“People have been so brainwashed by fiction”, Jon Ronson is warned in The Men Who Stare at Goats, his account of an extraordinary CIA-backed American special forces unit. “All this fictional stuff is like an immunisation against reality”.
The warning came back to me as I heard Chris Mullin, campaigner against miscarriages of justice, former Labour MP and minister, reading his re-written version of A Very British Coup, his 1980s’ account of how dark elements in the establishment destabilises a left wing prime minister elected with a programme including withdrawal from Nato, and unilateral nuclear disarmament.
In his new version, Mullin imagines Jeremy Corbyn riding a bicycle on his way to Buckingham Palace after his surprise election victory in 2020.
As the BBC helpfully points out, “it’s all a complete fiction”.
Yet there is a growing tendency, in political or spy thrillers, to throw more and more facts into fiction, in a way that might encourage a kind of pseudo-knowing cynicism.
A character in Inside Story, the latest thriller by Alan Judd (the pseudonym of a former MI6 officer), makes the case for 4 new Trident nuclear missile submarines, takes a dig at judges in the European court of human rights, and a swipe at the MI5 and MI6 renegades, David Shayler and Richard Tomlinson.
The US-born author, Edward Wilson, bases his new novel, A Very British Ending, on plots by a group of right wing spooks and military figures to bring down Harold Wilson’s Labour government in the late 1960s.
Wilson throws almost everything at the reader.
He includes the claim that Roger Hollis, one time head of MI5, was a Soviet agent; Clockwork Orange, the black propaganda psyops operation in Northern Ireland exposed by Colin Wallace; the exposure of Sir Anthony Blunt as a wartime Soviet agent while he was working for MI5; the controversy surrounding the sinking of the Argentine cruiser, General Belgrano, during the Falklands war.
Wilson clutters his novel with reports of actual events, preventing the book from becoming a compulsive pageturner. More pertinently, he describes his hero, an MI6 officer called Catesby, as developing “a grim admiration for the merciless genius of the Secret State”.
Catesby never found out why, in the end, Harold Wilson resigned. “Life wasn’t a tightly knit detective novel where there are no loose ends”, observes the author of of A Very British Ending.
Indeed. There is a danger in mixing fact with fiction.
Who, for example would have thought that from being a villain, the man who had supplied arms to the IRA, the man responsible for the Lockerbie disaster, one of whose agents had killed the police officer Yvonne Fletcher in London’s St James Square in 1984, Gaddafi would become a useful and profitable ally, with Tony Blair thanking him for the “excellent cooperation” between the two countries’ counter-terrorism agencies following a period during which the UK and Libya worked together to arrange for Libyan dissidents to be kidnapped and flown to Tripoli, along with their families.
Ronson starts his book with the sentence, “This is a true story”. You could not make it up.
