An Officer and a Spy

Paris, 1895: an army officer, Georges Picquart, watches a convicted spy, Alfred Dreyfus, being publicly humiliated in front of a baying crowd.

Dreyfus is exiled for life to Devil's Island; Picquart is promoted to run the intelligence unit that tracked him down.

But when Picquart discovers that secrets are still being handed over to the Germans, he is drawn into a dangerous labyrinth of deceit and corruption that threatens not just his honour but his life...

"The Dreyfus Affair constitutes one of those moments of history that a lot people know of rather than much about."  How true, I have heard The Dreyfus Affair referred to over the years but never really known what it concerned.  Because even among well educated people, amongst which I am fortunate to count myself,  there's often little more than a headline understanding of the issues of anti-Semitism that it embodies and a French miscarriage of justice, Devil's Island and Emile Zola's famous attack on the French establishment's conspiracy against the Jewish army officer, Alfred Dreyfus: J'accuse.

But the real story is like something from the imagination of Alexandre Dumas, full of intrigue, wrongful imprisonment and heroic effort to establish the truth. In other words, it's a thriller and there is no more deft hand at work in that genre than Robert Harris. However unlike previous Harris thrillers, An Officer and a Spy is not a hypothetical historical account, but, save for a few small fictional details, an almost documentary-like assemblage of what actually took place.

Dreyfus was convicted of passing secrets to the Germans in 1895 and sent to solitary confinement on Devil's Island, where he was forbidden even to speak to his guards. But he was an innocent fall guy, fingered by the military and the government because he was conveniently Jewish, while the real culprit was allowed to continue at dissolute liberty to avoid the embarrassment of the public knowledge that there was a non-Jewish – ie authentic French – spy in the army.

          
The hero of the piece, however, is not Dreyfus, who despite his dreadful suffering, is a minor and not particularly sympathetic character. Instead, Harris unearths the tale of Georges Picquart, the French officer who initially played a part in Dreyfus's arrest, only to be struck by a growing suspicion that the wrong man had been sent away. Although not without his own flaws, including a glint of antisemitism, Picquart is a man who can't let anything lie – even when it is beneficial to him. After Dreyfus's incarceration he is made head of a secret intelligence unit called the "statistical section". But he finds himself a victim of a sinister campaign when he begins to ask uncomfortable questions.
While finely attuned to modern resonances of surveillance, cultural identity and patriotic loyalty, Harris stays true to the atmosphere and morals of the period. He has crafted a compelling narrative of state corruption and individual principle, and a memorable whistleblower whose stubborn call can still be heard more than a century later.

Reading this in these post-EU-Referendum days, and in the immediate aftermath of the election of Trump to the White House and the stomach-churning images of Farage cosying up to the President-elect, the cover-up that the French military and secret service exacted makes me think of the turmoil within and outside our own Parliament over the result of the vote, the apparent determination of the Prime Minister and her immediate entourage to railroad Brexit through and most disturbing of all for me is the unprincipled stepping into line of all those MPs in the Tory Party and Labour who are trotting out the lame expressions 'the people have spoken' and 'respecting the will of the British people'.  It makes my blood boil.  That they put the power of their political parties before the good of the country is incredible.  "But that's politics" someone said to me the other day.  The dark side of politics...........