The Write Rabbit

There must be lots of authors I’ve ‘missed’. Bestsellers are probably bestsellers for a reason, but preconceptions arise, you file them away in the ‘to be read at some point’ part of your brain, there’s always something else to be read.

John Le Carré first came onto my radar in the ’70s, when the BBC did an adaptation of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy with Alec Guinness. I was too young to appreciate it, but I remember my parents were enthralled. Since that time his presence has slowly been building in my consciousness, in the form of battered Pan Books on my parents’ bookshelves and further adaptations of his work on film and TV. I used to stay up in Scotland and he had rented the cottage on the estate to finish a novel. My partner had met him a few times through work. He caught my attention when he quietly announced his withdrawal from the Man Booker prize, for which he was nominated this year.

More recently, a friend told me about an independent library in Cornwall that had had its funding withdrawn. When I looked it up, I saw he had been a previous chairman. Then the crunch point came when a colleague from work said they’d read one of his books on holiday, and how much she’d been drawn to the character of Leamas.

It was that word ‘character’ that did it for me. Until then, I’d had this idea that John Le Carré was ‘just’ a political thriller writer, a good one, but did I really want to read ‘cold war’ novels? When I started to read The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, I realised what I’d been missing all these years. Leamas is indeed a compelling character – edgy and dark. The prose is spare and powerful. It’s so much deeper than I imagined. Preconceptions be damned. I hope I’ll never again dismiss an author till I’ve read him on the page. What a complete joy it is to discover an author like this, especially one with a great raft of work behind him which will keep me busy for a long time to come.

When I parked in my road after returning from an idyllic camping trip with the children, yesterday, I noticed something odd about the 4×4 Jeep in front of me. Looking closely, I saw that a yellow and black sticker, contrived to look like a number plate, covered the real digits and letters beneath. Now the number plate read: CO2 KILL5. I live in a part of London where stick thin women who look like they barely have the strength to turn the wheel drive Little Johnny to school in several tons of steel 4×4, so I have to admit I smirked. And with a knowing shake of my head, it took me back several years to when I volunteered for a certain ‘green’ organisation.

I used to go into the office once a week and remember the looks of horror when, one day, I walked in with a plastic bag containing my lunch because that’s how it had been handed over to me in the sandwich shop. I quickly learned how to get the photocopying machine to print double sided, and even remembered not to flush the loo every time. I’m not saying they didn’t do good work there, but it was odd. People would come back from holidays sporting tans, but no one dared admit increasing their carbon footprint several thousand times by flying, or if they did, it was justified at length by the ‘eco tourism’ they did at the other end. The strange hypocrisy was further borne out by a ludicrously chilled out attitude, but in an arena where the office politics were rife and the hoops you had to jump through to get anything done worse than anywhere I’ve ever worked.

It always amazed me how everything was so black and white. The film An Inconvenient Truth was doing the rounds, and Al Gore had been elevated to a God-like hero figure. Red Ken was a superstar for increasing the congestion zone in London, and Boris was a fiend-from-hell for wanting to reduce it.

It was while I was in the midst of this that Sarah Hall’s The Carhullan Army was published. The book is set in a future world where oil has run out and climate change is playing havoc. The Thames has burst its banks, flooding Westminster, and the country is run by a nebulous dictatorship.

“Even the rain is different now; erratic, violent, not the constant grey drizzle of old postcards, jokes, and television reports. It’s rain that feels wounded.”

The book got me thinking. How brilliant of Hall to imagine the future like this, how elegant to evoke it, and how powerful to wrap it up in a compelling story set in the Cumbrian fells.

While there is a place for marching and activism and scaremongering, awareness can be built in different, subtler ways. There is a strong tradition of fiction writers imagining dystopian futures – Orwell’s 1984, Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, to name a few classics – and readingThe Carhullan Army I was reminded of this.

I left the organisation shortly afterwards. I care about the planet, but I’m not ‘right on’ and I never was very good at activism. I realised I could get on with being ‘green’ in my own quiet way.