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Buy it on Amazon.
How’s this for irony? “An Officer and a Spy” is about a soldier who is fraudulently judged, an officer who learns the truth, a truth that is suppressed, and a writer who exposes the real crime.
“J’accuse” is a film of that book. It was directed by Roman Polanski, who committed a sexual crime against a minor in Los Angeles in the 1970s and at least one more in Europe more recently. It was a major hit in France. It was nominated for a dozen César Awards https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/28/movies/roman-polanski-cesar-awards-france.html?action=click&module=Latest&pgtype=Homepage — the French equivalent of the American Academy Awards — and won two, including two for Polanski: Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay. This was not a popular choice. Women protested. Some walked out of the awards ceremony. Others took to the streets with a fervor that inspired the police to fire tear gas. Like this:
But that’s not the ironic event. It’s this: We can’t see this film. No English or American distributor will take it on. The Spectator sums the situation up:
The real-life Dreyfus, a scapegoated Jew, was literally erased: the military sent him to Devil’s Island to torture him, and also to make him disappear from French consciousness: he was used as a proxy to avoid confronting corruption at the heart of the general staff. Now the movie Dreyfus is being erased in countries that sorely need to relearn the malign consequences of religious bigotry, groupthink and censorship. The effective banning –— what else can we call it? —– of ‘An Officer and a Spy’ cries out for an Émile Zola to denounce it. British readers should remember that when Zola was convicted of libel by a French court for his famous essay ‘J’Accuse!’ he fled to safety in liberal England, where he spent a year in exile.
Watch the trailer. See what we’re missing.
There are few black-and-white issues in life. I have no sympathy for a man who uses his power to dominate women for sexual advantage. On the other hand, I want to see this film.
Reality check: there is a book. And if you like historical fiction that reads like a thriller, “An Officer and a Spy” is your next book.
Robert Harris explains: “My novel is essentially what happened. I don’t really embroider the truth. I have to simplify, but none of the main things didn’t happen. I thought this story can only be told as a thriller. That is what it is. You wouldn’t believe it in a novel of social realism.”
He’s right. In a standard-issue, third-person novelization of an historical event, you’d say the author has political and moral points to make and he’s skewed the facts to make them. Or, more simply, you’d say it’s all made up, that people don’t act this way. But they do. They did. And I, hater of long books, gobbled up “An Officer and a Spy” at the gargantuan length of 150,000 words and 425 pages.
You know the story. “L’affaire Dreyfus,” the Dreyfus Affair. In 1894, the only Jewish officer in France is convicted of passing military secrets to the Germans and sent to Devil’s Island, where he is the only prisoner. But he’s innocent. Four years later, Emile Zola publishes “J’accuse,” exposing a cover-up at the highest levels of the Army. Dreyfus is pardoned. In 1906, as “a soldier who has endured an unparalleled martyrdom,” he is awarded the Legion d’honneur.
You knew all that. What you don’t know is who first realized Dreyfus was innocent. And how he came to realize that. And what he did. And what happened to him.
So let’s start at the beginning… of the novel. Robert Harris, author of such bestselling thrillers as “Enigma” and “Fatherland,” starts on January 5, 1895. A crowd — no, a mob: 4,000 soldiers and 20,000 citizens — watches as a soldier rips the epaulettes, buttons and braids from Dreyfus’s uniform and breaks Dreyfus’s sword. But Dreyfus is not broken. “Long live France!” he shouts. “I swear I am innocent!” The crowd’s response: “Traitor! Death to the Jew!” And Dreyfus is taken off to spend the rest of his life in prison. And that, the government hopes, is the end of Dreyfus. A French officer: “What does it matter to you if some Jew is stuck on Devil’s Island?”
To make sure the Dreyfus family is not continuing to plot against France, the Army assigns Georges Picquant to continue the government’s investigation. A bad choice, for the truth does matter to Picquant, a Major in the French Army, a man almost certainly unknown to you. Robert Harris: “Picquart was an extraordinary figure. He spoke six languages. As a young man, he was a fan of Dostoevsky and had a letter back from him. He met Proust and I’m pretty certain he met Zola before ‘J’accuse.’ He was a very good friend of Gustav Mahler. He was tremendously handsome, with a lot of female lovers. He was part of that Proustian world of the belle époque.”
If I say more, I do you no favors. [To buy the paperback from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here. For the audiobook, click here.]
Beyond the plot twists of Picquant’s investigation and the Army’s response and Picquant’s astonishing refusal to be broken by the Army he served and loved, what’s the appeal? Simple: some things don’t change. A crime against justice and a cover-up of that crime — that didn’t end with Dreyfus.
“And that’s the great lesson of the whole affair,” Harris says. “Any institution, be it government, the army, a corporation — the moment that people within it convince themselves that it’s all right to lie for the greater good, they will proceed to do it and go on doing it until either they succeed or they are exposed.”
You can, Harris believes, see in the Dreyfus story the start of “the monstrosities” of the 20th Century. If you dare, you may also see this as a book that has something to say to our own.
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