I am rapidly coming to the conclusion that you can't go far wrong with Robert Harris. Not is the same way as you can't go wrong with, say, Sebastian Faulks or Paul Auster, because he is not that kind of literary genius, but because he is an infallible storyteller: sophisticated, super-well-researched and utterly gripping. He combines the merits of the instinctive thriller writer with those of the journalist, and for me it is no accident that his novels are almost always based on real and/or historical events, reported, adapted, extrapolated.
You never know where he is going next. He still has to complete a trilogy set in the political world of ancient Rome, he has famously imagined Nazi occupied Britain (Fatherland), recounted the extraordinary story of Bletchley Park's WW2 code-cracking (Enigma), related the eruption of Vesuvius (Pompeii), visited modern Russia (Archangel) and analysed the motivations of Tony Blair (The Ghost). However, it was, for me at least, something of a surprise that his latest novel, An Officer and a Spy deals with historical events which seem rather more arcane.
That is undoubtedly the consequence of my own ignorance and a certain cultural conditioning. As a Guardian review I read nicely put it: "the Dreyfus Affair is one of those moments of history that a lot people know of rather than much about". Yes, one is vaguely conscious that the Dreyfus Affair was a big deal in late nineteenth century France, yes, one knows it was a miscarriage of justice with a strong anti-semitic dimension and, yes, wasn't that the thing that Emile Zola wrote his J'accuse thing about..?
