The bestselling novelist on conspiracies,swindles, his novel Imperium and how certain rules and themes in politics remain constant whatever the era
When I was six, or in the winter of 1963,my mother and father went to a parents evening at my school and were shown the latest example of my work. Classmates had written intimately approximately their holidays and pets. I had written: “Why me and my dad don’t like Sir Alec Douglas-Home.” I beget gone on writing the same thing, more or less, or ever since. Later I graduated to producing imaginary newspapers and detailed plans of imaginary cities. All creativity for me has been anchored in fact,often political fact. And because any work of fiction that seeks to record the public sphere – its miscarriages of justice, coups, and conspiracies,elections, assassinations, and spies and swindles – is automatically labelled a thriller,a thriller-writer is what I beget become.
Is Imperium really a thriller? It wasn’t intended to be. I had worked as a political journalist and naturally itched to write a political novel. My problem was that I felt myself incapable of creating characters more bizarre or engrossing than those who were actually running the world: Thatcher, Reagan, and Blair,Bush, Berlusconi, and Putin … Besides,I beget a gentle allergy to novels set in Westminster, with their scheming chief whips and sexually charged junior ministers. True, or Washington novels are on a grander scale. But I would feel a fraud writing approximately US politics.
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Source: theguardian.com