Monday, March 9, 2015

Review: "An Officer and a Spy," Robert Harris

Historical fiction review of An Officer and a Spy by Robert Harris

By Paul Carrier

Alfred Dreyfus
It’s debatable whether the Dreyfus Affair was, as British novelist Robert Harris asserts in An Officer and a Spy, “the greatest political scandal and miscarriage of justice in history.” But it’s certainly right up there, and Harris offers a vivid retelling of the remarkable tale in this historical thriller.

Captain Alfred Dreyfus (1859-1935), a native of Alsace, was a French army officer of Jewish descent who was convicted of treason in 1894 for providing military secrets to the German Empire. He was sentenced to life in prison and shipped to Devil’s Island in French Guiana.

Dreyfus was innocent, a victim of rampant anti-Semitism, inept counterespionage, corrupt legal proceedings and, after his conviction, a botched cover-up. The case against him began to unravel in 1896 when evidence pointed to a major named Charles Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy as the real spy. 

The Dreyfus Affair took a series of sensational twists and turns after that, including a second trial for Dreyfus, sharply dividing France and drawing international attention. Dreyfus’ innocence was proven over time, and he was cleared on all counts in 1906. Reinstated in the army as a major, he eventually rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel.

Colonel Georges Picquart, a real-life army intelligence officer, narrates An Officer and a Spy, which is largely his story. History has given Harris a colorful supporting cast to work with here, including disreputable military commanders, craven army underlings, a crusading defense lawyer, a duplicitous handwriting expert and a forger whose luck runs out.

Georges Picquart
Initially convinced of Dreyfus’ guilt, Picquart discovers Esterhazy’s treason. Only later does Picquart come to realize that Esterhazy is not a second spy. He is the spy. Later still, he learns that the army is so determined to prevent this miscarriage of justice from being exposed that it will do virtually anything to maintain the illusion of Dreyfus’ guilt.

Exiled and reviled by the army brass before being drummed out of the service that he loves, Picquart sets out to prove Dreyfus’ innocence. As that campaign gathers momentum, an already intriguing novel becomes almost impossible to put down. Harris combines high drama with telling, scene-setting detail.

Although the army command seems to have the upper hand at the outset, the conspirators underestimate Picquart. And they fail to reckon with the determination of other Dreyfusards, as Dreyfus’ supporters were called, including the writer Émile Zola. His sensational open letter to the president of France exposing the truth is splashed across the entire front page of the newspaper L’Aurore in 1898 under the blaring headline “J’Accuse . . . !” (I accuse.)

In Harris’ account, Dreyfus made a convenient target because he was disliked within the army for a variety of reasons, but primarily because of his ethnicity. Cold and arrogant with officers of equal rank but obsequious with superiors, Dreyfus flaunted his wealth and hailed from a German-speaking family with roots in what was then German-occupied Alsace. That made his loyalties all the more suspect in the minds of senior French commanders, once they learned they had a spy in their midst who was feeding military secrets to the Germans.

Émile Zola
Readers unfamiliar with the facts of the Dreyfus Affair may find An Officer and a Spy especially compelling, thanks to the suspense of not knowing how the story unfolds. But Picquart and the other key players are so well-drawn, and the personal and national implications of the scandal so mesmerizing, that even those with a working knowledge of the case will be swept along by Harris’ gripping account.

An Officer and a Spy successfully fictionalizes an all-too-real outrage that tore France asunder, pitting conservative military leaders and their traditionalist allies in the Catholic Church against progressives, intellectuals and secularists, whom Zola came to epitomize.

“The truth is on the march and nothing shall stop it,” Zola said as the tide began to turn in Dreyfus’ favor. It’s a lesson that later government schemers in other countries also ignored at their peril while trying to hide their misdeeds.