Tomorrow sees the launch party for Henry Porter’s gripping The Dying Light which leaves the reader wondering at the end about what he – or she – would have done, in the most satisfactory way. As The Economist put it in a professional book review, “For those who like political thrillers, this is one of the season’s best: scary, informative and, alas, eminently believable.”
In case a declaration of interest is necessary, Henry was completing the proofs and all those demanding final re-writes of The Dying Light while he was directing the Convention on Modern Liberty with me (and I know how hard he worked at that), publishing his Observer column every fortnight, launched and wrote his Guardian blog while going to the States as the London Editor of Vanity Fair. I have to admit that it crossed my mind that no-one could manage to write a good novel as well.
He has excelled even himself. There is a small dark power that haunts this land. The power of the Prime Minister to call an election at his own timing, manipulating events in the interests of accumulating and continuing a personal influence that is rooted in kingship not democracy. We are witnessing the ruthless exercise of the power now by the PM’s Faustian proxy who longs to be himself officially known by his initials. The fact that it can be buggered up by incompetence (see October 2007) does not make it any the less dangerous. Someone can shoot themselves in the toe without taking away from their gun its potential as a murder weapon.
I never thought anyone would weave this dark power into a credible thriller. Not only does The Dying Light achieve this it also pulls off another quietly brilliant expose that only dawns upon the reader gradually. The Dying Light is set in the near future with an all too believable Prime Minister who has elements of Blair and Major about him, being run close by an opposition party that is… You are well into the book before you realise that you don’t know which political party the PM represents or what the opposition stands for: they could be Tory and Labour or Labour and Tory. Something that makes the story all the more believable.
If I pick out these two political points because they are so original, while the larger dark power the heroine finds herself threatened with is the surveillance society itself. It is wonderfully done - and there is a dubious player over whom a question hangs: the British people.
