Author's Q and A with Colin MacKinnon
Your new novel, The Contractor, is about nuclear terrorism. That's a pretty heavy theme. Are you trying to scare people?
Sure. Scary stories are a great way to hook readers. But the problem - nuclear terrorism - is real and it's been worrying me for quite a while. It's easier to make an atomic weapon than people realize. I don't mean a dirty bomb, I mean a real, Hiroshima-style A-bomb that could take out half a city. As I have a character say, "I could probably do it in my garage." He's right. The main problem is getting your hands on enough highly enriched uranium, but if you could do that, building a functioning A-bomb wouldn't be all that hard. Basically all you'd need would be a really strong tube and some dynamite. What you produced might not be a great A-bomb, but it would be an A-bomb. Writing The Contractor gave me a chance to explore plausible ways terrorists might actually acquire the HEU. Also, it gave me a chance to do another spy novel. I like the genre.
How come?
The spy is forever trying to find things out, trying to learn the secrets of inscrutable people and their governments. As a writer, I'm interested among other things in the problems different cultures have in communicating, in understanding each other. We send signals we think the other side can read and they can't. And they send signals to us that make no sense. A spy story can be a metaphor for how we try to solve the mystery, the enigma that other peoples and other cultures present to us. Also, I wanted to evoke some of the far-away places I had known - Pakistan, Turkey, the Persian Gulf.
You know the Middle East well?
Long back, when I was all of twenty-three, I went to Iran on something of a whim, as an English teacher. I found the place fascinating and the experience turned out to be life-transforming. I spent a good deal of my young adulthood in the region, mostly in Iran, but also in Saudi Arabia - seven years when you add it all up. You might call that a misspent youth and I'm not sure I'd argue with you, but I traveled and worked all over the place and it was a fantastic experience. Five of those seven years I lived in Tehran, a city I came to think of as home. And I learned a lot, which you do when you live among people not like yourself.
Like what?
The main thing is that most people in this world just don't think or live the way you do. And they're perfectly happy that way and wonder why the hell you're so strange. Also, I lived in Iran in the most intimate way possible - my first marriage was to an Iranian woman. None of my in-laws spoke English. Once you've made that level of human contact, you can't think in stereotypes anymore. Those are real people in the headlines and the television news who are getting maimed and killed, not abstractions.
Wasn't the Middle East a dangerous place?
It sure is now. But when I first went to the region as a young guy in the '60s - heading for weird places was a very '60s thing to do - there was nowhere near the bitterness and hatred and conflict that we see now.
At least not in the open.
Well, right - maybe it was there under the surface waiting to break out. But, still, it was basically fun to be there back then and to travel around. And easy. Example: if you wanted to, you could hop on a bus somewhere in Germany, say Munich, and go all the way through Turkey down to Beirut, then over to Damascus in Syria, to Baghdad, to Tehran, to Kabul in Afghanistan, then down through Pakistan to India and across India to Calcutta.
Sounds like a long trip.
Yeah, you'd have to like buses a lot to do that, but the point is, traveling by land from one end of the the region to the other was perfectly feasible back then - no on-going wars, no big hang-ups at the borders. Nobody would bother you. More or less a safe deal. And there you were, you with your backpack and your American passport, seeing the sights and having a hell of a good time. No way you could do that now. Now the whole region is consumed with violence. Very depressing if you knew the old days.
You learned languages?
I learned Persian pretty well, which I came back and taught at Columbia and Georgetown. I learned some Arabic and Turkish too.
Rick Behringer, the main character in The Contractor, is so different from the usual spy novel hero.
Rick started life as a jazz pianist, but he failed at that, so he went into the army, where they put him in communications intelligence - COMINT in the jargon. After the service he went to engineering school and became a computer and telephone security whiz - I mean he's really good at his job - which is why the government now makes use of his talents.
As an outside contractor.
Right. Rick represents a new phenomenon in the spy world - a private sector guy who does actual espionage for the U.S. government. We didn't use to have such people. Now we do, and their numbers are huge. The public doesn't realize this, or realize what the implications are.
You sound dubious.
I am. It's a terrible system. It's expensive, it allows our spook agencies to get around legitimate oversight, and the chances for screw-ups are just boundless. Rick knows all this.
And yet he's happy to participate in the system.
Perfectly. He loves the life, the adrenalin rush it gives him sometimes. Plus the money.
Critics have praised your "tone-perfect dialogue." How do you achieve that?
I listen carefully to people as they speak - language is like music, there's a certain rhythm and tonal quality to it, and everybody's got this different way of talking. When I'm imagining a character, how that character speaks is every bit as important as what he does or what she does, and I try to get that down on paper. And I work in the realist tradition. Realism - verisimilitude - makes the literary experience tremendously powerful.
Critics have also praised your knowledge of the inner workings of U.S. intelligence. How did you learn what you know? Were you ever a spy?
No, no, no. The way for outsiders to learn about spies is to go find some and talk to them, which I did. The Washington area, where I live, is full of spooks and ex-spooks. They have these retirees' groups who get together for lunches and talk about the old days, and after lunch, over the fruit compote, they listen to government officials who they invite in to lecture on upcoming national security threats and that kind of thing. All very edifying. You can go and hang with the spooks and hear what they have to say. Plus, there's an enormous literature on the subject, which if you look at it carefully can be a big help.
What are you working on now?
Another international intrigue novel, partly historical, partly contemporary. It's inspired by a mysterious manuscript - a real one, it's in the Beinecke Library at Yale - written in a strange script no one can read and filled with weird illustrations of imaginary plants and pictures of little naked ladies frolicking in tubs. Plus zodiacal diagrams. Nobody knows when the thing was produced or who produced it or why, though it probably dates from the late renaissance. Even how it came to light in 1912 is mysterious. The guy who supposedly bought it from an Italian monastery, Wilfrid Voynich, was a scoundrel and a mammoth liar and nothing he said about how he acquired it should be believed. His wife Ethel, who was English, was active in Russian revolutionary circles in London and carried revolutionary literature between Russia and England. She was also said to have had an affair with Sidney Reilly, Ace of Spies, who was another scoundrel and probably a murderer. Lot of material here.
Read more
Read less
