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Journalist Jonathan Freedland |
A reporter’s
Bourne identity
Journalist Jonathan Freedland has a double life as a thriller writer
JONATHAN Freedland has viewed from a ringside seat some of the biggest events in international politics of the past couple of decades.
The Guardian journalist has covered beats in Washington and New York, and has also worked in the Middle East.
But it is the work he has produced under the alias Sam Bourne that brings him to the Jewish Book Week this year. As Bourne, the hard-news reporter has morphed into a thriller writer. Joined by murder mystery scribe Matt Rees, who has set his thrillers in the West Bank, Freedland will be discussing what prompted them to use the Middle East as a background for fiction.
Freedland recalls how he was inspired to turn his pen from heavyweight political tomes to pulp fiction thrillers. His first book, The Righteous Man, took some time to ferment: he first came up with the basic idea when he heard a tale as a child.
“There is a story within Jewish folklore that was passed on to me by my parents, and I had always thought it would make a wonderful book,” he recalls.
Then a posting in New York in the early 1990s gave him the setting for the story.
“I had been to Crown Heights in Brooklyn, and I thought this was a great place for a novel.”
Crown Heights contains an orthodox Jewish community, and Freedland was struck by the thriving Hassidic community – think Stamford Hill – in the middle of 21st-century world city.
He recalls: “In Crown Heights, the penny dropped: I suddenly had the basis for a novel.”
He told his agent about the idea – and was given short shrift.
“He told me to forget it until I had retired,” he says.
Penning fiction was quite a shift for him, His 1998 book Bring Home The Revolution is one of the clearest appraisals of Anglo-American political relations written in modern times. A thriller set in an orthodox Jewish community was an entirely different tack.
But the plot would not go away.
“The idea sat within me for another 10 years,” he says.
Then the Da Vinci Code made publishers desperate to find the next Dan Brown. While discussing Brown with his agent, his idea came into the conversation again.
“I caught him at a vulnerable moment,” he laughs. “He said: don’t talk to me about it, just write it.”
He says writing thrillers is a tough proposition – as hard as making sense of the political issues he covers on a daily basis.
“I take it seriously and it is proper work,” he says. This means using his reporting skills to ensure the thrillers ring true. “People have said reading the book feels like being in Jerusalem,” he admits.
“The book has a backdrop of the Palestinian and Israeli conflict – therefore I had a lot of material and knowledge I could use.
“I went to Jerusalem to do the research and visited the places where I was going to set scenes. I had been there with my notebook in hand – it felt familiar. It was similar to journalistic research.”
He is currently working on his third book. Set in London it features Camden Town and Holloway. Without revealing the story, he says it deals with a true tale that deals with the “last great secret of World War Two”.
His most recent offering as Sam Bourne is The Last Testament. While watching the tragic events unfolding in Iraq after the 2003 invasion, he was intrigued by the idea of the museum of Baghdad – a repository for some of the oldest artefacts in the history of human civilisation – being ransacked and what the looters may discover in long-forgotten vaults.
His story focuses on a teenage boy who disappears from the museum clutching an ancient clay tablet – an artefact that could unravel a long-forgotten biblical mystery, and help the ongoing crisis in the Middle East.
“I felt confident that my fiction could be fair to both sides. That is after all what I do in my journalism,’ he says.
“I wanted to bring out out the idea that what is right is not on either side, it is on both sides. There are extremists on both sides and then there are those ready to compromise” he said.
DAN CARRIER
• Jonathan Freedland and Matt Rees will be
discussing their work at 8.30pm on Wednesday February 27 |
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