Authors Electric

  My Christmas stocking this year included “Russian Roulette – The Life and Times of Graham Greene”, the latest biography of the novelist by Richard Greene, a Canadian professor of English, (and no relation). The book reminded me vividly of how much of an influence Graham Greene, and "Greeneland", have been on the directions my life has taken, particularly regarding the destinations that have left me with the most emotive memories and powerful stories. Haiti, and especially the Grand Hotel Oloffson, more than lived up to all the promises of dark excitement that I first felt when reading “The Comedians”, right down to the fact that one of the original characters Greene had used in the book, (Aubelin Jolicouer who inspired the character of Petit Pierre), was still propping up the hotel bar. I was a little later getting to the Hotel Continental in Saigon, which featured so prominently in “The Quiet American”. But despite the fact that Saigon has turned into Ho Chi Minh City ...

  I have a habit of seeing stages of my life in terms of books or films that seemed to reflect everything I was experiencing or feeling at the time. Is this, I wonder, how we make sense of our lives, attempting to give the chaos and serendipities of reality a narrative arc where none really exists? My early years were pure Christopher Robin, an only child in the countryside, whose best friends were pets and toys, entirely unaware that I had arrived at the end of a long line of privilege; white, male, middle class and British. The idylls of “Hundred Acre Wood”, (and “Never-Never Land” for that matter), were then replaced with a mixture of “Jennings Goes to School” and “Tom Brown’s Schooldays” – culminating in the cathartic anarchy of Lindsay Anderson’s film, “If”, which was released just as I was reaching the end of my patience with educational institutions. “Down and Out in Paris and London”, “Keep the Aspidistra Flying” and “Of Human Bondage” reflected the struggle to surviv...

Poor, tiny, battered Haiti is in the global headlines once more – this time courtesy of a scandal involving aid workers and prostitutes. I have to confess that there have been many times where I have accepted an invitation to a destination simply because I have read and loved a book about the place, (“The World of Suzie Wong” for Hong Kong, “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” for New York, “Death in Venice” for Venice, “Myra Breckinridge” for Hollywood, “Don’t Stop the Carnival” for the Caribbean islands generally, “The Great Railway Bazaar” for the art of travel itself, and so forth).   I must have read Graham Greene’s “The Comedians” pretty soon after it was published in 1966, when I would still have been in my teens, (I had probably seen the film too, which was produced as a vehicle for Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton the following year). Greene had already caught my attention with both his stories and his own life, taking my imagination to some of the darkest and mo...

A few weeks ago I went down to the beautiful hills on the Rwanda/Congo border, fancying that I was following in the great literary footsteps of the likes of Joseph Conrad and Graham Greene, but in reality probably more closely resembling William Boot from Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop . I was travelling with my client, Hyppolite, a young man who was just seven years old when he survived genocide. In 100 days he lost eighty members of his extended family and witnessed his beloved father being hacked to death by machetes and eaten by dogs. Born in a mud hut without shoes, water or power, and often hungry, he struggled after the genocide to gain an education and to learn to forgive the killers. By the age of thirty he had a Masters Degree in Sociology from Bristol University , had started a Foundation for Peace and had delivered a lecture at Harvard. I am hoping that in this book we will be able to give a child’s view of genocide, in the style of The Diary of a Young Girl...

This month I spent a week with a client in Saigon , getting a feel for their life and for their city. I’ve not been before so my expectations had been largely shaped by Graham Greene’s The Quiet American , news coverage throughout my younger life and the musical, “Miss Saigon”. It’s called Ho Chi Minh City now of course, but that doesn’t sound nearly as romantic. It is also sprouting tower blocks, making the riverside skyline indistinguishable from other Far Eastern boom towns from Hong Kong and Beijing to Singapore and Bangkok – or even Canary Wharf for that matter. At street level, however, some of the old magic still simmers and steams in the wet heat. You can still sit at a pavement table outside the Continental Palace Hotel or in the roof bars of the Caravelle or the Majestic, and imagine Greene lurking in a corner.  A figure as obviously foreign as me will still be offered massages by street girls and shoe shine services by young entrepre...

Living, as I do, in one of the safest and most prosperous islands in the world, and being part of a comfortable and loving family, it is easy to forget or to remain ignorant of the depths of hellishness that man is capable of inflicting on his fellow man, and frequently does. The collapse of the communist Eastern Bloc at the end of the eighties released a hurricane of shocking and fascinating human interest stories, carried back to the West by people who needed the help of ghostwriters to tell them. When Romanian President, Nicolae Ceausescu, was toppled from power and executed in 1989 his country was released from a quarter of a century of oppression. What horrified the outside world the most, however, was what was discovered inside the walls of the “orphanages for the irrecuperable” which littered the country. Thousands of children who had been deemed to be of no use to Romania, or who had been “inconvenient” births, were found locked up in these asylums, tied up in co...

Two months ago I wrote about getting my first book published and the experience that led up to it.   Last month I wrote about winning the Smarties Book Prize.  Now I want to write about what happened after that. I remember having supper not long afterwards with Jenny Nimmo, a fellow Smarties winner – and Carnegie winner too – and her husband David Millward, with whom my family and I have spent many a happy New Year’s Eve.  I was inclined to brush off the Smarties, thinking it would soon be like yesterday’s news, quickly forgotten and quickly over. But not so, Jenny said. ‘lt’s your CV. It will remain with you forever,’ she said. And she’s been right. After winning a major book prize, finding publishers for your books is easy. Once they were like gold dust.  Now suddenly they’re all over you. And agents.  I’ve had two.  The first brought me disappointment, and that’s all I’m going to say.  The second, however, has been the sort of a...

To write is one thing. To cast spells another. How to do it? Aged three years old, I used to tell stories to the children next door, weaving fantasies by means of my imagination. Those children were big ones who went to school and could read and write - but they’d line up on their side of the wall to ask what happened next. They were desperate to know but couldn’t for reasons I didn’t understand figure it out themselves. It fell to me - the little squirt peering over her garden wall - to tell them. There’s a knack to casting spells over the imagination. I didn’t know that then, but I do now. Not everyone can do it. But there are a greater number of people who can than do , and it’s not just the hard work, time and effort required that puts people off. It takes a supreme act of self-confidence to believe that the stories going on inside your head are of interest to anybody else. At three I never questioned that they were, but at nine - when I started my first few secret stories -...