Alan Glynn discusses his newest, Bloodland
Find out who and what influenced Alan Glynn when writing his newest book, Bloodland
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A tabloid star is killed in a helicopter crash and three years later a young journalist is warned off the story. A private security contractor loses it in the Congo, with deadly consequences. In Ireland an ex-prime minister struggles to contain a dark secret from his time in office. A dramatic news story breaks in Paris just as a US senator begins his campaign to run for office. With echoes of John Le Carré, 24 and James Ellroy, Alan Glynn’s follow-up to Winterland is another crime novel of and for our times – a ferocious, paranoid thriller that moves from Dublin to New York via Central Africa, and thrillingly explores the legacy of corruption in big business, the West’s fear of China, the role of back room political players and the question of who controls what we know.
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Given the compexity of the story, can you remember what your starting point was when plotting Bloodland?
Yes, I started with the idea of a helicopter crash on the Donegal coast. I wanted a shocking event like this to be the raw material for a conspiracy. The thing is, helicopter and plane crashes have been at the centre of a surprisingly large number of conspiracies over the years, where politically or commercially ‘convenient’ deaths occur – a classic case being that of Enrico Mattei, whose work in restructuring the Italian oil and gas industries posed a considerable threat to the international cartels. Mattei died in a mysterious plane crash in 1962. Officially, it was an accident, but no one really believed that. More recently, there was the Kaczynski crash in Russia, about which questions have been asked, about which theories abound. Of course, these things are enormously difficult to prove, making it one of the purest forms of conspiracy, and also one of the most horrific. In any case, unravelling the causes of my mysterious air crash, finding a nefarious justification for it, is what set the story in motion.
Did the idea for Bloodland come out of the global financial crisis or were you already thinking about these ideas before that?
The global financial crisis is not central to Bloodland. It’s there in the background alright, and it impacts directly on one character, but a lot of what happens in the story could have happened at any time. The scramble for resources in Africa is nothing new, corporate greed and malfeasance is nothing new and the venality of politicians is certainly nothing new. Where the story is rooted in the present, I suppose, is in the area of America’s identity crisis vis-a-vis China. That feels like a huge drama that will be unfolding for quite some time to come. But as with Winterland, any confluence between the book’s plot and current events is almost incidental as far as I’m concerned. What really interests me is the psychology, the interior life, of these people in positions of incredible power, people who seem to have no moral compass and very little awareness of the consequences of their actions.
Bloodland is set in Paris, New York, Dublin and Congo: how did you go about making the sense of place as authentic as it is?
And don’t forget Verona, and London. I’ve lived in a few of these places and I suppose I drew on memory for much of the detail. With the places I haven’t lived in, I simply did research – but this then crucially gets filtered through whichever character is involved in the scene. So it becomes a sort of double act of imagination, this person in that place. It was something I was particularly aware of when writing the scenes set in the Democratic Republic of Congo. For these, I was able to buffer my lack of direct knowledge with the densely layered perspectives of the characters, Tom Szymanski and Clark Rundle.
Bloodland has the kind of plot where tiny details at the start lead to huge revelations by the end. How hard is it when writing a story like this to keep back secrets from your readers?
It’s not easy. I continually re-read, re-write and revise. At the same time it’s an organic process and the subconscious does a lot of the heavy lifting for you. A connection that in the context of the story might seem inevitable, something meticulously and very deliberately placed there by the author, will often in fact have occurred to me at the very last minute. Maybe it was there all along, waiting to be discovered but the poor sap at the keyboard isn’t necessarily the first one to see it. But then when it all becomes clear, you have the luxury of being able to go back and re-arrange stuff, to re-weight and re-calibrate scenes in the overall context of the story. As the writer, you just have to pay attention, which I suppose isn’t too much to ask. Another way of keeping secrets back from the reader, of course is by not knowing them yourself, as you go along. No plan, therefore, no outline. It’s a good way of keeping things fresh and unpredictable, but it’s also fraught with danger. You can write yourself into a corner. Or fall of the tightrope.
Bloodland follows in the footsteps of some great thrillers that have exposed corruption, from films such as The Parallax View, TV series such as State of Play and novels like The Constant Gardener. Do you have any particular favourites in the genre, and did any in particular influence you?
I like all of them: Klute, The Parallax View, All the President’s Men, The Conversation, Three Days of the Condor, Marathon Man. These are the great conspiracy thrillers of the 70s that I grew up watching, and there is no question but that they have influenced me a great deal. I also love the later stuff you mention and would add Syriana and Michael Clayton to the list, as well as what I have seen so far of Rubicon. But there is, I think, a key difference between the two periods. In the 1970s – post-Kennedy, post-Vietnam, post-Watergate – America lost its innocence. Back then it was genuinely shocking for people to realise that their government was lying to them. But you can’t lose your innocence twice, and now we’re not surprised if our governments and corporations lie to us, we expect it even, and often expect them to do much worse, so the key feature we remember from back then – that creepy frisson, that dawning realisation of the truth – is no longer what animates the conspiracy thriller. That can’t be replicated anymore. But these days, perhaps, it’s a question of scale – corporate power, for example, has grown exponentially in the last thirty years. Perhaps it’s a question of the inescapable and controlling nature of power in the modern world. These stories, consequently, are as relevant now, if not more so, than ever before.
Will we be seeing any more from any of the characters in Bloodland?
Yes, definitely James Vaughan, who has appeared in both Winterland and Bloodland. I think he has some explaining to do. Or someone has to do it for him. And I suppose that’ll be me.
