sense whatsoever of being poor and had an extremely happy and culturally rich childhood. My parents were interested in history and the world. My father read Graham Greene and Georges Simenon and was a strong trade unionist and Labour supporter. The classic family story is us going to a school event when I was about six and all the other children reading out stories about what they did on their holidays, but mine was called 'Why me and my dad don't like Sir Alec Douglas-Home'.

There's a lot of moaning today about too many kids going to university, but my parents were bright people and I wish they had had that opportunity." Harris made his name as a novelist with Fatherland, his vaguely Orwellian, 1992 debut that posited a counter-factual history of Europe after Hitler had won the war. He followed it with bestsellers set among the second world war code-breakers of Bletchley Park (Enigma) and in the aftermath of Stalin's Russia (Archangel). He has transported contemporary political issues back to ancient Rome and, drawing on his close association with New Labour when a political journalist on the Observer and the Sunday Times, conjured a character very like the post-Iraq Tony Blair in The Ghost (2007).

The books have received warm reviews with a quote from Martha Gellhorn adorning the Fatherland jacket:"Powerful and chilling ... convincing in every detail". They have notched up even more impressive sales. Harris and his wife Gill, sister of Nick Hornby, and their four children live in a large old vicarage in Berkshire that was once visited by Jane Austen. It is usually described as "the house that Hitler built".
　　
In thinking about his latest book Harris's new wealth and his old politics came together. "When Lehman Bros went down people were saying AIG was going to be next. That rang a bell because almost all of my money was in some sort of AIG bond, but like most people I didn't understand the first thing about this world. When I looked into it a bit more it was terrifying and shocking. We're all like mountaineers on some rock face lashed together. We're clinging on for dear life. And at the same time there has been this alarming rise in the super-rich class, which has been somehow facilitated by new technology."
　　
Harris says he had little interest in writing about the new rich. "I have met some of them and they seem to me to be both boring and often themselves bored. But I was intrigued by these enormous amounts of money, all floating free of tax, which is profoundly undemocratic. We've all been like saps buying our pension funds and tracker whatevers, and while we've been left for dead, these people have cleaned up. Anger was not the least of my emotions in writing this book."
　　　　
Harris read English at Cambridge but spent most of his time editing the university newspaper. In 1978 he joined the BBC trainee programme "largely because at that time NUJ rules meant if you went into print journalism you had to start work in the provinces. I'd just come from the provinces and didn't particularly want to go back." While working on Newsnight and Panorama he co-authored a book with his friend Jeremy Paxman about the history of germ and gas warfare; he then wrote books about the media's handling of the Falklands war and an account of the forged Hitler diaries fiasco. By 1987 he was political editor of the Observer.

That you think of setting a book

A quote from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, itself written near Geneva, opens the book. While Harris points out that many hedge funds have relocated there for both tax reasons and to be near the large hadron collider at Cern, from where they might recruit the mathematicians and physicists needed to develop increasingly sophisticated computer models, "as soon as you think of setting a book in Geneva, then Frankenstein does loom large". It is not only a man-made monster running out of control that provides the literary and scientific underpinning to the novel: Darwin features prominently and the shade of Orwell hangs over the book, with its emphasis on surveillance, sinister corporations and an anti-democratic dystopia.

Set on British general election day 2010, Robert Harris's latest novel is a characteristic combination of ripping yarn, political and historical verisimilitude and diligent research into a hither-to closed world. The Fear Index is set within the mysterious opulence of a Geneva based algorithmic hedge fund. The company at the heart of his story has developed an artificially intelligent, "self-learning" computer model that trawls the world for information and allows its traders to anticipate market movements prompted, usually, by some disaster or failure. But having delivered this novel about predicting the future – it could be claimed as easily by the science fiction community as the thriller world – Harris was surprised to see on the BBC website a few weeks ago the headline "Supercomputer predicts revolution" and a story about how the Arab spring was foreshadowed via "automated sentiment mining" in which websites were searched for increased preponderance of words such as "terrible" and "horrific".It is a peculiarly apt concern.

"Orwell has always been a huge influence on me," he says. "He first came to mind regarding this project about 12 years ago when I read a book by Bill Gates in which he said one day the McDonald's headquarters in America would know when a Big Mac was sold in Newbury and then a computer algorithm would work out when the cattle had to be slaughtered in Chicago. I got very interested in these ideas but couldn't find a way to make them work in fiction. Then came the financial crash and I realised I could marry the two things. These algorithms that were driving companies were nowhere more dominant than in the City.

King Crow by Michael Stewart

There's a lot going on in Paul's world, and there's even more going on in his head. Paul's home life is distinctly suboptimal: he's bullied, his mother neglects him and her unsettled lifestyle sees him continually moving from house to house and school to school on the manky fringes of Manchester. As a result, he's retreated into ornithology and fantasy and we're treated to some fine nature writing and some fantastic riffs about the inherent stupidity of penguins, why giant pandas really don't deserve to be saved and the contribution vultures make to their eco-system. The direct staccato voice and no-nonsense language visible in that plot summary remain throughout.

Combined with Paul's frequently nonsensical world view they provide continual amusement and just the right level of bemusment. Paul may be troubled, and he may take us to some dark places, but King Crow remains a light, beguiling read."That doesn't really matter. Then we ran away, then we stole a car and knocked Andy down.

All I need to add for myself is that the narrator is called Paul Cooper and he's quite strange – but then you've probably guessed that.  Or at least it does for that first two-thirds of the book, until Paul offloads a very big surprise. I'm wary of saying more about this revelation, because to do so would be to spoil it. Suffice to say, it is a big one. It completely wrong-footed me. It made me go back to the beginning and entirely changed my view of what had been happening. Perhaps I'd been reading naively, but that shouldn't draw away any praise of Michael Stewart's skill. It was an unsettling and impressive moment.

The car really smashed into him and there was blood everywhere. I wouldn't say he was alright. I'd say he was dead. That would explain Dave's look. Then we had a car chase. I tried to shoot Dave. Then we walked into Kendal. Then we nicked a clown, went to a squat party, took lots of drugs and I ended up here and had sex for the first time ever with Becky, who is lovely."Later on, he gives an even more succinct version: "Apart from killing a man and one or two little hiccups, this has been a really successful trip."
The trouble is that, after dropping us over this steep edge, Stewart never quite manages to get back to the same heights. I still enjoyed the final third of the book. Paul remains amiable and intriguing and there's still plenty of the madcap action that makes the early pages so enjoyable. But the narrative disintegrates along with Paul's increasingly damaged psyche. It's looser and flatter and never quite as compelling. To go back to that original metaphor, it becomes Open Season rather than The Decline Of British Sea Power. Still good. Still wonderfully strange. But not a masterpiece.

a page-turner of tomalin

Tomalin's book, a page-turner, seems to me to be an effective reproof to those who, like Michael Holroyd, believe literary biography to be in its death throes. But what does she think? Are publishers going to dispense with fat lives? "No! I think people are always saying things are over. Fiction has been regularly over since the 19th century. You can't entirely talk about books in groups like that. Some work and some don't. Clearly, we have got a public with a shorter attention span, but there is also this great interest in history. I'm devoted to Michael. He's adorable. But I rather think he's enjoying being Cassandra about this." On the other hand, so far as her own career goes, she would like to work on slightly more manageable subjects in the future (Dickens follows Hardy, who followed her award-winning Samuel Pepys). "I have grandchildren and step-grandchildren and I would like to spend time with them. I'm 78 and Michael [Frayn, the novelist and playwright, and her husband] is 78, too, and he also needs a bit of attention." She sighs. "People say I should write a memoir, but I don't think I can." Why not? She is quiet for a moment and then she says: "Because I don't have enough sense of myself. I know it sounds pathetic, but I don't know who I am. One of the things I have done since I started writing biography is live through them. Those lives are still with me. It's as Katherine Mansfield said, 'One life is not enough.'"

Is there anything left to disclose about Dickens? Perhaps not. His biggest secret – the existence of a carefully closeted mistress, a one-time actress called Ellen Ternan (Nelly), with whom he may have had a child (the baby probably died) – was, after all, revealed to its fullest extent in Tomalin's groundbreaking 1990 book, The Invisible Woman. Unless more diaries or letters unaccountably turn up, a new life is a matter of emphasis, mostly. Nevertheless, her skill is such that you read her Dickens with a mounting sense of amazement (and sometimes horror), the small things taking a hold of you as much as the large. It is wonderful. Two weeks after I finished it, I still cannot get out of my mind the fact that, once it was over, Dickens's feckless parents never again referred to the year they forced him to spend working in a blacking factory (he was just 12 years old), as if it had never happened.

Nor can I stop thinking about the way Dickens signalled to his long-suffering wife, Catherine, that their marriage was effectively over (he simply got a workman in and divided their bedroom in two). Next time I see a photograph of Dickens – it won't be long; next year is the bicentenary of his birth – I will remember Eleanor Picken, who met him in Broadstairs when she was 19. Thrilled to know the famous writer, Eleanor sunned herself "in his smiles", but she thought, too, that his eyes were sometimes like "danger-lamps".

Like Dickens, Tomalin is fiercely energetic, and mordantly funny, but today she also has the slightly frail aspect of one who, having completed a vast undertaking (Dickens's life is so incredibly voluminous: his letters alone run to 12 volumes, each one some 800 pages long), now awaits the verdict of the various partisans who patrol this sacred ground. Her eye wanders to the window. "You feel exhausted, low, terrified. When I was young and books were published, no one made any sort of fuss. Now... you feel people are going to jump on you. You can't help it." It would be the same with any book, but in the case of Dickens, who induces such intense (and intensely odd) passions in his devotees, you can multiply this by five.

William Jefferson Clinton

Ora Bill Clinton, a dieci anni dalla fine di quella sua esperienza politica, in piena recessione economica mondiale ha deciso di far sentire la propria voce attraverso un libro. Il volume, che si intitolerà Back to Work e che sarà pubblicato nel mese di novembre, contiene la ricetta segreta di Bill Clinton per far fronte a questa tempesta economica senza paragoni nella storia. William Jefferson Clinton, detto Bill, è stato presidente degli Stati Uniti d’America per otto anni, due intere legislature, tra il 1993 e il 2001. Un periodo che coincise esattamente con l’ultimo periodo di crescita economica degli States, una crescita dovuta essenzialmente all’esplosione della cosiddetta new economy, trascinata dallo sbarco nel mercato delle nuove tecnologie informatiche.
　　

　　
Le prime indiscrezioni che sono trapelate danno per certa la presenza di due fondamentali ingredienti nella magica ricetta di Bill: «increasing bank lending and corporate investment», vale a dire aumentare l’attività creditizia delle banche, quindi il debito delle famiglie, e far crescere gli investimenti delle aziende. Ricetta rivoluzionaria? Non me ne intendo molto di economia, ma non direi.
　　
In ogni caso, ammesso e non concesso che qualche editore italiano voglia tradurlo, non sembrano esserci le condizioni per preoccuparsi: il libro uscirà in America a novembre, vale a dire che in Italia non potrà arrivare prima della metà del 2012. A quel punto l’economia come la intende Clinton potrebbe già essere un amaro ricordo.