Read all about it!
Nicholas Coleridge
THE FOURTH ESTATE by Jeffrey Archer HarperCollins, £16.99, pp. 550 With this novel, not very loosely based on the careers and rivalries of Rupert Mur- doch and Robert Maxwell, Jeffrey Archer has invented a new literary form. It reads like the novelisation of the screenplay of a fictionalised biography, or rather two biographies, since he has drawn liberally on William Shawcross's Murdoch: Ringmaster of the Information Circus and Roy Greenslade's Maxwell's Fall.
The opening chapters in which Richard Armstrong, a Ruthenian Jew born Lubji Hoch, contemplates suicide on his yacht as his media empire disintegrates, and his Australian arch-rival, Keith Townsend, faces ruin when a small mid-West Ameri- can bank hesitates over a loan reschedule, are so reminiscent of Shawcross and Greenslade's accounts that they scarcely qualify as fiction at all.
Here lies the novel's strength and weak- ness. Since we already know so much about the two tycoons, Archer needs to supply lit- tle in the way of fine writing to make them plausible. Armstrong/Maxwell is a fat bully, eats several breakfasts, spoons caviar at his desk, bonks his secretaries, bugs meetings, fires editors by telephone from his helipad etc, while Townsend/Murdoch is the son of a knighted Australian newspaper owner, goes up to Oxford and forms a dim view of the British Establishment, buys a lot of newspapers and sensationalises them, fires a few editors etc. There is no credibility problem, no requirement for Archer to establish motivation or build up character, since the reader accepts such people exist.
The downside, of course, is that we already know what's going to happen. There is never the slightest doubt, from the moment Lubji Hoch becomes a brilliant bargainer in the local Douski market and flees the Nazis on a tramp-steamer to Liv- erpool, that he's going to end up the loser. Similarly, through all his reverses, we know Townsend/Murdoch is going to pull through. In this respect, The Fourth Estate is less successful as a cliffhanger than Archer's Kane and Abel, in which you had to wait and see whether the polyglot refugee or the East Coast toff would tri- umph.
Given that so much of the novel is fac- tion, it leaves you wondering about the periodic invented scenes. Was Rupert Mur- doch really seduced by his headmaster's daughter in the cricket pavilion? It is virtu- ally the only fact in the whole of chapter six that I couldn't cross-reference with Shawcross's biography. And Maxwell, if he has access to Jeffrey Archer blockbusters wherever he is now, is going to love the scene about his heroic escape from a Nazi death camp. It occurs to me that Jeffrey Archer — 'the master storyteller' as it tells us, not once, but twice, on the dust- jacket — would have been the ideal authorised biographer for Maxwell: an opportunity missed.
It behoves anyone reviewing the latest Jeffrey Archer in a respectable newspaper to sneer at the general badness of the writ- ing, plot, characterisation etc, but the fact is: it is no punishment to finish this book. Archer is not as good as Ken Follett, let alone Frederick Forsyth, nor as amusing as Jilly Cooper, but in a slightly mechanical way, this is well crafted and accomplished. It is no mystery to me why it will outsell Martin Amis, A. S. Byatt and Pat Barker combined by a factor of 50, or that he was paid £11 million or £34 million to write it, depending which press report you believe. As branded merchandise, it delivers.
It is so easy to read that you can watch television at the same time. There are no superfluous characters, subplots, digressions or even physical descriptions of people and places. Instead there is direct speech ('I have the President of the United States on line one') or eccentrically precise biographical detail (`Keith was born at 2.37 p.m. on 9 February 1928'). Chapters are short and end with lines like, 'But no one could have anticipated what would happen next' and 'It's when people think they've got me by the balls', said Armstrong, 'that I most enjoy screwing them.'
Whether Lord Archer's prose is really worth £170 a word (£34 million for 200,000 words) is a matter for his publisher and contract-broker, but as an in-flight read between the first and second Bloody Mary, this is his best effort since The Prodigal Daughter, (which I remember lapping-up as a teenager at 30,000 feet en-route to Denver).
Nicholas Coleridge is the author of Paper Tigers, published by Mandarin.
To order this book at the special discount price of £13.99, call 0181 964 9640.
Previous page
