It would be strange if a writer didn’t feel at least some personal affection for
their most popular creations. But when Tom Rob Smith talks about Leo Demidov,
hero of his three books, it comes across as something much stronger, more
intimate, even. Smith, one might say, admires his fictional
construct.
“His voice is very different from mine, he has a sort of
stoicism which is very different from mine,” explains Smith, speaking from his
London home in a telephone interview.
“What I fundamentally love about
him, what I really connect to is the sense of... that people tend to make
mistakes, but what is really great about humanity in general is one’s ability to
try and make things right. He never gives way to despair. Demidov has
experienced enough of the terrible side of humanity, but he always looks for
something better. There is a way around this: we can try and make this
better.”
Leo Demidov is the central figure of Tom Rob Smith’s three
novels, Child 44, The Secret Speech and Agent 6. When we meet him in Child 44,
he is an agent with the MGB, the Soviet Secret Police that operated between 1946
and 1953; Demidov is a reliable cog in the oppressive mechanism with which
Stalin’s Communist authorities keep the populace in check.
The plot of
Child 44 is fixed around the desperate hunt for a sadistic child murderer, one
whose existence is denied by the state; the book opens with Demidov convincing a
subordinate that his child could not have been murdered but rather was the
victim of a tragic accident.
There is no violent crime in the Soviet
Union, after all, and to admit as much would be to suggest that the Communist
ideology has failed. Demidov is loyal to his overlords.
But when events
close to home force him to confront the cognitive dissonance of the regime, he
embarks on a slow and tortuous emotional journey to reconfigure his personal
ideology in the face of the overwhelming apparatus of a repressive
state.
It is a journey that continues through the subsequent volumes,
taking him from the Stalinist era to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in
1979.
The thriller trilogy presents as a thoughtful and intelligent
dissection of totalitarian ideology, and poses a fundamental question: is it
possible for simple, genuine honesty to prevail – even to exist – in the face of
concerted oppression?
But why start this dissection in the 1950s, one wonders,
especially since the true story that served as the inspiration for Child 44 – the crimes of Ukrainian serial
killer Andrei Chikatilo, the so-called “Rostov Ripper” – took place between 1978
and 1990? “In a contemporary thriller, you have to manufacture things because
most of our lives are safe and pretty ordinary,” Smith says. “In this world,
everyone was in danger pretty much all the time: if they said the wrong thing,
if they put the wrong image up on the wall, if they didn’t clap long
enough.”
The constant apprehension, the sense of fear creates a useful
backdrop for exploring basic truths, Smith suggests. “The crime structure of
this story offered a way of exploring the sort of strange insanity of these
dictatorships, where they can make and rewrite the laws of truth.”
SMITH
WAS born in 1979 and brought up in south London, the son of antique dealers.
After taking a degree at St John’s College, Cambridge, he worked as a script
editor and screenwriter for a number of popular daytime soaps in the United
Kingdom and, for a while, with Cambodia’s first soap opera in Phnom Penh. Not
quite the stereotypical background for a thriller writer, perhaps.
“Well,
I’ve always been fascinated with dictatorships, for some reason,” Smith
explains. “I think what fascinates me about them as a writer is... the way in
which they created these fictions, the way in which they can spin something that
is clearly a lie and turn it into truth. In a weird way, I think that’s
why dictators are often hung up about writers.”
An interesting
insight.
“I think it is hard as a writer not to be interested in
dictators and the way in which they create fictive worlds.” Despite his
astonishing success – Child 44 was nominated for 17 international awards,
including the Man Booker Prize, and has been translated into 30 languages – and
the evident sophistication of subject matter and delivery, Smith is sometimes
referred to – slightingly – as a thriller writer or a genre writer. Not that he
necessarily has a problem with this: it is, he argues, as much a question of
what value people choose to place on these descriptors.
“I suppose I
think about it more now than when I started writing Child 44,” he says. “And
then when you’ve written the book, you see how it is packaged in bookshops, how
reviewers and commentators approach it... I suppose I was a bit naive when I
wrote it.”
In what sense, naive?
“Well, part of the reason is that there
is far less baggage [attached to the notion of genre] in the film world. With a
thriller, you can win an Oscar, you can receive critical acclaim. There’s no
reason why a thriller shouldn’t be taken any less seriously than anything
else.”
But there’s no reason for this to be taken negatively, Smith
says.
“I think I would rather take on the prejudices of the
classification, rather than shy away from them. For whatever reason, I do seem
to write about danger, and I do seem to write about that
tension.”
Readers, he says, have a right to know what to
expect.
“I think when you write a thriller or any other genre, you are
laying down a very clear proposition to the reader, that this is the emotion
that will dominate the book, and it is a singular emotion that will connect it
all.”
Now that’s a novel concept – an author taking his responsibilities
to his readers seriously.
SMITH, WHO will be a guest of the International
Writers Festival in Jerusalem later this month – uses his fiction very
effectively as a means of exploring the tensions that are inherent wherever
there is a clash of ideological principles. Child 44 and The Secret Speech, his
first two books, are concerned primarily with the Soviet Union; but Agent 6
stretches further afield, taking in the tensions of the civil rights movement
and the anti-communist sentiments of ’60s United States, and the cultural and
political frailties that characterized Afghanistan – then, as now – at the start
of the 1980s.
Central to the plot of Agent 6 is Jesse Austin, an
African-American stalwart of the civil rights movement and a socialist, modeled
on the activist and singer Paul Robeson. Austin – and through him, Demidov and
his family – become pawns of the Cold War, and the reader is confronted by the
deleterious consequences of controlled thought, no matter its origins.
It
has been easy for some critics to accuse Smith of taking a political stance –
specifically of drawing unfavorable parallels between the US and the USSR – but
he argues that this couldn’t be further from the truth.
“I am always very
skeptical of direct comparisons,” he asserts. “What I am saying, what was
interesting to me of the American response [to the specter of communism] was
that there was a real threat, there was a need for vigilance. But yet that’s
taken into a extreme reaction, going against everything that is American, that
whole idea of liberty and how you react against something by imitating it on
some level.”
Smith confesses to being surprised at some of the more
vitriolic comments that the trilogy has attracted – anti-communist propaganda in
the case of Child 44 and The Secret Speech, or willfully un-American in the case
of Agent 6.
“I mean, I thought the jury was in on this, I thought we all
agreed that Stalin was awful,” he comments dryly. “I didn’t realize there
was a debate on that. I thought we all agreed that the anti-communist measures
in America were terrible, that lives were destroyed by this.”
The point
isn’t one of drawing a moral or political equivalency, but of thinking about how
patterns of oppression emerge and their capacity to repeat.
“I think what
I was interested in was that there are very many ways in which these
persecutions can come about. That is the danger, that they can arise again and
how they arise, in small form or on a national level.
There is the need
to be vigilant.”
IT CAN be difficult not to be forced into taking one
side or the other, of course. There’s the question of self-preservation,
an ever-present reality in the Soviet Union of Smith’s books; or it can be
engendered by an ideological hermeticism that shuts one away from the
reality.
Take Paul Robeson, the model for Jesse Austin in Agent 6. The
travails he suffered at the hands of the American establishment as a consequence
of his activism are a matter of record; so too his intransigence.
“There
are very few people I am so inspired by, yet there are moments when I couldn’t
disagree with him more,” Smith says. “Questioned [by Congress] about the Gulags,
he said that the people who died there were fascists. How can this man who was
so full of warmth and compassion dismiss these deaths as necessary?”
Demidov,
Smith’s hero, personifies the struggle between the competing impulses, much
closer to Smith’s sensibilities, one senses. The inspiration for the character
comes from stories Smith read in the course of his research, of ordinary men and
women struggling to maintain their humanity in the face of immense
oppression.
“Warm stories of light pushing through the
darkness. These are the stories to which I am really drawn to, and Leo to
me is one of those stories: he gives up on the ideology but he doesn’t give up
on the world.”
There is something remarkably personal about the way in
which Smith speaks of Demidov – of Leo – that reflects in how he speaks about
himself. Repeatedly, he returns to the issue of good luck and fortune: he was
fortunate enough to have the chance to learn his craft as a screenwriter,
fortunate enough to have a supportive family, he says.
Even getting to
write Agent 44 he puts down to being in part the product of fortuitous
circumstances.
“I’d been working in an office, it had been very difficult
to write my own stuff,” he says. His contract ended, and “for the first time, I
thought, if I could write anything, what stories would I naturally gravitate
to?”
The loss of a job presented an opportunity: “This is my time, this is my
space, my risk... I’m the person who is going to lose two years of his life if
it doesn’t work. I need to find something that I love, that I am really
passionate about.”
The passion – and the unassuming modesty that
accompanies it – carries beyond the world of fiction.
Smith gives a 10th
of the income from his books – as well as all prize money – to a nominated
charity on a yearly basis. It doesn’t come up at all in conversation, but when
asked waxes eloquently and enthusiastically about his current nominee, a charity
for the homeless in the United Kingdom.
As he speaks, my mind returns
once more to the relationship between Smith and Demidov, between the writer and
his creation. It took Demidov three books and 30 years and immense emotional
pain to find inner peace. Smith, a thoughtful and reflective conversationalist,
seems to have achieved a similar state via an easier path, by writing about
Demidov’s journey. It’s the easier path, no doubt, but then Smith doesn’t live
in Stalinist Russia. And to be fair, this is an age where it is much easier to
do nothing.
Perhaps we should all take up writing, try to make the world
a better place.
Tom Rob Smith will be a guest of the International
Writers Festival, Jerusalem, from May 13 to 17. He will also be in conversation
with Alon Hilu at the Saloona Bar, Jaffa, on May 17, at 7:30 p.m. Further
details and RSVP: deborah.dwek@britishcouncil. org.il. For more
information about the Writers’ Festival, visit:
www.writersfestival.mouse.co.il/en
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