Carlos Ramet

Archer’s Ardent Glory: Nostalgia and Change in Jeffrey Archer’s A Matter of Honor

Jeffrey Archer, whose life has often been compared to some of the more outlandish aspects of his books, is probably best known in the United States as the author of such commercial successes as The ProdigalDaughter (1982),First AmongEquals (1984) and A Matter of Honor (1986). In his own country, however, he was in the public eye well before he ever started writing fiction. A striving overachiever, he represented Britain in international track and field, promoted public charities which involved “The Beatles,” and was elected to Parliament at the age of twenty-nine. In fact, he only turned to writing fiction after bad business investments forced him to resign his seat in Parliament and to look for alternative sources of income. As Archer himself has stated, “[I see myself] as a politician, first and foremost” (qtd. in Leiyveld 2).

Notwithstanding Archer’s desire to have his “tombstone . . . say something more than ‘best-selling author’” (qtd. in Crick 418), it has been his publishing success which has allowed him to remain active in politics—and, beginning with his entry into popular writing in 1976 with Nota Penny More, Not a Penny Less, critical disapproval appears not to have hurt his sales. Although his books are frequently dismissed as simplistically written and old-fashioned, his first seven novels sold more than thirty million copies worldwide in their first few years of distribution (Current 20). His 1986 spy story, A Matterof Honor, despite being termed “a mechanical genre exercise” (Sexton 35), became “an instant bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic” (Current 23), with an initial printing of 400,000 copies (Ross 28). In part, the strength of the book lies in its deliberate nostalgia, which provided a suitable vehicle for the expression of Archer’s traditional values. As Michael Crick noted in his biography Jeffrey Archer: Stranger thanFiction, Archer’s publishers “were brazen” about the comparisons with old-fashioned adventure- story writers (335), and reviews culled for the front pages of the paperback edition included comments that A Matter ofHonor “revives the fun, the energy and high spirits of the early James Bond books and films,” and that Archer, “like [John] Buchan . . . has the ability to grab and hold [the] reader’s attention,” with both of these reviewers implying that the energy of the book is in part the result of its harking back to an earlier time. Archer, in fact, admitted that his first venture into the pure espionage genre “was an attempt to write a modern Thirty-Nine Steps” (qtd. in Ross 28), thus acknowledging his indebtedness to John Buchan, Dornford Yates, and other gentlemen spy writers of the ’Teens and ’Twenties. As such, Archer’s novel, coming a few years before the end of the Cold War, can be read as a kind of summation of the spy novel as it had developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But Archer’s story of a son’s attempt to restore his father’s reputation can also be viewed as the conservative politician’s nostalgia for lost empire, especially since the novel reflects British anxieties in the 1980s over national identity, Thatcherism, the Falklands Islands crisis, and the inevitable return of Hong Kong to the PRC.

The modern origins of the spy novel can be traced to Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Purloined Letter” (1845), in which the amateur detective C. Auguste Dupin must recover a document stolen by a foreign minister, the permanent loss of which would have grave consequences for international peace. The form began to take on much of its characteristic atmosphere during the late nineteenth century when “Fear of Invasion” novels and “War Preparedness” books, serving an overt political purpose, were popularized by writers such as William Le Queux and E. Phillips Oppenheim. Later practitioners such as John Buchan in TheThirty-Nine Steps (1915) added the element of a deadline for suspense and emphasized the chase, or hurried pursuit and flight across an exotic landscape. Alfred Hitchcock, in his film adaptation of the Buchan novel in 1935, clarified the need for the “paper chase” device (or MacGuffin, as he called it) and included both touches of romantic comedy and the implication that romance would lead to marriage.

By 1986, when Archer publishedMatter of Honor, there had been many additional changes to the spy novel such as the shift from amateur to professional status for the hero, the hard-boiled cynicism of the working-class spy, an increasing reliance on scenes of torture, and the plot pattern of the suicide mission (often an assassination attempt) as popularized by Frederick Forsyth, Alister MacLean, and others. But Archer’s novel largely ignores the then-more-recent developments in the genre and remains, as one reviewer put it, “a yarn. . . [which] turns the clock back” (qtd. in Matter).

This nostalgic quality is not merely the result of turning the clock back from the perestroika of Archer’s day to 1966 and the height of the Cold War, but even more so the consequence of looking to the patterns of plot and heroic qualities as found in the earliest examples of the modern spy story. As with the gentlemen heroes of the ’Teens and ’Twenties, who remained fundamentally loyal to club, caste, and countryside, Archer’s hero Adam Scott (whose name recalls both the first man as well as the Polar explorer that many British schoolboys idolized when Archer was young) retains his amateur status by being unemployed, his affiliation with the upper crust via his Wellington College and Sandhurst background, and his traditional virtues of duty, honor, and service by being motivated primarily to clear the family name.

As demanded by the pre-World War II formula, Adam is the “ordinary” individual who is accidentally plunged into a world where the stakes are high and where things are really happening—in this case, when he attends the reading of his disgraced father’s will. Having inherited a Russian ikon with an important document inside, Adam travels to Zurich to retrieve it. The hare and hound pursuit begins in earnest when a beautiful German girl whom Adam had been seeing is killed. From then onwards, Adam journeys desperately across Europe by plane, bus, van, and ferry, back to the relative safety of England. En route, the must live by his wits, and he is aided by numerous odd and eager characters whom he meets by chance.

If the story seems to be the stuff of countless Hitchcock films, the inclusion of specific motifs, scenes, and action reinforces the idea that in writing A Matter of Honor, Jeffrey Archer had the Thirty-Nine Steps—both the film and the book—firmly in mind. Richard Hannay, in the film version, must impersonate a politician and give a rousing impromptu speech to delay capture. Adam Scott, in A Matter of Honor, eludes his pursuers by pretending to be an Irishman and by inventing a confession to give to a priest. In the Hitchcock film and in the Archer novel, banter between the hero and an attractive woman who is helping him is an important ingredient. This banter is at times romantic, at times exasperated: “Is there any hope of you listening to me for five minutes without continually interrupting?” Adam Scott tells Robin Beresford in A Matter of Honor (218). “Couldn’t you realize I was speaking the truth in that railway carriage? You must have seen I was genuine?” Richard Hannay tells Pamela in the Hitchcock film. In both instances, the desperate tone results in part from frustration that the intelligent woman to whom the hero has increasingly become attracted does not yet believe in him. Several similarities between John Buchan’s seminal novel and Jeffrey Archer’s retrospective book are also apparent, including the frequent use of disguises. The famous scene in Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps in which Hannay borrows “the flat blue cap and . . . white overall” (27) of a milkman is paralleled in A Matter of Honor when Adam Scott pilfers “the long brown coat” of the janitor (329). More significantly, the social class attitudes of Buchan’s day, where servants are depicted as speaking in broad, heavily phoneticized accents (“[T]he porter had a weighty face: ‘Nawsty business ‘ere this morning, sir’” [16]), and as being easily impressed or bribed (“half a crown went far to console him” [17], Hannay observes) are equally preserved in the Archer novel: “’Never ‘eard of ‘im, sir,’ said the porter, almost standing to attention when he recognized [Adam’s] regimental tie” (67). As one reviewer noted, “this is a stiff-upper lip thriller of the old school . . . ” (Stuewe 90).

But Archer’s novel is still a book from the 1980s and not from the 1920s and as such reflects many of the social and political anxieties of the post-war era. The loosening of social constraints in the 1960s, with its images of Carnaby Street, “Swinging London,” and hippie love-ins in Hyde Park, resulted in a freeing up of political restrictions as well. Harold Wilson, at the time the youngest prime minister of the century, spoke with a Yorkshire accent and was initially viewed as a representative of the new “swinging meritocracy” (Halasz 30). By the late 1970s, however, Wilson and Callahan’s Labour Government policies were blamed for many of the economic problems of the day: devaluation of the pound, “stagflation,” frequent strikes in the public and private sectors, and the resultant diminishing of Britain’s international status.

Margaret Thatcher was one of the most outspoken critics of Labour’s drift in foreign affairs and of the post-war welfare state, warning in 1977 that “[each] time you go further along the Socialist road, nearer and nearer to the Communist State, then the consequences of the Communist State will follow” (qtd. in Nossiter 42). In 1979, she became Prime Minister of Great Britain and began the process of negotiating an agreement to return Hong Kong to China and to possibly relinquish ownership of the Falklands Islands. These moves were viewed as a sign of weakness by the Galtieri Government of Argentina, leading to the invasion of the islands and unleashing a wave of patriotic sentiment in Great Britain. Margaret Thatcher’s successful prosecution of the war resulted in her easily winning re-election in 1983 and to having a parliamentary majority for enacting economic reforms (Jones and Kavanagh 8-9). It was in this atmosphere of national pride over recent foreign and domestic achievements that Margaret Thatcher appointed Jeffrey Archer deputy chairman of the Conservative Party in 1985. And it was during this period of patriotic glow that Archer composed and published A Matter of Honor.

Because of his life-story, Archer was at first considered the perfect “communicator” for the Conservative Party. He was brash, energetic, resilient, and a self-made millionaire. Like Margaret Thatcher and John Major, he came from a lower-middle-class background and distrusted certain aspects of the British Establishment (Crick xvi). Moreover, he was not a rigid ideologue: he could stand to the left of the Party on certain social issues—most notably, the death penalty, which he opposed—but could be drawn to the right on the economy. And yet, during the time that he “epitomized what Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Party stood for in the 1980s—hard work, enterprise, making money, and succeeding against all odds” (Crick 246), Archer was also capable of making outrageous statements which delighted the Left and which embodied the darker aspects of Thatcherism—a certain insensitivity and mean spiritedness.

Archer, for example, opined publicly that ending unemployment is a question of “getting off your backside and finding a job” (qtd. in Leiyveld 2) and implied on BBC television that “the Labour Party is a gaggle of communist sympathizers,” according to James M. Perry of the Wall Street Journal (36). Archer lasted less than a year as deputy party chairman but a decade later was still outspoken on issues of law and order and on taxation. Fear of crime, he noted at an annual conference debate in 1993, is a result of “our ridiculously loose attitude towards bail” (qtd. in Crick 382). And two years later he stated on television: “It is an ideological myth of the Labour Party that you must tax the rich [because] it’ll make the poor feel better” (qtd. in Naughton 25).

At his worst, Archer has a tendency to oversimplify, and this, plus the reductive nature of the popular novel, results in implicit as well as explicit expressions of ideology in A Matter of Honor. Adam Scott, in the novel, observes that under Harold Wilson few people buy British goods (249), that the pound is being devalued unnecessarily (195), and that England is a land of “long strikes [and] high inflation” (380). Worse still, the novel implies, too much money goes to the Arts Council (226), Harold Wilson has become a lapdog to President Lyndon Johnson (203), and the United Kingdom cannot even win at cricket over India (92). Much of the novel seems intent on establishing a deplorable state of affairs in order to suggest that what is needed is to find “an English saint” (203) who can plunge a sword into the heart of foreign and domestic beasts (169). Consequently, the quest for the ikon of St. George—described as a “search [for] the Holy Grail” (212)—begins to represent a yearning for a restoration of world status, and a return to a pre-Yalta era when the generation of Adam’s father could still best the Germans (169) and were the senior partners in the special relationship.

As such, Archer’s nostalgia is not for the 1960s and a time when he is forced “to listen to ‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand’” (66) and is made to feel “strangely out of place” (20), but rather for the 1940s, for the rhymes “his mother sang so often over the kitchen sink” (20), for an era when parental roles were clear and when parents could set “high standards of morality” (23). In 1980s Tory fashion, the novel posits that a return to the old codes of conduct would automatically result in a return to the old political and international arrangements. In fact, once Adam has found within himself the doughty resourcefulness of a Richard Hannay, the second half of the novel can impose a kind of fantasy reversal on the world as it has existed since the war. Not only are the Americans now the untrustworthy and suspect partners (301) in a clear reversal of the actual Intelligence situation that existed after the Kim Phillby affair, but we are told that “[o]nly a British officer” can have the sang froid to land a plane and to shake hands in the midst of a terrifying fire fight (288). The pound is still the most trusted currency in the world (109) and the British cycling team on the continent still has “a chance for the bronze” (391). And in a wishing-away of all the permissiveness and cultural relativism of the 1960s pop art scene, good old bourgeois art—better yet, religious art—sells for more (439) than “a large oil by an artist that [Adam] had never heard of called Jackson Pollock” (115).

The novel manifests not only a carefully cultivated smugness regarding ignorance of the arts (225) but an equally developed disdain for those working-class scholars who have been encouraged by a Labour Government to enter the Foreign Service. Wainwright, an applicant who is fluent in several languages, is depicted as too physically awkward to be of much use (81) and Matthews, already a member of a Foreign Office task group, is characterized as a bounder who would have been better off joining the police force (211). But where the novel offers its most provocative Thatcherite warning of what might happen if the “March to the Left” is not halted is in its characterization of the Russian agent Alex Romanov and in the nature of the secret document itself.

Archer derived only a few formulaic ingredients from the post-gentleman-spy novels of John Le Carre and others, most notably the use of a KGB adversary and the classic exchange on the bridge. Interestingly, however, the KGB agent Romanov has been given many of the heroic traits of a latter-day James Bond so that he becomes, like Bond, himself a kind of Clubland figure and parallels Adam Scott in a variety of ways. To begin with, as Alex Romanov’s family name suggests, his pedigree is impeccable and his own acute nostalgia is for his grandfather’s world—for the Tsar’s pre-revolutionary Russia—and for a time when his family were among “the wealthiest landowners in Petrograd” (42). Secondly, Romanov is described physically in terms that could be used for Ian Fleming’s hero or for Jeffrey Archer’s: “At twenty-nine, despite being six feet, he still only weighed 165 pounds on Western scales, and his muscles remained hard and taut” (99). But Romanov, unlike Adam Scott, is the sole character who shares Bond’s knowledge of a particular cuisine and cellar, gratifying his epicurean tastes with “gravard lax edged with dill sauce . . . [and] a half-bottle of Premier Cru Chablis 1958” (129). Adam, by contrast, appears content with boiled frankfurters (94), a fried egg and a couple of rashers of bacon (134) and admits he’s “never actually had champagne and caviar” (150). The ordinariness of his English food emphasizes Adam’s connection to the amateur hero of the pre-war chase melodrama, and the refinement of Romanov’s haute cuisine demonstrates his ties to the post-war professional spy.

As David Cannadine and others have noted, the world of James Bond, with its “sex, sadism and snobbery,” bears only a surface resemblance to “[t]he healthy, rugged world of Richard Hannay” (49), and in this match-up between the two types of espionage hero—the professional and the amateur—Archer seems to be saying that the purity of a Richard Hannay will win the day. The professional, Romanov, is twice referred to as resembling “a Western film star” [42], he wears only Savile Row suits [46], and he is motivated primarily by a desire for “wealth in the West” [125]). In addition, by emphasizing the view of Romanov as the Russian equivalent of a James Bond, Archer can move beyond the mere doubling of characters to a more explicit ideological statement. Both Romanov and Adam are athletic and must confront the legacies of their fathers, but Archer uses Romanov to demonstrate what an English hero—what a James Bond or a Richard Hannay—would become under a Leftist government: Romanov, we are told, “curses the system he was born under” (123), in part because it stifles personal initiative. He envies the efficiency of a free enterprise system (138) and the material comforts that are the natural rewards for those who have prospered in it (103). Chafing under a Communist regime, Romanov has become villainous and has many of Bond’s characteristics in excess: he is not only handsome but haughty; not only a gourmet but a gourmand; not only ambitious but insatiable, and so on. In fact. Archer’s Alex Romanov seems to embody most of the seven deadly sins, including lechery, and it is in his various unbridled appetites that he continues to diverge from his counterpart, Adam Scott. As we have seen, Adam eats merely for nourishment rather than for sinful pleasure, and he demonstrates an equal control over sexual hunger. Following the pattern established in the Hitchcock version of The Thirty-Nine Steps, Adam has a series of encounters with women but remains chaste; Romanov’s encounters are sexually fulfilled and increasingly deviant.

From Hitchcock as well comes the “MaeGuffin,” the object that everyone is in search of, and here again it is put to a clear ideological purpose. In the aftermath of the Falklands Islands War, some Conservative critics began to view open negotiations for the return of colonial territories as ill-advised, and a fear that the return of Hong Kong to the PRC at the conclusion of the ninety-nine year lease would result in massive immigration problems in Britain led members of Thatcher’s own party to delay a settlement of the issue (Jones and Kavanagh 53). In this country, of course, Jimmy Carter’s Panama Canal Treaty had been denounced by the Republican Right.As if to combine those two then-current events into a grand cautionary tale, Archer turns his MacGuffin into a “bad” treaty agreement that would have compelled the United States to return Alaska to the Soviet Union at the end of a similar ninety-nine year period.

What is glossed over, of course, in this polemic for Anglo-American hegemony, is the legitimate legal claim the Soviet Union would have enjoyed in such a lease arrangement, and that the Chinese and Panamanian governments did in fact enjoy. Instead, in A Matter of Honor, “‘fair play’ diplomacy” (314) is rejected as fundamentally antiquated and naive. The Soviets, who have been demonized, must at all costs be denied that which they consider to be theirs “by right” (375). As Victoria Glendinning noted in an article written for the Times Literary Supplement, “[t]here is a potentially painful tension in all Archer’s fiction between the will to win at all costs . . . and the concept of private honor. This conflict, implanted in Archer’s heroes by the confused British morality that they inherit from their fathers, is never investigated” (1368). Equally uninvestigated is whether or not the sexual purity bordering on prudery of Archer’s hero is a believable or even an admirable character trait in a modern adventure novel. Glendinning went on to argue that “Mr. Archer writes stories for boys” (1368), and the fairy-tale quality of the book is clear: through a series of symbolic male/female encounters, the sexually chaste hero learns that personality and integrity matter more than physical beauty, so that the closure in the novel is in part the closure that will come from finding a suitable life partner.

In arguing for the validity of his kind of writing. Archer has stated that “the old-fashioned hero is coming back. The days of men rushing into the room and kneeing people in the crotch, shooting them, shouting profanities and rushing out is over” (qtd. in Lauerman 1), and elsewhere he has stated that “it is possible that [a] novel says things I believe, such as ‘Simple decency will win if you play it straight’” (qtd. in Field 43), though as we have seen the Allies do not really “play it straight” with the Soviets in A Matter of Honor.

Clearly, the retrospective view used in the novel both simplifies and distorts, and Archer, whose politics and background are considerably more complicated than those incorporated in A Matter of Honor, may have felt the need to reduce complexity through the simplifying medium of the melodrama. His conservatism, for that matter, is to a large extent homegrown. He has been quick to point out the number of occasions when he has defied his own party (Perry 36), and his mother, whose newspaper column in the 1950s painted a rosy and moralistic version of small-town English life (Crick 32), has perhaps had the greatest shaping influence on his traditional values. She is certainly largely responsible for the sexually circumspect quality of A Matter of Honor, since Jeffrey Archer asks her to read each of his manuscripts before publication. “She seldom makes any comment,” Archer has said, “but if I dared to put in a word like ‘damn,’ she’d draw a circle round it” (qtd. in Crick 440). In addition, there is presumably an element of careerism to Archer’s wide-ranging endeavors. As a result, one suspects that his party affiliation comes as much from opportunities that existed in Britain in the late 1950s and early 1960s as it does from a strict adherence to conservative political theory. Crick, for that matter, believes that in a 1960s U.S. context, Archer would have become “a fairly liberal Democrat” (170) and points out that Archer’s father was himself a Conservative politician who was liberal on some issues (6).

But during the period when he was writing A Matter of Honor, Archer’s political opportunities were tied to Margaret Thatcher and the book demonstrates the influence of her philosophy as well as a return to the earliest purposes of the espionage story—to offer a dire warning to a country and to insist on a particular policy direction. Archer has stated that he scrupulously avoids promoting Conservative Party politics in his fiction. “If you read my books and thought, ‘Christ! He’s pushing Margaret Thatcher and the bloody Tory Party,’ I’d never sell a book” (qtd. in Field 43). However, as someone who “was often at Margaret Thatcher’s elbow, having been a member of her original prime-ministerial campaign” and who was later asked to write John Major’s inaugural address (Field 43), Archer’s placement of a simplified version of Thatcherism into a genre that is by definition both reductive and concerned with political affairs may have been inevitable.

Carlos Ramet

Department of English

Saginaw Valley State University

University Center, MI 48710-0001

 

Works Cited

Archer, Jeffrey. A Matter of Honor. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1986.

Buchan, John. The 39 Steps. 1915. New York: Popular Library, 1961.

Cannadine, David. “James Bond and the Decline of England.” Encounter 53 (Sept. 1979): 46-55.

Crick, Michael. Stranger than Fiction. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1995.

Field, Michele. “Jeffrey Archer: The Events of His Life. . . .” Publishers Weekly 26 Apr. 1991: 42-43.

Glendinning, Victoria. “Profit Without Honour.” Rev. of A Matter of Honor. Times Literary Supplement (London) 5 Dec. 1986: 1368.

Halasz, Piri. “Great Britain.” Time 15 Apr. 1966: 30-34.

“Jeffrey Archer.” Current Biography. 1988 ed.

Jones, Bill, and Dennis Kavanagh. British Politics Today. 5^th ed. Manchester, England: Manchester U P, 1994.

Lauerman, Connie. “Books.” Chicago Tribune 10 Sept. 1985, sec. 6: 1.

Leiyveld, Joseph. “A Tory Plot...?” New York Times 10 Oct. 1985, sec. A: 2.

Naughton, John. “Television: Taxing Questions for UK Pie.” Observer (London) 9 Apr. 1995: Review Section: 25.

Nossiter, Bernard D. Britain: A Future That Works. London: Andre Deutsch. 1978.

Perry, James M. “U.K. Tories Go on Attack. . . .” Wall Street Journal 10 Oct. 1985: 36.

Ross, Jean W. “Jeffrey Archer: CA Interview.” Contemporary Authors. New Revision Series, 1988. Vol. 22.

Sexton, David. Rev. of A Matter of Honor. Spectator (London) 12 July 1986: 35.

Stuewe, Paul. “Imports: Fiction.” Rev. of A Matter of Honor. Quill & Quire Sept. 1986:90.