Jeffrey Archer is back. But then, was he ever gone? In the 50 years since writing his first book, Not A Penny More, Not A Penny Less, Archer has kept himself busy. He has written over 40 books and sold over 300 million copies world-wide. He is published in 115 countries, in 48 languages. There is no doubt that he is a literary tour de force, but he is one who knows that he is one and seems to want to express it.
“Jeffrey seems to have an impulse to prove everything he says,” said writer Anthony Horowitz upon meeting him once. Archer tells Horowitz that he has been the bestselling author in India for six weeks, that The Washington Post described him as “a storyteller in the class of Dumas”, and that he will be remembered long after he is gone.
None of this is probably wrong, the operative word being “probably”. Archer is known for stretching the truth―an admirable quality while writing fiction, but not so much while telling facts. A Guardian reporter once recounted how Archer told him about sitting in the prime ministerial bathroom while former prime minister John Major shaved, and discussing the details of a forthcoming cabinet reshuffle, a claim that Major denied. “Somehow it didn’t really matter, though: you knew that it was possibly untrue. As a journalist you just had to lay off for the degree of likely plausibility in anything he told you,” wrote the reporter.
Archer once accused Bollywood of stealing works of authors like him. He was referring to the film Ladies vs Ricky Bahl (2011), which he claimed was plagiarised from Not A Penny More, Not A Penny Less. He was critical of a “second-rate Bollywood idiot who goes around saying he’s a Bollywood star producer and then he is not! Such has been my Indian experience many times”.
Drama king: Jeffrey Archer and wife Mary attend a play at Sadler’s Wells Theatre in London | Getty images
To THE WEEK, however, he was more sanguine about his feelings for India. “Everyone knows I love India,” he said over email. “Though I am still appalled when I drive through the streets of a major city and see children sitting on the side of the road who will never get a proper education. How many Mozarts, Picassos, and Shakespeares are there staring at me, but they are simply not given a chance.”
The fact that he exaggerates is criticism lite. Reviewers have kept the big guns for his writing. A New York Times critic described one of his books as “trash”. Another reviewer wondered whether Margaret Thatcher nominating Archer’s fiction as her favourite reading was “a rare example of that even rarer thing―a Thatcherite joke”. Yet another critic called him “Enid Blyton for adults”. But ultimately, Archer’s got the last laugh. The plebian reader embraces Archer with the same vehemence with which the literary elite eschew him. He is wildly popular among fans, a fact that Archer himself takes pains to drive home. “Patrick White and Nadine Gordimer (both Nobel Prize winners) have been virtually forgotten,” he told Horowitz. “But, you see, they knew nothing about story. On the other hand, Agatha Christie….” His point is clear: long after his critics disappear, he will be remembered.
He might be correct, but unfortunately his latest book, An Eye for an Eye, does not do justice to that sentiment, lacking that signature flourish of his classics like Kane and Abel and The Prodigal Daughter. In them, the suspense was driven by the reader’s emotional investment in the characters and their fate. In An Eye for an Eye, the suspense―whatever there is of it―is driven by a plot which suffers from over-speeding. When we ask Archer whether it would have helped to slow down the pace and describe the scene outside the window in more detail, he replies, “You are not the first person to suggest this, but I fear it might take away from the sheer speed of the storytelling, which for me is primary.”
In good company: A 1986 photo of Jeffrey Archer with prime minister Margaret Thatcher, who said that Archer’s fiction was among her favourites | Getty images
In the book, the British and the French are in contention for a billion-dollar Saudi arms deal, and caught in the cross-hairs of this rivalry is the son of a former British foreign secretary, a spunky prostitute, a depraved Saudi prince and the by-now famous Scotland Yard detective, William Warwick. One can expect the usual Archerisms in the book―an art theft, a nail-biting chase, an ivy league-educated peer, a revenge-seeking villain, and lots of upper-class British snobbery, which seems to be the oxygen that everyone breathes in Archer-verse. The plot sags mainly because it stretches the bounds of credulity. How, for example, is the reader to believe that Lady Hartley, the mother of a key character, entrusts her legal affairs to a solicitor she meets just once at a funeral? Or that the villain manages to conceal an original Rembrandt in the ladies’ bathroom on the day it is to be unveiled? Archer, however, seems unruffled by such criticisms. “I can tell you far more implausible things than that,” he tells us.
Even if the morality of some of his protagonists is questionable, there is a clear demarcation of good and evil in Archer’s books. It is like he believes in humanity, even if he doesn’t in humans. Also, you can almost always be assured of a happy ending. Why should you not be? After all, Archer himself is living one. He has homes in London, Grantchester and Majorca, a beautiful marriage to British scientist Mary Archer, two sons, a close-knit family, and millions of fans all over the world. At the age of 84, he still works eight hours a day using the same felt-tip Pilot pen and Staedtler pencils, writing up to 14 drafts of a book. “Whenever I go out to dinner, go for a walk, attend a function or meet a person, the mind is looking for something that will make a story,” he tells us. For him, the whole world is one big story and whatever happens, it must go on….
A shot of archer
An excerpt from the prologue of An Eye for an Eye
Simon Winchcombe Henry Howard Hartley saw the Prime Minister for the first time that morning, and his father for the last time that night.
It happened thus:
For the past two hundred years, the Hartley family had either taken holy orders, ending their days as bishops, or entered the House of Commons, before joining the Cabinet as a minister of the Crown.
Simon’s father, the Rt Hon. John Hartley PC KBE MC, was no exception and ended a distinguished career as Home Secretary before being elevated to the upper house as Lord Hartley of Bucklebury. His wife Sybil was first and foremost a housewife and a mother, who occasionally involved herself in good works, which was no more than was expected of a Hartley spouse. So, when Sybil delivered a son, Simon – all Hartley children were named after disciples – they both assumed he would follow in the family tradition and either become a bishop or a Cabinet minister. Had he done so, this tale would never have been written.
Their only child, Simon Hartley, showed from an early age that he had no interest in the family tradition, when at the age of eleven he won a scholarship to the North London Grammar School, despite having been offered a place at Harrow, the family alma mater. And on leaving school, he progressed to King’s College London to study law, rather than going up to King’s College Cambridge to read divinity or politics.
When Simon graduated three years later, he bucked another Hartley trend by becoming the first member of the family to be awarded a first- class honours degree, rather than the usual second or even the occasional third. And, if that wasn’t enough, after leaving university Simon migrated to Boston to join a bunch of colonials at somewhere called the Harvard Business School, an establishment his father wasn’t sure he approved of.
Two years later, as a graduate of the other Cambridge, Simon returned to his native soil to be offered a dozen jobs in the City of London, ending up as a trainee at Kestrals Bank with a starting salary well in excess of anything his father had earned as a minister of the Crown.
During the next decade, he rarely left the square mile, other than to travel to distant lands, where he would negotiate deals that left his colleagues in awe, while making a fortune for his bank.
By the age of forty, Simon had married a beautiful and talented woman, Hannah, who had borne him two sons, Robert and Christopher – neither disciples – and had joined the board of Kestrals as the company’s youngest director. It was assumed it could only be a matter of time before he would become chairman of the bank.
And, indeed, he might have done, had he not received a call from Number 10 Downing Street asking if he would be kind enough to join the Prime Minister to discuss a matter of national importance.
Excerpted with permission from HarperCollins
AN EYE FOR AN EYE
By Jeffrey Archer
Published by HarperCollins
Price Rs499; pages 372