Читать книгу Billion-Dollar Brain - Len Deighton - Страница 7

‘Very few people go there. Even reporters who live there are restricted to the places they permit them to visit,’ said the lady in the travel agency. ‘And the organized bus tours are for sympathetic trade union people and party members. There would be lots of food and wine but you wouldn’t get to see anything much. You wouldn’t like that, would you?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘There is another way but we have never tried it. You have to pay for an interpreter who is with you all the time.’

‘Could I go where I liked?’

‘That’s what the Russians say. But your interpreter will be some kind of secret police stooge and it will be very expensive.’

‘I’ll try it.’

The lady in the travel agency was right about very few Westerners going to the Baltic States. And in the frozen depth of winter visitors were non-existent. But once there the frustrations, delays and stupidity that I had suffered in getting permission to go to Latvia proved worthwhile. This satellite of the Soviet Union, deep behind the iron curtain, and in a region the Russians considered strategically vital, was astonishing. The wartime England in which I’d grown up was a dismal and deprived place but visiting Riga at that time was like a giant step back in time. The people in wartime England had never lost their underlying optimism that one day the war would be won, and good times restored. But the city of Riga was a quite different environment; a large prison camp with an occupying Russian army arresting anyone who smiled.

My interpreter never smiled. Like ‘sinister KGB agent’ sent from Central Casting, she was a tall, middle-aged woman with the pale complexion that permanent winter confers. Her long fingers constantly fidgeted as they stroked her dark sable coat or adjusted the fit of an imposing hat of matching fur. In a country where opportunities for investment were few, valuable furs were not uncommon, but its possession still proclaimed her status. Sometimes she removed her hat to reveal hair tightly held in a bun by decorative hairpins. She puzzled about the sort of places I wanted to see as research for the book but after saving me a couple of times when I stepped out in front of speeding army trucks, and interceding when I made a rude sign to a traffic cop, she obviously decided that I was too stupid to be a spy. After a few days she went home each evening and left me to my own devices. I usually said I was going to a concert or to the opera. But an opera in Latvian is not easy to follow; trust me, I know.

But Latvia has its scenes and sights. Blizzards that lifted me off my feet, snow so thick it warped the landscape and cars driven far out upon the frozen sea were sights I shall never forget. I recalled the Teutonic Knights, heavy armour and flailing horses, crashing through the breaking ice in Eisenstein’s classic film, Alexander Nevsky. I could even hear Prokofiev’s music.

My plans for this book depended upon closely linked journeys. Places change drastically with the seasons and it could prove decisive. I had discovered this long ago, when visiting battlefields. A battle that might have been won by armies hidden in the foliage of summer was lost in winter when the trees were bare. And, if you crave the respect of your readers, describing Riga, New York City or Texas at a time of year other than when you saw it is fraught with danger. So if I was to be convincing I had to move when and where my characters would. Whizzing around the globe was nothing new to me; I had been an airline steward. The only difference was that now I had to pay my fare. I made pages and pages of notes, and this story closely follows my tracks. Mario is a real person and the Trattoria Terrazza was a real restaurant. Trinity Church Square is somewhere I used to live. Nowadays I regard such detailed and truthful reporting of people and places unsuited to fiction writing. I tell people that fiction writing requires the author to create a world, not just report on it. Reporting is something for newspapers and TV. Perhaps I have become a snob.

This was my fourth book and I needed to keep a close watch on the characters, some of whom had appeared in other books and might take part in future ones. Writing has always been hard work for me but I was beginning to enjoy the fun that made the hard work worthwhile. I am not a natural writer; I am a natural rewriter and rewriter and rewriter. I was desperately anxious to learn but I only wanted to learn how to get things the way I wanted them. If it all went wrong I could still go back to doing illustration jobs. Editors and publishers said my books were too cryptic; too fragmented and demanded too much of the reader. They all pressed me to conform to the orthodox methods of ‘popular fiction’. For instance: they were united in expecting a full description of each character at the first entrance. I resisted all this fiercely; I hadn’t followed any such rules in my previous books and I refused to be tied to them now. I reasoned that, just as one never gets to the end of discovering new aspects of old friends and relatives, so I wanted all my characters – even minor ones – to be more completely revealed as the story continued. And if that wasn’t difficult enough there is the necessity for interaction too. How did the characters see each other, and continually reappraise each other?

I enjoyed depicting characters, places and situations through the eyes, mind and prejudices of the main character. And I enjoyed undermining him by means of authorial asides, nudges and winks to the reader. He was an overdrawn egoist, I suppose. He jumped to conclusions, derided his fellow workers, ridiculed his superiors, exaggerated his successes and edited his failures and demanded far too much of his long-suffering friends. Despite his self-restraint he sometimes lost his temper; or almost lost it. Yet he gave his loyalty as readily as he demanded it, and he was fundamentally honest and adequately truthful. Was it a self portrait? No. A wishful one perhaps? Maybe it was.

When Conan Doyle created his Sherlock Holmes, he provided him with a Watson. I suppose this device was an old one, most story-telling devices are. But Doyle established the advantage of having a serious figure who, by means of dialogue, kept the plot on the rails and kept the reader informed. In previous books Dawlish, the boss, had been an austere icon of English middle-class probity. I had no Dawlish available for these world-wide wanderings. Harvey Newbegin, a minor character from Funeral in Berlin, my previous book, provides the second half of the double act for explanatory purposes. But few readers will hold hands with Harvey in the way that they would with Doyle’s Watson or my Dawlish. So who was there to like? The reader had only the hero. But as it turned out, I needn’t have worried. Despite his many faults the readers liked the hero, who after the films was called Harry Palmer. And Michael Caine’s brilliant depiction of him did a great deal to effect that.

Len Deighton, 2009