After all the controversy over my Spin Doctor’s Diary, it’s a great relief to move onto somewhat safer ground. Ground where the risk of losing friends or disappointing old colleagues isn’t an issue. On the whole, people like novels or hate them. They are entertained or bored by them. But they are rarely outraged. Yes, autobiographical novels can get an author in trouble with people who think they’ve been unfairly portrayed, but my first stab at fiction, Time and Fate, is hardly autobiographical. How could it be? It’s set in the future. And at least when you’ve made up the story you can’t be accused of betrayal or breaking confidences. I’ve had quite enough of that for a while.
There are similarities between my diaries and the novel I struggled with for over two years, so perhaps I should get those out of the way first. They are both deeply immersed in the overlapping worlds of journalism and politics that I used to inhabit. They both contain spin doctors and prime ministers, newspaper editors and ambitious MPs. And the background to both is a New Labour government that is neither infallible nor irretrievably wicked.
When, earlier this year, the cabinet secretary said it was completely unacceptable to him that I should publish my diaries, the Sunday Times, among others, got the idea that I had knocked off a quick bit of political satire as an act of revenge. If only it was that easy.
I’ve done some tough jobs in my time, but none that has kept me awake at night as much, or caused me the same degree of stress and misery, as fiction writing. I am genuinely impressed (I never thought I’d say this) by people like Ann Widdecombe, who can hold down a major job in public life, with all the demands that go with it, and write novels at the same time. Do they never sleep? Come to think of it, as Time and Fate turned me from a generally sound sleeper into an insomniac, maybe they don’t.
I’ve never been one for a quiet life, however. My boredom threshold is too low. So maybe it’s inevitable that Time and Fate should have its own fair share of controversy. Like a plot in which the chancellor of the exchequer (not Gordon Brown, I hasten to add – this is fiction, remember) fails in his long-term ambition to become prime minister. Or where Alastair (no, not the Alastair), who happens to be editor of the Daily Mirror, wants to run a story claiming the new prime minister is having an affair. Or where an American president shows that the only thing that matters to him is his own survival. Just how likely is any of that? But then that’s the joy of fiction. Nobody has to believe it.
There’s no doubt that politics is fertile ground for the novelist, although my new friends in the publishing world tell me that political fiction is a minority interest. Maybe that’s because people can get an endless diet of political intrigue and drama just by reading the newspapers. In the time I was writing Time and Fate, Britain went to war on the basis of disputed evidence, a once highly popular prime minister saw his ratings nosedive – before staging a remarkable recovery – and press reports of the private lives of the home secretary and, to a lesser extent, the prime minister’s wife, kept the nation bemused, if not exactly entertained. More than once during that time, people were heard to say, in that old cliché, you couldn’t make it up.
And then, once the book was finally finished and being touted round the publishing houses, it suddenly had to be revised. Why? Not at the insistence of the cabinet secretary this time, but because the truth had come too close to the fiction. In my original plot, there was a no-warning bomb attack on the London underground, sending shockwaves across the capital while the prime minister was in Scotland attending a conference. When exactly that happened on 7/7 I was too bound up watching the events unfold even to remember that something so similar was a central episode in my book.
The re-writing didn’t mean any major changes to the structure, but it couldn’t have been left as it was. So it still deals with the threat of terrorism and how the state should respond. There must be a danger that people will try to analyse it as some kind of knee-jerk reaction to those awful events. It certainly isn’t, and I have no wish to get drawn into the kind of debate that has raged in the United States about how fiction writers can or should respond to 9/11. I hope that if people read Time and Fate they will see that knee-jerk reactions are rarely wise ones.
So suddenly, from nowhere, I have two books on the shelves with my name on the cover (my previous opus, the Berlitz Guide to Iceland, has finally been eclipsed). When I look at them I am ashamed of neither, but it’s the novel that comes closest to making me feel proud. Not because it’s any great work of literature. I wouldn’t make that claim and, besides, it has to be for others to judge its merits. More because I have carried it around with me in my head and in drafts and redrafts for so long, never really expecting to see it in print. That it has at all is thanks to a courageous publisher, willing to defy the conventional wisdom that political satire doesn’t fly off the shelves. I was told several times by the big publishing houses that, while they’d enjoyed the book, people were either too bored or too cynical about politics to want to read novels on the subject.
Which brings us back to where we started, I suppose. There are plenty of people willing to blame me for making people more cynical (though probably less bored) with politics, by publishing The Spin Doctor’s Diary. There’s no point me insisting that my intention was the opposite, although it happens to be true. Most readers of Progress would probably agree with me that politics is both endlessly fascinating and tremendous fun. I’ll probably lose a few of you if I go on to argue that we shouldn’t always take it too seriously. Yet more may fall by the wayside if I say that being as honest as we can about how politics works, and facing up to the mistakes we make along the way, is one good means of re-engaging the public.
In Time and Fate, the prime minister goes on TV at the end and says, ‘I’m going to do something very unusual for a politician, if I may. I’m going to be very honest with you indeed.’ It’s the one line in the book that I took from real life. From Tony Blair, of course. At the end of the novel, we don’t know if the prime minister’s honesty will pay off. But it’s not a bad strategy.
I’ve learnt a lot of things about publishing in the past few months, and one is that the question they all want to ask is ‘what are you writing next?’ Well, no more diaries for a start. And maybe a nice little novel set in the south of France without a politician in sight. Honesty may be a good strategy, but it doesn’t half take its toll.
Time And Fate by Lance Price is reviewed on page 37. It is published by the Polperro Heritage Press price £7.95 from bookshops, or by post from the Polperro Heritage Press, Clifton-upon-Teme, Worcestershire WR6 6EN at £9 including postage and packing. E-mail: [email protected] or order direct from www.polperropress.co.uk