The drive for power leads to deceit. Soon moral ruin comes in its train, then violence, then murder. This cycle of high hopes rolling down to hell in a handcart is probably plot No 2 in literature. (Plot No 1 being girl meets boy, etc.) Corruption of the soul, of the heart, of men, of power, of ideals and idealism has been at the dead centre of so many great books it’s kind of invidious to pick a top 10. Still, here we are.
My first thriller, Cold, touches on how too much veneration for God and soil - love of nation - can corrupt. The hero is an ex-IRA man, one of his allies an ex-Mormon CIA man wrestling with his religion. But events in modern Russia inspired it: things I’ve seen with my own eyes from Chechnya to Moscow, from Siberia to Sochi. It’s not about Putin, but while working as a journalist, I’ve met him and three of his critics: Anna Politkovskaya, Natasha Estemirova and Boris Nemtsov. They all got murdered, reason enough to dedicate Cold to their memories. Below is my idiosyncratic selection of the books that pass two tests: they’re all great reads, and their subjects are rotten to the core.
1. Macbeth by William Shakespeare
It still grips me, this play written in 1611 about a Scottish nobleman corrupted by the lust for power who goes on to kill a good king and - to secure his grip on the throne - keeps on killing. Rereading Macbeth, you get the flavour of what it must be like to be at the court of Kim Jong-un in Pyongyang, or of Al Baghdadi in Daeshland: “It will have blood, they say; blood will have blood.”
2. Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler
The outstanding novel about how the Russian revolution became twisted by Stalinism. It’s great literature, but at its heart is the corruption of a human soul, as the great revolutionary Rubashov allows himself to be ruined - and ruin others he loves - to serve an ideal. When people rot, Koestler tells us, they do so from within.
3. Chinatown by Robert Towne
Picking a screenplay is a cheat. Yeah, but it’s Chinatown. To me, this is the defining work of art about the corruption that is the essence of LA; the living, breathing, pulsing dishonesty of Tinseltown. At the dead centre of the American Dream is a lie, a city built on wrongdoing. When power indulges in murder, hypocrisy and paedophilia, the forces of law and order don’t just look the other way, they entrap the honest detective. He ends up with slit nostrils. The helplessness of ordinary people in the face of corrupt entitlement has never been better told.
4. Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices from the Afghan War by Svetlana Alexievich
The 2015 Nobel laureate’s stunning work on the Soviet agony in Afghanistan is simply written but no less profound for that. She tells the stories of individual soldiers and Soviet citizens, in Kabul and elsewhere, coming to realise that the ideals of fraternity and solidarity the old men in Moscow spout are toxic. It’s a lament for a noble idealism that turned sick. The boys were sent home in zinc coffins - hence the title.
5. Bare-Faced Messiah by Russell Miller
This extraordinary biography of L Ron Hubbard tells the gobsmacking truth about the greatest conman of the 20th century, a title for which there’s a lot of competition. Miller considers Scientology’s boasts about their founder and on critical examination, all of it - that L Ron was a war hero, an explorer, a nuclear scientist (and not a bigamist) - turns to dust. But at a higher level, the book tells us something about how feeding the longing for a god can, if corrupted, get very, very crooked indeed.
6. Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene
In this satire on the fantasy land of the intelligence agencies, specifically MI6 (for whom Greene worked), the urge to make a bit of money on the side in a corrupt and seedy pre-Castro Cuba entraps the hero. He ends up constructing a web of deceit that envelops him and others to their cost. It’s the under-told story that too many James Bonds are on the take.
7. The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
Into the city with no more personality than a paper cup, Chandler’s genius was to place a knight in battered armour, a heavy-drinking, chess-playing Sir Galahad transposed to 1940s LA. In this reworking of the Knights of the Round Table, Mordred is the city’s immoral rich, his thanes bent cops and smooth-talking, grey-suited mobsters. A corrupt city has never been so skilfully drawn.
8. Maxwell: The Rise and Fall of Robert Maxwell and His Empire by Roy Greenslade
The sickly sweet corruption of journalists in thrall to an ogre from a medieval fairy story, Greenslade’s account of the madness of those under the monstrous whim of King Bob is hilarious and tragic, both at the same time. But as newspaper finances collapse, this book also salutes print journalism’s richer, funnier, ignoble past.
9. The War Diaries of Count Galeano Ciano
Vainglorious, conceited, sometimes silly, Count Ciano was Mussolini’s foreign minister and son-in-law. Grubby, on the make and with a love of the good life, Ciano was a fairweather fascist who understood the far deeper evil of Nazi Germany and did his ineffective best to save Italy’s honour and overthrow his father-in-law, for a time. When the Nazis rescued Mussolini, Ciano was shot in the back on the orders of the old man. But his diaries record Italy’s descent from corruption into something far worse, providing posterity a window into Mussolini’s dark soul.
10. The Unravelling by Emma Sky
Sky, a punky, anti-war English liberal, provides a ringside seat from within the US military to the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq and the moral quagmire into which the west’s great warriors sank. The funny thing is that eventually the Americans corrected some of their mistakes with the surge and got enough boots on the ground to end murderous chaos and restore order. Then Obama came in - and the US left Iraq in the hands of a hopelessly incompetent sectarian, paving the way for Daesh. This is a nicely told morality tale, of how high hopes of installing democracy ended up souring and corrupting the American soul.
— guardian.co.uk (c) Guardian News & Media Ltd, 2016
