Faber & Faber

Francis Bennett's acclaimed Cold War trilogy (Making Enemies, Secret Kingdom and Dr Berlin) is now being reissued in Faber Finds. To accompany publication comes this introduction by the author, in which he remembers the Cold War years - an era of much tension and uncertainty, and examines its repercussions - on our behaviour, our thoughts, our politics and our culture.

For all of us now the Cold War is history, an event from the last century that is slowly revealing its true identity as historians uncover new sources to tell us more about what we thought we already knew. For those of us who lived through that time, it remains a fading memory of a terrible paradox: that our continued existence depended on a terrible force that both superpowers possessed but mercifully were afraid to use.

Power may have neutralised power, but that didn’t stop international tensions and threats to our safety developing. We lived for more than forty years in a world of great uncertainty, when it was always possible that a nuclear explosion would end everything in moments. We may have got used to this, superficially at least, but underneath I believe that the Cold War affected our behaviour, our thoughts, our politics and our culture.

I remember most clearly those sudden outbursts of international tension that seemed to come out of nowhere, whose resolution kept us glued to the radio and newspapers and later to the television. Hungary in 1956 when, for a few days, it seemed that a nation would regain its freedom before a terrible betrayal and the brutal power of an oppressor pulled the country back once more under the Soviet jackboot. The Berlin Crisis in 1961, when Soviet and American tanks faced each other, gun barrel to gun barrel. It only needed one failed nerve, one single shot, and a terrible conflagration could have begun. Or the Cuba Crisis, a year later, when for nearly a fortnight America and the Soviet Union tested their resolve against each other while the world held its breath and sometimes we wondered if we might see the day out, let alone the week. Or 1968, when in Czechoslovakia we had a fleeting glimpse of a desperate freedom that would have to wait more than another twenty years before it would be achieved.

Despite these crises, the much-fared conflagration never happened. The nuclear button was never pressed, though fingers must have hovered, ready to do their deadly work.  The world survived. In the end, the Soviet empire destroyed itself, its dogma failing before the brutal facts of an underperforming economy and the ever-increasing demands of its citizenry which it lacked the wherewithal to satisfy. The Wall came down. The Soviet Union retreated in to history. The Cold War ended and the world survived.

What interested me as a writer was how we survived. What went on behind the scenes? How did the proxy wars fought under cover by spies on both sides draw the sting from the politic confrontations that made the headlines? What were the secret mechanisms that came into play to stop the madness of mutual destruction? I searched for answers and found few that satisfied me. So I took three events and looked at what might have happened. I went looking for my own fictional explanations for historical events, the truth of which we might never know. (Even now, I believe, there are many more documents and therefore truths to be revealed about the events I was concerned with in my books. We remain some distance from a complete understanding of all the secrets of the Cold War). I set out to propose my own answers to historical events, to create fictional explanation that, I hoped, wasn’t too far divorced from what really happened.  That was the origin of my trilogy.

In each case, I based my fiction on known fact or event. For example, in Making Enemies, the first book in the series, I wondered if the scientists who built the Soviet atomic bomb had faced similar doubts of conscience to some of those involved in the Manhattan Project, and if so, what happened to them. They may have worked for monsters but they were not monsters themselves.

In Secret Kingdom, which takes place in Hungary in the dangerous summer months that led directly to the Revolution, I knew that the British ambassador’s warnings of trouble building up had been ignored by the Foreign Office in London. Why? What were the consequences of such an extraordinary and irresponsible act?

In Dr Berlin, the last of the trilogy, I wanted to know what could have happened to induce the Russians to blink, so that they withdrew first one tank then, later, another from the confrontation with America? What moves and counter-moves could have taken place behind the scenes to defuse the crisis?

Fiction as speculation? Well, why not? Isn’t all fiction speculation, making us believe and care for people who don’t exist except in our imaginations? Two of the masterpieces of twentieth-century Cold War fiction, Le Carre’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, are, in their own way, speculations. What might have happened if ...

But Cold War thrillers are more than that. They are puzzles, who is the hero, who the villain? Their characters are complex people whose egos collide. Sometimes they are victims of immutable historical forces that frame the way we live and act. That, for me at least, is one of the intense pleasures of this kind of thriller. It is only an inch or two away from the truth - and that truth is often a closely guarded secret. The author is testing that official secrecy with a work of imagination.

Verisimilitude, a vivid imagination, a sense of drama, the conflict of characters, the eternal battle between good and evil laced with a good dose of moral ambiguity, these are the elements that keep the reader glued to the page, the ingredients of the age-old craft of writing fiction. At the end of the day, whatever justifications an author may use to explain what he has written, there is only one test that a book should face. Is it entertaining? Does it keep the reader glued to the page? I hope, in the case, of my trilogy, the answer will be yes. I leave it to you, my readers, to judge that for yourselves.

See also: The Big Chill (review of Making Enemies by Phillip Knightley)