Interview: Ronan Bennett

Ronan Bennett, who grew up a republican activist in Northern Ireland, has never lost the urge to speak out politically. His latest novel is about chess and terrorism

In 1974, Ronan Bennett, an 18-year-old Irish republican revolutionary, was wrongly convicted of murdering an RUC officer and spent 18 months in Long Kesh prison (later renamed the Maze). He has told the story of his arrest and imprisonment many times, and doesn't like to go over it again ("I'm worried that I can no longer bring to it any kind of outrage," he says). But he still quotes a remark made to him inside by an older prisoner, to the effect that novels were nothing but "bourgeois nonsense": all that mattered was direct action to further the cause.

Bennett took the comment to heart, and gave up reading fiction for a decade - before realising that writing novels was not only something he felt driven to do, but an effective way for him to "play a part" politically.

Having published his fifth novel, Zugzwang, to enthusiastic reviews, and written numerous screenplays - the latest for Michael Mann in Hollywood - he continues to say he "couldn't justify to myself writing a novel unless it had a political relevance. My fiction has to be about more than aesthetics, more than character, and more even than the 'human condition'."

Yet Bennett has for a long while been aware of the potential aesthetic drawbacks of strong belief: "The issue for me," he reflects, when we meet near his home in Hackney, east London, "is how do I make the comments that I want to make about what's going on around me, using fiction, but so that the fiction doesn't suffer ... The constant struggle is: how far can I push this?" He wants to address social and economic problems, "but not in a sloganeering way".

His novels, as a result, make use of allegory and parallel: the most recent have "discussed some aspect of the present world by telling a story in the past". The Catastrophist (1997), which was nominated for the Whitbread award, deals with the Belgian Congo on the eve of independence, but as a study in colonialism takes more than a sideways glance at the Irish Troubles. Havoc, in its Third Year (2004) considers the rise of Puritanism in a 17th-century English town, but also speaks to contemporary issues of intolerance and legal injustice.

Zugzwang, which first appeared in instalments in the Observer, is a political thriller set in St Petersburg on the eve of the first world war - a time when Jews came under suspicion of being Bolshevik terrorists. "I was intrigued by the anti-semitic rhetoric of the day," Bennett has explained. "Why, Russians asked, were Jews so keen on terrorism? Why did they want to destroy western civilisation?" A British Muslim reading the novel "might nod his head in recognition". His expressed aim was again to tackle "the big issues confronting us", and the novel examines, among other things, the unholy methods used by powerful intelligence agencies. ("Zugzwang" is a chess term that describes the desperate state of a player who, whatever move he makes, can only worsen his position - a powerful metaphor for the "war on terror".)

Yet Bennett also wanted to write a pacy, plot-driven detective story, and each instalment was designed to end on a cliff-hanger, in the manner of the Victorian blockbusters. It was an increasingly panicky process, and many of the instalments have been substantially revised ("I knew that Chapter 8 was terrible ... it was too expositional ... I had people providing explanations rather than things unfolding naturally").

His starting point was the extraordinary Polish chess grandmaster Akiba Rubinstein, perhaps the strongest player in the world in 1914, but who imagined flies buzzing around his head, and was so shy he would leave the table as soon as he had made a move, thinking his presence odious to his opponent. Bennett, who co-writes a chess column in this newspaper, had for years wanted to write about the glamour that in those days adhered to world chess tournaments, and in particular about Rubinstein, whose extreme self-effacement he has always found compelling and who played "with a certain kind of beauty".

Zugzwang's protagonist is Otto Spethmann, an apolitical psychoanalyst who tries to cure Rozenthal (the Rubinstein character), and who is reluctantly drawn into the political intrigues of pre-revolutionary St Petersburg. The novel, as Bennett confirms, is not his first to raise the question of "what a good man does in an extreme situation - what is the right moral choice for him to make ... if he considers himself to be basically decent?"

Bennett's writerly energy has often been focused on flawed heroes, or idealists who have lost their way - individuals who don't always meet their own high standards, but who represent the demands of social justice. "Because of my own experiences, I'm really interested in only these kinds of characters," he has said: "I can't do the chameleon thing." His own life has often appeared in a coded, dismantled form in his novels and screenplays, and it's hardly surprising, given the embattled nature of his early years, and the controversy he has attracted by his outspoken republicanism, that he says he has "never written from the point of view of someone who's secure or comfortable".

Bennett was born in 1956 and raised in Belfast by his Catholic mother; his Protestant father left home when his son was a few years old. Bennett went to St Mary's Christian Brothers school on the Lower Falls Road, where he became politically active as he experienced what he later referred to as the "endemic violence and hatred" of Northern Ireland in the early 1970s. After his spell in Long Kesh, he left for England, where his friends were "voluble, if unsophisticated, young enemies of the state": activists, anarchists, revolutionary socialists. "I squatted," he recalls. "I worked in a bookies ... I went to Paris and hung around with Chilean refugees ... I demonstrated, talked a lot of bollocks and wrote articles I would never want to re-read now."

Before long, he was arrested again. Police raided his Bayswater flat and found a copy of The Anarchist Cookbook, along with wigs, false moustaches, balaclavas and false documents. Bennett was accused of leading a terrorist gang and charged with the legendary offence of "conspiring to commit crimes unknown against persons unknown in places unknown". He spent 20 months on remand, sometimes in solitary confinement.

At his 14-week trial at the Old Bailey - which became notorious as the "anarchists' trial" and the "persons unknown trial" - Bennett took the unusual decision to defend himself. "I really enjoyed it and would have enjoyed it even more had I known we would be acquitted. The judge let me sit with the advocates, so it was Michael Mansfield, Helena Kennedy, Geoffrey Robertson and me. They were in full legal gear, I was in T-shirt and jeans."

By all accounts his performance was measured and impressive, and, following his acquittal, he thought of pursuing a career in law, but instead started a history degree at King's College London. He stayed to complete a doctorate on crime and law enforcement in 17th-century England, discovering material he later drew on for Havoc, in its Third Year. ("I'm far more proud of the novel than I am of the PhD.")

When he hit 30, after leaving King's, he wondered: "What am I going to do? It was the only time in my life I felt unhappy and unsettled." During his 20s he thought himself more experienced than his peers, even "invincible" - "I had been interrogated at length on three occasions and come through OK" - but, he says, he increasingly realised his experiences were in other ways very limited.

He threw himself into the campaign to free the Guildford Four and also began to write a series of percipient articles for the British press arguing the benefits of dialogue with Gerry Adams and the real possibility of a peaceful Ireland. The IRA had yet to end its bombing campaigns, but Bennett stood square against the orthodoxy that any negotiation with Sinn Fein amounted to a surrender to terrorism. He was accordingly accused in the right-wing press of being an IRA stooge (he had made it clear that he never had any connection with the paramilitaries).

He even castigated other writers from Northern Ireland for not expressing the complexity of the Troubles in their work, and for pandering to the "British point of view" that the conflict was a tragedy of tribal sectarianism and therefore insoluble - "that it was a question not of politics, but simply of hatred. These were men of violence, the thinking went: they just wanted to kill."

His first novel, The Second Prison (1991), features a young Irishman who is charged with conspiracy against "persons unknown". Bennett recalls the elation he felt when his agent, Tessa Sayle, told him it would be published, especially as "I wasn't plugged into that world ... nobody ever said when I was at school that you could be anything other than a bus driver, and I was embarrassed to be writing a novel." Two years later, Loves Lies Bleeding, a TV drama about an IRA killer serving a life sentence, was much admired. Directed by Michael Winterbottom and starring Mark Rylance, it "really worked", Bennett says, and doors began to open for him.

The Catastrophist was even more of a breakthrough. Critics praised the interweaving of the dramatic events in the Congo with the relationship between the phlegmatic writer James Gillespie and the "vital, subversive, impatient" Italian journalist Ines Sabiani. Comparisons began to be made with Graham Greene.

These successes helped him achieve what he calls a kind of "normalisation" of his life. But controversy was always close at hand. In 2000, David Trimble tried to prevent the screening of Rebel Heart, a Bennett-scripted BBC drama about the Easter rising, claiming that it was "hopelessly one-sided", and that the author was "a most unsuitable person" to have received the BBC's imprimatur. Word began to reach him "of writers, academics and journalists trying to persuade editors and producers not to commission me". He had run-ins with Charles Moore, then editor of the Daily Telegraph, and Boris Johnson at the Spectator.

With the outbreak of peace in Northern Ireland he has ceased to be the subject of witch-hunts, though he raised eyebrows in some quarters by attempting to see beyond the "shorthand descriptions" of the 9/11 hijackers as "fanatics, cowards and evildoers". (He co-wrote the screenplay for The Hamburg Cell, a film released in 2004, which imagines the life of an al-Qaeda group as they prepare for the suicide attacks.) He has criticised Blair and Brown from the left, and finds obvious parallels between the Irish situation and the war on terror, not least, in relation to Iraq, the fact that "foreign troops and civilians don't mix".

"I have political views that most people don't share," he says, "but I have realised that if all is in place aesthetically, you can write what you want." Works-in-progress include "a non-melodramatic drama" about newspapers for the BBC and a script about the lives of children in Hackney, where his own children are growing up. His next novel will look into the death of a child in custody ("the UK sends more children to prison than any other country in Europe").

And then there's the flourishing career in film. After Bennett sent in his first Hollywood script a few years ago, his agent phoned him sounding much relieved: "Ronan, this is great," he enthused. "I mean, it's political, of course, but not scary political."

Inspirations

Belfast Catholic family

Long Kesh

Soledad Brother by George Jackson

Graham Greene

The Times They Are a-Changing by Bob Dylan

Contributor

Paul Laity

The GuardianTramp

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