Writers are frequently advised to shape their stories along conventional lines. This means simplify the plot-line, eliminate descriptive passages, emphasize and extend action, minimize characterization and forget sub-plots. This sort of well-intentioned advice is apt to transform a book into a film script. Not a bad move, you say. That’s true, unless you wanted to write a book.
Coming to writing at a time when the formalities of such instruction were unavailable I was likely to break one or the other of these rules: sometimes all of them in one go. I suppose many writers are drawn to the problems of characterization. That certainly was my prime interest; not just the characterization of the central characters but of spear-carriers too. Until Berlin Game I had fretted and struggled as I tried to retain the pace of the action while expanding the reality of the people in the story. To give my characters a real, or at least a convincing, life demanded more space. Did giving them a domestic dimension mean pressing the pause button in order to relate the dull routines of mortgages, electric bills, children’s ailments and traffic jams? No, that is not the way to treat your readers unless you just don’t care about them; and in that case you should be writing literary novels.
I have always been a planner. I remain in awe of writers who complete a book in ten days as friends of mine do. And even more wide-eyed to hear others proclaim that they customarily don’t know how their stories will end until they are writing the final chapter. I am far too timid for that kind of perilous pursuit.
My writing life is littered with the notes of abandoned stories, and Berlin Game had been balanced on the lid of the litterbin for a long time. The basic idea attracted me very much but there were problems that I’d not been able to crack. It was while on the final stages of Goodbye Mickey Mouse, a story about American fighter pilots flying out of England during the war, that I went back to some ideas about the man I came to call Bernard Samson. Goodbye Mickey Mouse had been described as ‘a romantic war story’ and although that seemed a surprising verdict at the time, I could not deny its validity. It was intended to be a book about a father and his son but for many readers the son’s love affair with his English girlfriend dominated the book. The meetings of a variety of English characters with equally varied American airmen were just as important as the air battles. Yet, more than once, I regretted not being able to integrate the English characters with the battlefield conditions at the airbase. Why hadn’t I cast the girlfriend as a nurse, or as a radio operator with an ear to the men fighting and dying? Well that was another sort of book, and it was just as well I didn’t write it because it was not the sort of book I wanted to read and that’s always a deciding factor.
But out of these ponderings came the idea that one could have a story in which wives and girlfriends were shoulder to shoulder with the fighting men. What about superior to them and in authority over them? And why not a spy story? I had a head filled with real-life espionage stories and Berlin was like a second home for me. I had good contacts on both sides of the Wall and my wonderful wife spoke German like a native. Now the domestic dimension would not be so domestic. Pillow talk would concern matters of life and death. Fidelity would not just be to the marriage vows but to the Official Secrets Act too. I scribbled these notes on the blank side of a US Air Force document that confirmed that I was physically fit enough to fly back-seat in a Phantom jet fighter. This was the beginning of Berlin Game.
I became so invigorated at the format I was drafting that I dismissed the idea of confining it to one book. What about a trilogy? Wait! What about two trilogies? Why not make a wall chart and see what it all looked like? That is what I did. This must not be a continuing series; all the books must be standalone stories, with no dependence on anything that had gone before or anything that might come afterwards. Impossible? No, just hard work.
Speaking as a reader of books rather than as a writer, I have always measured a book’s success by the way in which the characters were affected by events as the story progressed. This ‘development’, the way that experience changes the people in the story, is an important repayment to the reader for the time and effort he or she has given to you and your book. Change is not to be measured in elapsed time. For the Berlin family depicted in Winter almost half a century passed before the final page was completed. In Bomber, the airmen, and the German civilians under attack from the air, changed just as radically in little more than 24 hours.
So the prospect of planning and writing many books using the same characters (each of them aging and changing) was both attractive and daunting. They would grow older; perhaps wiser, or perhaps more foolish, or bitter. They would suffer setbacks and ailments; delight, sudden death and despair. And in fiction, as in real life, there was no going back. An inconvenient death in book number three was not something I could rectify in book number four. For all those reasons the writing of Berlin Game, the first book, required more preparatory work than any of the subsequent ones. Here were the people – the foundation – upon which the Bernard Samson stories would be built and balanced. Vague characterizations might have provided a way of keeping the options open. Better to start off with strongly realized people who would clash and caper according to rapidly changing events. Anyone who spent much time in Berlin’s eastern sector – and the Zone too – could not fail to see that Germany’s communist regime was shaky, although shaky regimes repressive enough sometimes continue for a long time. I certainly had no dates in mind but, as I have depicted in the books, there was a weakening of resolve and the regime was becoming more impoverished every day. Fundamentally agricultural, with no exports worth consideration, and a middle class with no income worth taxing, the DDR was a living corpse. I had previously written of the likelihood of the two Germanys becoming a Federation. The bureaucrats of both regimes were comparing pension plans and the border guards were shooting fewer escapers, which had to be a good sign. While people in the West were talking about, and even admiring the stability of the so-called German Democratic Republic, its rotten fabric was there for anyone who wasn’t wearing pink-coloured glasses. I was further convinced of all this when mingling with the drunks on Ascension Day and this is an experience that inspired the final chapters of Berlin Game. Collapse was sure to come eventually but little did I guess that the Wall would come down with such a spectacular crash. Telling the story of this amazing period was an opportunity that could not be ignored.
You can see what a wonderful life I have enjoyed. Melvyn Bragg once interviewed me and told the TV audience that I was the hardest working writer he had ever met. I was delighted; but he was wrong; I have never worked at all. Wrestling with the problems of writing books