Lying in state

How often does one come across an author who deals primarily in the thriller...

How often does one come across an author who deals primarily in the thriller, yet misses out on major commercial success, but gets nominated for two Bookers, and traverses multiple genres, earning critical approval as a writer of mainstream, crime, espionage and historical fiction? One did in Julian Rathbone, who died on February 28 in Hampshire.

An echo of the title, A Spy of the Old School 1982, ran through Rathbone8217;s career, hinged on his very 19th-century faith in the primacy of the writer8217;s imagination. Rathbone was an outsider, somewhat like the mongrels of history he created, somewhat a lonely spy, who didn8217;t quite do the expected. He rather used the faccedil;ade of the thriller to spy on the more fundamental questions of life and the historical contexts that defined them. His thrillers would tend to uncanny depths while his more ostensibly serious fiction might flaunt a theme of crime. By the same token, he wouldn8217;t keep the present out of his historical fiction.

Rathbone was born in Blackheath, London, in 1935 and was the great nephew of the Basil Rathbone of Sherlock Holmes fame. At Magdalene College in Cambridge, he took a tutorial with F.R. Leavis, but despite his lifelong regard for the man, never became a Leavisite. Three years spent teaching in Turkey made him a libertarian leftist and he set his first four novels there. King Fisher Lives was his first contender for the Booker in 1976, a feat matched by Joseph in 1979, the latter set in Spain during the Peninsular War. But it was perhaps Graham Greene8217;s Rathbone8217;s most obvious influence praise for Lying in State 1985 that came the closest to his sense of creative fulfilment. The Last English King 1997, the most commercially successful of Rathbone8217;s historical novels, fictionalises the Norman invasion from the Saxon perspective while his last work, The Mutiny 2007, studies the Indian revolt of 1857.

It will always be difficult to place Rathbone in literary history and genre. With a long-dead century8217;s convictions in his bones, he was yet a post-modernist demolishing every constrictive influence on fiction and tuning his books to the dialogue between playfulness and seriousness. Not surprisingly, he looked at art as subversive and frivolous. But his artistic frivolity is deadly serious. Regardless of how literary history treats him, if the novel can only be about itself and yet be a universe unto itself, then Rathbone8217;s works examine themselves and also confirm our Bakhtinian belief in polyphony.