An Officer and A Spy is the first novel I read of Robert
Harris. Harris shot to international fame with his debut novel, Fatherland,
and, as the cliché goes, has never looked back, since. Harris, when he was a BBC-reporter
in the 1980s, wrote a few non-fiction books, one of which was the endlessly
riveting Selling Hitler, which I have reviewed on this blog.
I picked up An Officer and A Spy, not so much
because it was written by Harris, or, not entirely because of that, as because
the subject interested me. The Drefus Affair, which took place in France at the
turn of last century, is one of those historical event, I should imagine, many
would be aware of, or, heard of, but of which, most would not know the details.
(That Harris wrote the novel also made the decision easy; I might not have been
inclined to read the book if it were written by someone whose name I did not
recognise).
Alfred Drefus, a Jewish officer in the French army, was
convicted in 1895 of treason. Drefus was found guilty of passing on French army
secrets to the Germans. He was sentenced to solitary confinement on the Devil’s
Island, an ice-free island near the north-eastern tip of the Antarctic
Peninsula (near Venezuela), where he was subjected to emotional torture of very
impressive proportions—Drefus was forbidden to speak to anyone during the
entire period of his incarceration. The Drefus affair, as it came to be known,
aroused strong public emotions in France at the time, and public opinion was
sharply divided as to whether justice was done. Latent Anti-Semitism as well as
hurt French pride and the inevitable French paranoia towards the Germans,
following the heavy defeat of the French army by the Germans in the 1870 war (resulting
in Germany appropriating French regions bordering with Germany), played a vital
part in how Drefus was treated and viewed throughout the trial. That Drefus was
a German Jewish did not help. The Drefus case is considered as a great
miscarriage of justice in French history. Emil Zola was one of the many
influential intellectuals in the French public life who were disturbed by the
handling of the investigation by the French army, and took up the case of the
convicted Jewish officer, which eventually led to the exoneration of Drefus.
It is highly likely that the higher echelons of the French
army were aware that Drefus was innocent, but allowed, nevertheless, for him to
be the fall-guy, and, when they became aware that truth might come out, went to
great length to suppress it.
It would, however, be wrong to say that everyone in the
French army was complicit in the conspiracy (and, by association, an anti-Semite).
There were French army officers who were uneasy about what happened to Drefus,
and showed great courage and righteousness, in the face of intimidation and
threats by the increasingly unsettled French army, in revealing truth.
The French army-officer who played a major role in the
re-trial and eventual exoneration of Alfred Drefus, whose name has disappeared
under the sand of time, was Colonel Georges Picquart, the protagonist of
Harris’s absorbing novel.
The story is narrated from the eyes of Colonel Georges
Picquart, of French army. Picquart comes to hold the belief that Alfred Derfus
did not receive a fair trial. Picaquart, a member of French army’s General
Staff, has witnessed the court martial of Drefus in his capacity as a reporter.
Within six months of Drefus’s conviction Picaquart is promoted to the position
of the chief of the operational arm of French army’s intelligence section, known
as statistical section. Picquart has no, or not many, warm feelings towards Drefus.
Drefus is a graduate of the prestigious Ecole Polytechnique and Ecole de Guerre
(French army’s war college) where Picquart was his teacher. Drefus, with his
somewhat standoffish manner and a tendency towards viewing any unfavourable
decision as resulting from crypto-anti-Semitism, has not made it easy for
others to develop warm feelings towards him, and Picquart is no exception. Picquart,
the novel hints, might have had a smidgen of anti-Semitism in him—all the more
remarkable, then, that he fights tenaciously and even risks his own military
career to prove the innocence of Drefus, once he is satisfied that Drefus is
the fall guy, and the real traitor is someone else. Picquart has always
believed that the case against Drefus was weak—he has told the French war
minister, General Mercier, who has had Drefus arrested in an unseemly hurry in
the absence of any clear proof of Drefus’s guilt, that Drefus’s acquittal was
the likely outcome of the court martial. Picquart is, therefore, surprised and
uneasy when Drefus is found guilty. When Picquart takes over the reins of the
statistical section he sees the photocopy of the letter, which was considered
in the court martial to be the incontrovertible evidence of Drefus’s guilt.
Picquart realises that the handwriting is not Drefus’s but that of one Major
Ferdinand Esterhazy, a feckless, inveterate liar, whom Picquart suspects to be
the man who was passing the secrets to Germans. This had indeed been the case.
At the time of the court martial several hand-writing experts had rejected the
notion that handwriting in the letter was Drefus’s, until an obliging one came
along and gave the army the opinion they wanted to hear. An army officer lied
to the tribunal, and, just in case if this was not enough, a secret file, full
of forged documents and confirming Drefus’s guilt, was passed on to the
tribunal, with full knowledge of Mercier, keeping the legal team representing
Drefus completely in the dark. As Picquart’s suspicions grow that the wrong man
has been sent to gaol, he also begins to suspect that those who conspired to
frame Drefus are in his own department and, backed up by the powerful army
brass, will do the same to him. Picquart begins to carry out his secret
investigation. As Picquart delves deeper into he realises that the rot goes
right to the top of the French army. Picquart begins his fight against echelons
of French army to prove the innocence of a man he has disliked but who, Picquart
believes, is innocent.
Robert Harris has narrated a gripping tale that conflates
the historical narrative as well as the personal perspective (of Picquart). Harris’s
prose is dry, sardonic, but also elegant. The Georges Picquart that emerges from
this narrative is emotionally aloof, at times cynical, but also someone with a
strong sense of where his moral compass should be and uncompromising on his
principles once he makes up his mind. If
I have to make criticism I’d say that the novel does not give you a good enough
idea of the rabid anti-Semitism that was affecting at least part of the French
society at the time. One, therefore, might wonder whether the decision of the
French army to make Drefus the fall guy was motivated only by cynical opportunism
of the army combined with the determination of the army generals to not be seen
to have made a mistake or whether some of the higher army officers were also
affected by the anti-Semite fervour. Harris
made the decision to make Picquart, and not Drefus, the hero of his story. Picquart,
in some ways an army-insider himself, and, more pertinently, is focused on the
injustice he felt was done to Drefus. Picquart is uninterested in the wider,
cultural ramifications of anti-Semitism that might have influenced the decision
of the French army to scapegoat Drefus. The absence of the details of
historical backdrop to the Drefus affair, thus, is understandable, but it still
seems like a gap.
The Drefus affair might have happened more than a century
ago, but it is still relevant in the twenty-first century. in the As I type
this, the Labour Party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, is embroiled in a controversy
whereby he stands accused of either deliberately being or allowing himself to
be the figurehead of racist Anti-Semitism within the Labour Party, particularly
amongst his noisy supporters).
An Officer and A Spy is a very satisfying read. It is a
historical novel which reads like a thriller. Very much recommended.
