I always open the envelope with great excitement when I know that the latest edition of Red Herrings (the CWA newsletter) drops though the letterbox. Excitement turned to sadness when the cover revealed that the great C.J. Sansom had died. He was my model author. He was the author I most aspire to be compared to. The comparison would inevitably find me wanting, because he was the greatest, is the greatest. Books, at least, are immortal, even if authors aren’t.
C.J. Sansom was, as the CWA obituary says, a man with a very strong moral compass. I’m going to quote a paragraph of his from the historical note at the end of Dominion, a book which looked at Britain in an alternative world, where Nazi Germany had conquered and occupied Britain.
“I find it heartbreaking – literally heartbreaking – that my own country, Britain, which was less prone to domestic nationalist extremism between the wars than most, is increasingly falling victim to the ideologies of nationalist parties. The larger ones are not racialist, but they share the belief that national identity is the issue of fundamental, overriding importance in politics; it is the atavistic notion that nationhood can, somehow, allow people to bound free from oppression – nationalism always defines itself against some enemy ‘other’ – and solve all their problems. UKIP promises a future that will somehow be miraculously golden if Britain simply walks away from the European Union. (To what? To trade with whom?)”
John Le Carré, another of my favourite authors, died an Irishman. He was so furious about Brexit that he researched his family’s Irish roots and found he was entitled to an Irish passport. The last book of his that I read, A Legacy of Spies, is the final George Smiley novel. When Smiley is asked to explain what the Cold War had all been about he explains – ‘So was it all for England, then?’ he resumed. ‘There was a time, of course there was. But whose England? Which England? England all alone, a citizen of nowhere? I’m a European, Peter. If I had a mission – if I was ever aware of one beyond our business with the enemy, it was to Europe. If I was heartless, I was heartless for Europe. If I had an unattainable ideal, it was of leading Europe out of her darkness towards a new age of reason. I have it still.’
We are poorer today, for many reasons, not least the loss of giants like C.J. Sansom and John le Carré.