We are all spies. One reason is that we seek power, particularly the kind of power that is wielded in secret, beyond the ken of moralists, committees, juries and judges, because what is not known cannot be condemned – it’s said that knowledge is power, but its absence may also be our protection. We particularly want to find out the stuff that will help us to put one over on our neighbours, or conquer our rivals on the stock market, or beat the other candidates for that job we covet. Then again, some of us spy for the more mundane reason that we simply like to know, and we feel respect for those who know more than we do. Perhaps we are even a little jealous of the miasma of mystery cloaking certain privileged individuals who ooze an aura of knowing things denied to lesser mortals. Sometimes, of course, we sense that they’re faking it. We see through those pretentious dweebs and recognise them for what they are: writers of spy thrillers. Authors who’ve made a living from smoke and mirrors, fooling some of the people some of the time. People like me.
The main character in the novel you’ve just read (or, if you’re peeking ahead, are about to read) is Stepan Ilyich Povin, a colonel-general in the Russian secret service formerly known as the KGB. ‘My Stepan’, as I’ve come to think of him. Where did he come from? Why is he here? To those questions there is a short answer and a longer one. Let’s start with the short one, keep things simple for now, because later on they’ll be getting fraught.
Stepan first became a twinkle in his father’s eye on a cold March day in the flat of my agent, Julian Friedmann, who believed that I had demonstrated enough talent to be worth spending a brainstorming afternoon with. Everything we discussed always circled back to the late John le Carré. He was my role model, and how could it be otherwise? In the spring of 1979, George Smiley was still a few months away from showing his face on television, but even then he dominated the spy-thriller genre in a way few characters have before or since. So one of us, I forget who, asked ‘What’s the opposite of le Carré?’ And the answer turned out to be an intensely private, able spy who worked for the other side, for Russia, but also for us, here in the West, not just a spy but a traitor, too. A double agent who felt betrayed by the behemoth that the Russian state had become, an apparatchik turned idealist in whose tortured, closet-Christian soul the saints had supplanted Stalin.
‘The opposite of that’ chimed well with my seething ambition. It was an oddly unsatisfying time in my life. I had striven to become a barrister and succeeded, only to find that it was far from being all that my imagination had cracked it up to be. My speciality, I used to tell people, was ‘death’: wills, probate, trusts. Death both in truth and in terms of my sense of dissatisfaction. I was ready to embark on a major life change. However, I had a wife and two young children, so I needed money. Whatever I wrote had to be better than good, which also meant that it had to be dramatically different.
Stepan quickly found a place in my routine. On the morning train to London I would coax him into existence in a blue Counsel’s notebook, using a ballpoint pen. My Russian colonel-general gestated over a series of forty-five-minute journeys on the Southern Region. I may have been the only passenger who never minded if the trains ran late. My children did mind. They only saw me at weekends.
The book was finished. Julian sold it to Sphere and publication was set for October 1981. Then came a stroke of luck. Martin Cruz Smith published Gorky Park, which became an international bestseller. Like Kyril, my own novel, it was set in Russia and peopled almost exclusively by Russians. Suddenly there was this New Wave, and I rode it.
Success followed. Stepan had evolved into a complex character. He was a Christian, a spy, a traitor and a civilised human being, beset by doubt. He was also gay, not that I chose to dwell on that. For twelve years, homosexuality between consenting adults in private had been legal in England, but just because something is legal that does not necessarily make it sit comfortably in the public psyche. Back in 1981, the only way you could combine ‘gay’ and ‘hero’ in a sentence was by discussing the swashbuckling roles of Errol Flynn. So Stepan stayed firmly in the closet, with sly nods and winks.
I dwell on this because when a publisher wants to bring an old trilogy to new readers the first question everyone asks is, ‘How are these books relevant to life today? What light do they throw on where we are now?’ Indeed, one of the things aspiring writers are taught is always to put themselves into the mind of an imaginary reader who wants to know, ‘Why am I reading this?’ So when a reboot of the Stepan trilogy was mooted I went back and read the novels with that question in mind. As a result, I reached certain conclusions, though your mileage may differ.
Consider what was really going on during the period covered by the Stepan trilogy and in the years that followed. First there was the Cold War. Then we got Brezhnev and a thaw and everybody said Russia would develop, its people would throw off the shackles, democracy and prosperity would herald a brave new world. Then we got Putin. The message Stepan sends me across the years is this: Russia can modernise, but it can’t change. It just reboots the cycle. The message is a sombre warning and I’m glad of a chance to refurbish it, because it’s never out of date. Perhaps, in a not-too-distant future fashioned by the Alt-Right, we too shall once again succumb to the thrill of banging people up because we don’t like the people they’re banging.
If Russia didn’t change, I certainly did. For one thing I bought a word-processor. It cost north of £2000 (in 1982 money) and offered two options: green letters on a black screen or black letters on a white screen. It couldn’t perform any of the other functions we now associate with even the humblest computer, phone or tablet. For the first time in my life, I became a trailblazer. At first the other members of my chambers in Lincoln’s Inn regarded me with sub-Luddite suspicion. My clerk in particular was most upset but he knew his place – he was the grandee who wore an expensive suit that fitted whereas I was the brash young man who wore a cheap one that didn’t – and kept his thoughts to himself. Then another, more senior colleague bought a proper desktop computer, one that could actually do sums, tempering my pride with the uneasy sense that I’d have done better to wait and do more research into technology trends, particularly pricing.
Ah, research. If you have already read Kyril you will have encountered confidently presented descriptions of what life in Russia was like, back in the day. Kind people ask me, ‘How many times did you visit Russia, to glean all that information, that sense of place?’ I have never visited Russia. The information was hard won. In those days, Google was a typo for a kind of cricket delivery, nothing more. I went to libraries, many libraries. I sent off money orders to obscure American publishers and received in exchange shoddily printed studies of the Russian Orthodox church, or the inner workings of a Soviet frigate, or recipes for borscht, all enclosed in the kind of padded envelopes that were used to mail us our condoms at uni. (‘You know nothing, Jon Snow, nothing.’)
What I couldn’t research, I cheerfully, shamelessly made up. I put my imagination to work. To paraphrase Laurence Olivier, ‘It’s called acting, dear boy.’ The only real advantage I had was unlimited confidence in the proposition that few of my readers would have visited Russia either. MI6 and the KGB must have faced similar limitations in the eighties when it came to gathering and analysing information (although I hope they resisted the urge to sex up the dossiers more than their successors – and I – liked to do). The spies I wrote about would have recognised their counterparts in the times of Peter the Great and Elizabeth I under Sir Francis Walsingham, the founder of England’s secret intelligence service. Pausing only to buckle on a dagger and swirl a cloak around their shoulders, they’d have slithered into the darkness to get the work done properly, face to face and often mano a mano. Technology? Using lemon juice to write invisible messages that revealed their secrets in the warmth of a candle flame. The latest thing. Nowadays, MI5 and MI6 have websites on which they recruit openly, cloaks and daggers no longer a requirement. No, what you need to bring to the party today is an ability to code coupled with a moral vacuum where hacking is concerned; still the Great Game but played with different tools. If my Stepan asked a promising candidate how good he was at ‘double-tap’, he’d have been expecting to hear about the applicant’s skill with the SAS’s legendary quick-fire killing shot to the head. Now, perhaps not.
The difference in approach has found its way into fiction. Here’s a sentence from a 2020 review of a recently published spy thriller: ‘…a cat and mouse game played by well-matched enemies … a brainy FBI rookie with skills in data crunching, verbal analysis and profiling…’ And now here’s a line from the dismissive, three-line first review I ever received, from The Times no less: ‘One of the most unpleasant torture scenes ever set down in a work of fiction.’ I can no longer hope to stay in lock-step with an ever-changing world, but even if my Stepan could magic away the intervening forty years since he came to life I’d still put his finger on a taser, not a smartphone. I never had the pleasure of meeting John le Carré, although I used to buy all his work on publication, but from his recent novels I imagine he felt something along the same nostalgic lines. I deliberately set out to waft a faint but withering miasma of comedy through the airless corridors of KGB headquarters in Dzerzhinsky Square, something akin to what Ricky Gervais was later to achieve with The Office, and the trope of le Carré’s later work resonates with me. An old-school protagonist is brought into sudden and bewildering contact with The New Normal at MI6, where half the characters at his interrogation are one-third his age and three quarters of them are – gasp! – women, the latter brighter, tougher and often nastier than the boys. And why not? John le Carré and me, too.
For the second novel in the trilogy, A View from the Square, I needed to gather data about a state-of-the-art surveillance aircraft, and extra bookshelves were built in the study to accommodate the inflow of materials on military hardware. In later years, my son would recall learning an ‘obscene’ amount about guns from Dad’s filing cabinet, which earned him the soubriquet, in those days much prized by schoolboys, of ‘pretty cool’. (My daughter went through a teenage Goth phase, when she wrote poetry about piercings that benefitted from the ‘Torture Methods’ folder in the filing cabinet, so more help there then. Education… so priceless…)
At around that time I met my first real Russian spy. The only one, actually, and I keep his card in my wallet even now. No, I don’t pass myself off as him; it’s a reminder that we yield to preconceptions at our peril. The two things I vividly remember about this bloody Bolshevik revolutionary are his charm and the elegance of his clothes: he was clad in a small Savile Row fortune and all the charisma that went with it. The card proffered by Colonel… actually no, I may be mad but I am not stupid… by this attaché at the Embassy of the USSR, 16 Kensington Palace Gardens, W8, was all of a piece with its owner, expensive and engraved in exquisite Gothic script. He and I were at the same cocktail party on account of Julian Friedmann, by then a well-known literary agent. Comrade Attaché had wangled an invitation because he was ‘fascinated’ by Western ideas about life in the Soviet Union and made a point of cultivating writers of discernment (meaning, for all of five minutes, me) who could share his delight in quality fiction and serious journalism, reading groups, literary societies…
God, the man was good. If that’s who ‘my Stepan’ sent to London, one quails to think who was doing the dirty work in Washington DC.
Then came the third novel, and a parting. Nocturne for the General was the first book where I was allowed by my paymasters to run a little wild. It is essentially a two-hander, a series of interrogations between Stepan and a very bright young woman indeed. I cried out loud when I typed the last sentence (still IMHO one of my best), but I knew that we were done. I’d discovered China, and at that time no other writer in English of spy thrillers had. I was fretting to be off on the latest adventure, but there has never come a time when I don’t look back over my shoulder now and then to see how Stepan is doing. How life has treated him and his ilk. And I raise a hand to the man who put my children through expensive schools while launching my literary career. It gives me much pleasure now to acknowledge the debt owed to my first true fictional friend.
What happened after that?
I left the Bar and became a full-time novelist. They made a two-parter TV play of Kyril and at the invitation of producer Beryl Vertue, my wife and I visited a lovely stately home in Hampshire to watch Richard E. Grant studying his lines over a sandwich and Edward Woodward take notes from the armourer responsible for his handgun. At one heady moment the owner of the stately pile rushed around yelling, ‘Where’s the bloody shotgun?’ and we thought that life was about to overtake art in a big way, but it turned out to be only an adder on the lawn.
That was a brief but golden age. For a few years, publishing was rife with larger-than-life characters vying for the award of Big Swinging Cheque Book Commissioning Editor; then it all ground to a halt and I had to find something else to do. I mentioned earlier that there were two explanations for the genesis of ‘My Stepan’, and although I did not know it at the time, this ‘crisis’ was the first step on my journey to discovering who Stepan really was and why he had insisted on being born.
My travels around the world resulted in me being able to make myself misunderstood in three languages other than my native tongue, in each case ending up better able to read the words that have always paid my bills than say them out loud. For six years I worked in Taiwan, or a province of China according to your politics, and there two things happened. First, I learned to be afraid of China in a way that apprehension about Russian ambitions had never affected me. In my capacity as editor of the Taipei Review, the government’s flagship English-language publication, I got to know a lot about China. That country can modernise far more effectively than Russia, but the end is different and that won’t be changed or even diluted. The name says it all: Zhong Guo, the Middle Kingdom, the centre of the world to which all roads must inexorably be made to lead. The Kingdom’s (anyone who follows the rise of Xi Jinping will recognise a royal dynasty in the making) world view was forged centuries ago and has consistently nurtured a governmental mindset inspired by adamantine malevolence towards anything considered contrary to Chinese interests. That, at least, is something which China has never, throughout millennia, seen the slightest need to change.
The second thing was my initial brush with Buddhism. More of that later.
At one point I was holding down four well-paid jobs in Taipei. After my daytime stint at the government coalface I used to sub the next day’s China News for four hours, six days a week. I had a weekly column in one of the Sundays. Then there was the consulting editorship of Taipei City Hall’s English-language magazine. To stave off the possibility of boredom I taught English privately, and at all hours and in every kind of venue enjoyed contemplating the tale of two cities that was Taipei in the nineties: a brew of workaholic native Taiwanese and expatriates who had alcohol, if little else, in common. Taipei was a hard-drinking town, not one for cissies. I became what I now think of as a borderline functioning alcoholic. The funny thing was that the more I drank the better I wrote. In terms of character development, not so much.
I quit one month ahead of being fired, by my estimate; not because of the drink but on account of a change of government, resulting in a regime with high-falutin’ ideas about taking the party line if you chose to take the party’s dollar. I was fifty-two years old and have never had a job since, thanks in part to my Stepan. For a decade I commuted between a condo in Kota Kinabalu and the family’s permanent base in Lewes. My flat overlooked the South China Sea; I’d sit in my rattan rocking-chair and watch the sunrise segue into sunset while reading Proust. I must have read À la Recherche… more than twenty times, often turning back to the first page as soon as I’d finished the last. Please don’t let your eyes glaze over, for this section is brief and there is a point. It is thanks to Proust that I am now, finally, able to offer you the long answer to the question: ‘Where did Stepan spring from?’
For Proust had been there before me. He had been everywhere before everyone. What’s his secret? First, in his own words: ‘The function and the task of a writer are those of a translator.’ And now a comment by E. M. Forster that expands and illuminates the concept: ‘How amazingly does Proust describe … the personal equipment of the reader, so that one keeps stopping with a gasp to say “Oh! How did he find that out about me? I didn’t even know it myself until he informed me, but it is so!”’
Despite all the personal stuff that Proust helped me to translate, I still could not quite figure myself out. Fortunately, karma was at hand. It dispatched me to spend long periods in north-east Thailand surrounded by rice, nothing but rice, in a little wooden house on poles, where the shower was a plastic dustbin full of rainwater and the toilet was something you don’t want to hear about. There, thousands of miles from Sussex and uncountable aeons from the hedonistic lifestyle to which my former life had accustomed me, I became a Buddhist. That taught me about the interconnectivity of all things and the unreality of everything we think we know. It was as if I had spent much of my adult life in a darkened room, watching a sheet of photographic paper bathing in developer. Suddenly the picture was there. All of it. Warts and all. And it was a picture of my Stepan.
In Proustian terms, when I wrote Kyril and all the books that followed, I was in effect but unwittingly translating something for myself and at the same time seeking to make readers relate to it in themselves. What is that something? I had been adopted six weeks after my birth, and I only learned about that while at my first school, in distressing circumstances. Someone I’d thought of as a good friend told everyone I was a bastard, a term which had to be explained to me by my loving and very distressed adoptive parents. In those days and in my mind, a bastard, however they might dress it up, was someone whose mother could not abide the sight of him. Someone fit only to be discarded by the person who is supposed to love them the most. A freak. A misfit. A monster.
For a long time the resulting catastrophe lay buried so deep inside me that a few years after I’d become a published writer and left the Bar, on the verge of lusted-for triumph, I had a mental breakdown. I tried to kill myself, but used what my GP described as ‘the wrong kind of tablets’. (Since then I have comforted many people staring into the abyss with the reflection that the best things in my life, almost without exception, occurred after that botched suicide attempt, so think what I would have missed.) At the time, a wonderful therapist fixed me up but warned that in the absence of a lengthy period of analysis the cure was unlikely to be permanent. So it proved. As the years passed, every so often something would spark off a memory of his final words to me: ‘I’m sure this is somehow all to do with your mother.’
After becoming a Buddhist in 2012 I applied myself to meditation with considerable success. As a result, at six minutes to four in the morning of 11th February 2018, I had my first electrocutive vipassana insight. I saw, with crystalline clarity, that my mother had not given me away because she hated me, as deep down I’d always supposed, but because she loved me enough to make the most agonising of choices and do what was right. She was not a traitor. She had not set out to wreck the being she loved. She had done her best to save him.
All my books are essentially about the same thing: what we do when the person who loves us most yanks the rug from under us. That’s where my Stepan comes from. That’s the secret that he and his successors as my protagonists were seeking to uncover.
I hope you will like him as much as I do. A few words of caution, however: please do not stare into his eyes for too long. Eyes like his have a habit of turning into mirrors. And what has once been seen cannot be unseen afterwards.