Deyfusard reading: "An Officer and a Spy" by Robert Harris

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..? 


Oh dear, I now feel rather ashamed of not having explored the matter much further than that, notwithstanding the valiant efforts of a French teacher at my school, whose lesson on the case now re-emerges a little from the fog of distant memory.  However, I suspect, like many contemporary Brits, I broadly wrote the whole thing off as not having much to do either with me or with the modern world, coming as it did in a period of history famous perhaps for its artistic and cultural creativity, but geopolitically the other side of the great conflagration which started the twentieth century off for real, the Great War of 1914-18. (Which incidentally looms over this novel to a remarkable degree, albeit invisibly.)

Fortunately, Harris was clearly not so dismissive, and obviously saw in the Dreyfus Affair all the elements of a great spy story and thriller. It has machinations and intrigue galore, it speaks volumes about the society and historical period in which it occurred, it has a genuine hero, through whose eyes the tale is related. This hero is Colonel Marie-Georges Picquart, a career military officer who earned promotion through merit (and, to a degree, through his role as a minor cog in the machine which condemned Alfred Dreyfus as a traitor) to become the head of the coyly-named "statistical section", in other words the secret intelligence unit of the French army. It is in this role, and driven onwards by an honourable desire for truth and justice, that Picquart gradually discovers that Dreyfus is innocent and the evidence against him fabricated.

Dreyfus' innocence is indeed established quite early on in the novel, which in reality rather relates the closing of ranks in the army high command against Picquart to prevent the truth emerging, even to the extent of allowing an innocent man (but a Jew) to rot in horrendous conditions in a one-man tropical penal colony and another man, the real traitor, to go scot-free. The unfolding of the Dreyfus Affair is the story of Picquart's fight against the army establishment which tries to suppress him, the gradual emergence of a supporting camp (Zola et al) and his ultimate, though painfully halting, vindication. 

Harris tells the story with close attention to the historical detail, with the invention apparently limited mainly to the personal lives and motivations of his characters. He also places the story firmly in its historical and cultural context, with the attitudes and prejudices of the time a vital backdrop to the action. This is, for example, a period when, though already somewhat anachronistic, a duel can be fought between gentlemen when one calls another a liar, and when publicly rigid standards of traditional morality combine with a high degree of de facto tolerance for extramarital liaisons and homosexual relationships. This is not to say it is a world without cultural resonances in the modern day. The surveillance exercised over unwitting citizens by an almost out-of-control Statistical Section for example speaks to modern sensibilities, while the role of racial prejudice - here in the form of quite overt anti-semitism - is of course very far from a thing of the past.

Above all, though, An Officer and a Spy is a great bit of storytelling, with an honourable (if not totally unflawed) hero pitting himself, ultimately successfully against the system. It also does us the great service of bringing to life for an Anglo-Saxon audience (as the French would say) that rather arcane and half-ignored historical episode known as the Dreyfus Affair. Dear Mr Padwick - for such was the name of that French teacher at school - I finally got there!

Would I recommend it? Yes I would, as I would recommend any of the Robert Harris books mentioned above. They are not life-changing literature, but they are enjoyable and illuminating. Definitely worth it.