Fear and loathing behind the money trail as hubris takes the front seat
“IT’S A colossal story, says author Robert Harris of the global economic crisis, which forms the backdrop to his latest novel, The Fear Index. “In its way it’s a much, much bigger story than 9/11. But because it lacks, as it were, the burning towers and the iconic images, we tend to underestimate it. The governor of the Bank of England said yesterday that it’s possibly the worst financial crisis the world has ever seen. So I’m pleased to have written this book, because I’ve always seen myself as a political writer above all else, and it seems to me that this crisis is where politics is right now.”
Harris began his career as a political writer as a journalist and BBC television reporter, publishing a number of non-fiction titles between 1982 and 1990. “All I’ve ever wanted to do in life is write,” he says, “but I needed to earn a living.” It was his work on Selling Hitler (1986), an investigation into the hoax ‘Hitler diaries’, that led him to write his first novel, Fatherland (1992).
