Pop fiction’s Fab Four on tour in Europe to fight ‘disaster that is Brexit’

All we can hear is political noise. We have no idea what ordinary British people are feeling,” said a guy in Madrid, pondering the unfathomable mystery of Brexit. “It’s such a relief to know you still care.” We were at the British ambassador’s house in a leafy suburb in northwest Madrid, on the second leg of a diplomatic offensive led by four of the United Kingdom’s bestselling authors (with around 300 million book sales between them).

“Writers are solitary creatures,” said Kate Mosse (best known for Labyrinth, the first in her Languedoc trilogy) to the gathering of fans organised by the British Council. “It’s not often we get to go out and play with our friends.” ​Mosse was referring to her legions of readers, but also to her three fellow band members: Ken Follett (The Pillars of the Earth), Jojo Moyes (Me Before You) and Lee Child (the Jack Reacher series). Writers often claim to be failed musicians, and this newly formed supergroup had barely set foot on the road when they were being billed as popular fiction’s answer to Abba or the Fab Four. There was bound to be dancing at some point (on stage in Berlin, as it happens, where a thousand people turned out to greet them).

“Four heavyweights of British commercial fiction yesterday mobilised against the disaster known as Brexit,” declared the Spanish daily El País on 18 November. The aim was to declare their “unconditional love for Europe” and an unshakeable belief in the unifying power of story. The tour was funded by the writers’ foreign publishers and the love underpinned by a solid history of enviably healthy sales. Which is not to diminish the heart of the enterprise. In the words of Birgit Lübbe (of German publisher Bastei Lübbe): “We support the Friendship Tour because the friendship between our authors and their loyal fans, as well as the friendship between our authors and us, transcends national borders.” Differences of geography, Mosse said, are as nothing to the gulf between readers and non-readers.

Conceived in the long shadow of Brexit, the Friendship Tour was the brainchild of Ken Follett, who is a guaranteed chart-topper on both sides of the Atlantic. It was a simple plan: get out from behind the desk and head for Europe, countering the isolationist drift of politics through direct affirmative action. The message: we are connected by ties far beyond politics that will continue no matter what. “We all have millions of readers in continental European countries,” said Follett on Twitter, “and we want to tell them how much we cherish them, despite the impression that may have been given by recent political events in our country.”

“Our stories are Europe’s stories,” Mosse tweeted. “Our history is Europe’s history. In these challenging days, it’s up to writers to continue to celebrate what connects us.”

The tour kicked off at Milan’s Bookcity festival and culminated at the Sciences Po (Institute of Political Studies) in Paris, taking in Madrid and Berlin en route. “Something terrible has happened in our country,” confessed Follett disarmingly, on day one. And it felt like Milan was just waiting for permission to welcome them back into the fold. The crowd understood immediately that “we feel disconnected from our ruling class, that we don’t recognise our own country”, as Mosse said. “It was great to feel the human connection and the warmth coming back to us from the audience.”

It was warmth responding to warmth, like briefly estranged lovers now reunited, reigniting the old spark and realising that after three years of bewilderment they hadn’t been rejected after all. The question-and-answer session I attended in Madrid was moderated by Antonio García Maldonado, in English, for a mostly Spanish audience. “I don’t have as many readers,” he said, introducing his four panellists. “But I write.”

If this self-deprecation conforms to an English stereotype, it turns out there was good reason for it. “I feel very close to British people. I come from Andalucía.” It wasn’t a non sequitur or a joke, merely a statement of fact. “I come from Malaga, and grew up with British people. I feel at home among them.” The British have made a sun-kissed bougainvillea-blessed home-from-home in southern Spain thanks precisely to the European Union.

There was irony in the set-up. “These writers are touring to tell us why they are against Brexit,” said Maldonado, “but in a great show of democracy we are in the British embassy, so we had better talk about literature, readers, history.” Yet despite the valiant attempts of both hosts and guests to focus on the cultural, there was no escaping Brexit. With perhaps the sole exception of one 11-year-old boy who was there because he wanted to become a writer (Mosse: “Write every day”; Child: “Read every day”), Brexit was what everyone desperately wanted, needed, even, to talk about.

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Could it be that literature itself, with its fond trope of the lost paradise, was to blame for the mess we find ourselves in? The nostalgic idealisation of the past could so easily be exploited by myth-making politicians, peddling pernicious promises about making the country great again and taking back control. The dream of a golden age could certainly steer you wrong, Follett admitted. He saw it as the role of historical novelists to tell the truth about the past, to show it how it was. Life in the Middle Ages (the setting for many of his novels) was “dirty and violent”; he had once shown his daughter, a medic, a list of common treatments from the period, and she had declared that only one would have a hope of working, washing wounds with alcohol. Yet this dirty, starving, violent age had also produced the great cathedrals: human beings always had the capacity to rise above their circumstances and create something beautiful.

At the Fundacion Telefonica on the Gran Vía the following night, the first question the Fab Four were asked was: What’s the worst thing about Brexit? “They haven’t thought about the people – about the Europeans living in Britain and the British people living in Europe,” Follett said, his words nonetheless betraying a persistent perception of the British as distinct from the mass of continental Europeans.

“The damage done to personal relationships, to the sense of what it means to be British, the truth-telling and the-behaving well,” said Mosse. “The sense of parliament being the best of us, the place of reason.” So much anger and ugliness had been released into the public sphere that the two sides of the debate could no longer hear each other.

“Boris Johnson is a great literary character,” Follett added: “Everything he says is fiction.”

“If Nigel Farage were here,” said Child: “I’d give him a kick in the balls.” “So would I,” said Moyes, “with these pointy boots I’m wearing.” 

The second question was: whose fault is it? "We took democracy for granted,” Moyes said. “Democracy is a responsibility. We forgot to defend it.”

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Had Brexit affected their writing? What would the Brexit novel be like? The response was subtle, shaded, thoughtful. None of them was writing contemporary Brexlit, in the manner of Jonathan Coe (Middle England) or Ian McEwan (The Cockroach). But all could sense the virus worming its way into the soul of their work.

Mosse’s forthcoming novel is The City of Tears (May 2020), the second in her Burning Chamber series, set during the French Wars of Religion and spanning the three hundred years from 1562 in Carcassonne to 1862 in South Africa. But in essence, she said, it was a Brexit novel, about a country tearing itself apart over an idea, determined at any cost to expel the perceived enemy within (in this case the Huguenots). Moyes’s latest, The Giver of Stars, set in Depression-era America among the packhorse librarians of rural Kentucky, hinges on the importance of knowledge and learning, and even Child’s Blue Moon has the theme of fake news at its rotten American core. Ultimately, the Brexit-era novel was doomed to be a depleted, impoverished thing. With reduced freedom of movement we would interact less with others and become more insular, and a more narrow-minded people would produce “not very good books”.

“After all, 96 per cent of creatives are Remainers,” Follett claimed. Child was even more emphatic: “All intellectuals are against Brexit.”

“When I woke up the morning after the referendum, I wept,” said Moyes. “I had grown up European, and suddenly I was living in an alien land.”

“When the time comes,” said Child, appealing to the younger audience members, “please let us back in.”

Back at the ambassador’s residence, Maldonado, a political analyst, journalist and translator (of, among others, Francis Fukuyama, Bob Woodward, the Marquis de Sade and Norman Mailer) was curious. He wanted to know what Spanish writers the British authors had read. “We are all the descendants of Cervantes,” said Follett, grandly. It was intended as a compliment, and since Cervantes is the acknowledged father of the modern novel, it was also true. The politesse was acknowledged by the well-read room, but the sense of dismay was palpable.

Could they name a modern Spanish writer? Follett cited Colombian Gabriel García Márquez and Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa (“dreadful politics, but a brilliant writer”), from the Latin American Boom of the 1960s and 1970s, who were at least writing in Spanish. But it was Mosse who took the bull by the horns. “We are lazy about translation,” she admitted. “We’re lucky,” Child said, “because English is a global language. We don’t have to learn other languages, whereas other people have to learn ours.”

But still he regretted missing out on so many good books, and that so many good writers would go unread. More than 10 years ahead of the inaugural Man Booker International Prize in 2018, the Crime Writers Association had included among its panoply of awards a Dagger for Crime Fiction in Translation, naming the translator alongside the author on the cover and splitting the prize money equally. It was an important step in raising the status of the translator and making her more visible.

Literature in translation is a growth area. According to trade magazine Publishing Perspectives (6 March 2019), recent research from Nielsen indicates that over the past decade or so the market share for translated fiction has grown from 3 per cent to 5.63 per cent. And although Jo Nesbo and David Lagercrantz still occupy the top three spots in the table between them, the biggest growth has been in general/literary fiction (whose English-language counterpart has flatlined), suggesting a more urgent desire to learn about the world view of our continental neighbours.

“We need to listen more,” Mosse said. Literature is important for its entertainment value, for its capacity to take our mind off things, for the closure and consolation that are unachievable in real life, but also and equally for its capacity to drop us into the mind of the other. “In a world where we are increasingly polarised and tribal,” Moyes said, “the need for empathy is increasingly important.”

Tribalism went back to our primitive roots and was baked into our psyche. There was a place for local autonomy. But that was precisely the point of belonging to the Union, so that local identities and differences could be balanced and contained within a larger, cohesive whole. “When I was born Churchill was still prime minister,” Child said. “No one could accuse him of being a radical leftie. But he advocated passionately for a United States of Europe.”

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Was there a danger that the mind-blowing success of these four giants of British commercial fiction might drown out other voices, at home and abroad? It seems an ungenerous accusation. High-earning popular novelists help grow the market and do their best to pay it forward, as insider parlance has it. Child is famed for his support of other writers. Mosse is founder/director of the Women’s Prize for Fiction (25 years old next year), prompted by her awareness that women writers were going largely unheard. But set against the view that we need to multiply the variety of voices was the fear that the promotional environment was now so noisy that an over-abundance of recommendations was the same as having none.

“British people should read us as much as we read them,” Maldonado insisted, putting what seemed to me an incontrovertible case. But then I was a linguist by training, and suspected that if only we had valued languages more highly in schools, then we could never even have conceived of the disaster known as Brexit.

In May 2019 Follett published Notre-Dame, a short non-fiction book describing the emotions that consumed him at the time of the Notre-Dame fire last April (with all royalties going to French national charity, La Fondation du Patrimoine). He described how he had drawn on Victor Hugo’s great Romantic novel, Notre-Dame de Paris (The Hunchback of Notre-Dame), rendering into English its prescient passages about fire in the cathedral. When he looked back at his work in translation, he found himself thinking it was “the best piece of writing I’ve ever done”.

“All my books are love letters to Languedoc,” Mosse said. She described how she had her first success as a novelist at the age of 45, how up until then she had listed her profession as “reader”, not “writer”, in her passport, how it wasn’t until she first visited Carcassonne that she truly discovered her subject. “Going on holiday made me a novelist. The place leapt out and grabbed me. There was a whispering in the landscape.”

Each of the four major events in the four major cities concluded with the writers choosing an object that for them, sums up Europe. For Moyes it was a pair of blue suede shoes in softest Italian leather, bought for her as a 10-year-old by an indulgent great-aunt on a trip to Rome. For Mosse it was a pendant in the form of a labyrinth, a symbol encapsulating the essence of story that left her wondering why northern France should contain more labyrinths than the rest of Europe put together. For Child it was his leg and his arm, recalling injuries sustained by both his father and grandfather fighting two world wars in Europe.

Follett, more of a bon viveur, chose a thousand-euro bottle of Ribera del Duero. He promised to toast the Friendship Tour at journey’s end, and presumably cracked it open the night of 25 November in Paris. So was the whole escapade just an excuse to party, a covert operation to sell yet more books? asked El País on the back of this extravagant indiscretion, striking a rare note of scepticism. Probably, in part. But what is more convivial than eating and drinking and swapping books with your friends?

Mosse went to the human heart of the matter. Referring to the newly established Centre for Writing and Rhetoric at the Sciences Po, one student asked what the importance of imagination might be for the country’s future politicians and economists, and why they should be trained in creative writing. “Words count,” said Mosse. “In the end, words are the only thing that can stop the conflict, when people come to the table to talk. If you use words well you can change people’s minds, and that’s the one thing that will save us all.