Money, politics and power

The Wreckage,
Michael Robotham,
Sphere.

Reviewed by Nicky Pellegrino

It’s difficult to like Australian thriller writer Michael Robotham when he starts talking about how easily he became a bestselling novelist. Actually Robotham’s entire career is covetable. After a stellar stint as a journalist he turned to ghost-writing celebrity autobiographies and for a while life was all about dinner with Meg Ryan, hanging out at Elton John’s place or roller-blading with Geri Halliwell round her West London mansion. And then, in between working with Rolf Harris and Lulu, he knocked out 117 pages of a psychological thriller called The Suspect that publishers went crazy for and there was a fierce bidding war at the London Book Fair.

“It was pinch-me territory,” admits Robotham when I meet him for tea in a quiet corner of Auckland’s Langham Hotel, “and it was frightening, like being backed for favouritism in the Melbourne Cup without ever having run the distance. All these people had tremendous faith in me and I had no idea how to finish the book.”

Seven successful novels down the track, Sydney-based Robotham is as insecure as ever about his writing. “I’m motivated by the fear of failure more than anything else. With every book or article I’ve ever delivered I’ve been convinced this is the one that’s going to prove I don’t have a clue.’

And suddenly it’s hard not to like him. He’s self-deprecating, charming and with a fund of entertaining anecdotes. There’s the one about the time he made the mistake of telling customs officials in Europe that he was researching a novel about smuggling. “They took my rental car apart, every seat and door panel came out,’ he says.

Fortunately he hadn’t gone as far as attempting to smuggle for research purposes, but still it is something Robotham takes seriously. The journalist in him feels he needs to walk the streets and visit the places he writes about. So when his wife refused to let him go to Baghdad for research on his latest thriller The Wreckage (Sphere, $39.99) he was horrified. “I had to bite the bullet and do a lot of reading for research instead,’ he says.

The Wreckage is written around real-life facts. After Baghdad fell, $12 billion in hard currency was flown into Iraq, nine billion of which has never been accounted for. Meanwhile at the height of the global financial crisis western banks on the brink of collapse accepted $352 billion from drug cartels and crime gangs.

This book is Robotham’s fictional attempt to explain what went on, hung as much as possible on a framework of real events. It’s a big global story but he tells it in an intimate way through the lives of the people affected. There’s Luca Terracini the journalist trying to follow the trail of the missing money in Iraq and in London there’s a regular Robotham character, detective Vincent Ruiz, who rescues a woman from a violent boyfriend and realises she’s in serious danger for mysterious reasons. Plus there’s a heavily pregnant woman whose banker husband has disappeared. It’s page-turning stuff about money, politics and power that has bankers as its villains rather than the Cold War/ Mafia baddies of yesteryear.

“My books are all about motivation,” explains Robotham. “Even the villains have reasons for doing what they do - they’re never out and out bad. Personalities have so many layers – that’s something the ghost-writing gave me an insight to. There’s this idea we want to create three-dimensional characters when in truth everyone has got so many more dimensions than that.”

Far from being a fanatical plotter, Robotham has no idea where a book is going to go when he starts writing. This organic way of working means that more than once he’s got 30,000 words into a novel and realised he’s written himself off a cliff. Now he has plans to return to one of those abandoned manuscripts, a suddenly much more topical story about the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl.

“My wife won’t let me got there for research either,” he says mournfully.

Footnote:

Nicky Pellegrino is a succcesful Auckland-based author of popular fiction, The Italian Wedding was published in May 2009, Recipe for Lifewas published in April, 2010, while her latestThe Villa Girls, was published in April this year.

She is also the Books Editor of the Herald on Sunday where the above review was first published on 19 June, 2011 as was the Booklover column below:

Booklover

Alexander McCall Smith is the author of over 60 books and this month releases the latest in his 44 Scotland Street series, The Importance of Being Seven (Abacus, $29.99).

The book I love most is........WH Auden’s Collected Shorter Poems. Auden was one of the great humane voices of twentieth century literature. This collection embraces a wide selection of his poetry and includes the magnificent In Memory of Sigmund Freud and the gravely beautiful Lullaby. I never tire of Auden: what he said in the 1930s about his own time of crisis is as relevant today as it was then.

The book I'm reading right now is.......An Alchemy of Mind by Diane Ackerman

The book I'd like to read next is........The Moral Lives of Animals by Dale Peterson, which sounds fascinating – the author introduces the idea that animals have morality.

My favourite bookshop is.......Daunts, Marylebone High Street, London. It’s a wonderful original Edwardian bookshop, and I visit it every time I’m in London.

The book that changed me is......Again WH Auden’s Collected Shorter Poems. I remember the precise moment when I picked it off the shelf of a library. I had no idea at the time that this book would influence me so much. In fact, I think it changed my life, in that it very profoundly affected my outlook on so many things. Now I press that volume into the hands of anybody who asks me what to read.

The book I wish I'd never read is......I can’t think of one, I’m afraid!