Truth, dare or keeping a promise?
Andro Linklater
THE FEATHER MEN by Ranulph Fiennes Bloomsbury, f.15.99, pp. 280 Something about the desert drives the British mad. Perhaps, because heat and desiccation are the antithesis to our own cold climate and phlegmatic humour, we have evolved no defence against their harsh effects. Left in the desert for any length of time, our soggy countrymen shrivel, blacken and spontaneously combust in an intensity of passion for its sere appearance and complex loyalties.
The roll of those who have succumbed to this hot, dry insanity includes such honourable names as Charles Doughty, T.E. Lawrence and John Glubb, and in the 1970s fresh candidates appeared in the form of servicemen fighting for the Sultan of Oman against communist insurgents from the neighbouring state of Yemen. Many were from the SAS, and one, Sir Ranulph Fiennes, wrote a good account called Where Soldiers Fear to Tread about what was evidently a fierce and largely secret operation of ambush and deception.
Perhaps the polar madness which subsequently took Fiennes to the Antarctic and three times to the Arctic insulated him from the desert variety. In that earlier book, he seemed more deeply affected by the intensity of his military experience than by the dry beauty of Arabian rock and sand. Nevertheless, the strangeness of his latest work must, I think, be traced back to the effect which the desert and its secret war had on some of his informants.
Briefly, The Feather Men is based on the premise that a sheikh whose four sons were killed by British troops during the Omani campaign has paid a contract assassin to murder the soldiers responsible, ensuring that in each case the death should appear to be an accident. Absorbed by his first novel, Fiennes is about to become the fifth to die, when he is rescued at the last moment by an SAS vigilante squad. They ask him to write up the story in order to pre-empt a disenchanted director of their group from publishing his own less roman- tic account of their activities.
This scenario would make either an acceptable airport thriller or the basis of some good investigative journalism. Unfortunately, Fiennes has chosen to combine the two forms. Thus we have his apprentice effort at Frederick Forsyth assassinations, at Wilbur Smith sex scenes in Thai brothels, at a sexually repressed woman, 'Only once had she known a man with whom her loins could run wild', and at violent deaths:
Their heads had come together with such force that the grey hair and the golden hair seemed to sprout from a single pulp.
Mixed in with this nonsense, we are also given the unchallengeable fact of the death of Major Mike Kealy DSO on an endurance march (from exposure, accord- ing to the coroner; from an insulin over- dose, Fiennes alleges), and the presumably equally authentic deaths of other service- men from accidents and illness, or, as Fiennes suggests, by murder.
I find this factional mixture repellent in almost every way. It is written in a prurient, trashy style. It reduces the lives and deaths of real people to the inconsequence of a
paperback romance. It purports to be an apologia for a vigilante group. And the ostensible raison d'être of the group is almost the only unacceptable reason I can think of for producing a book. You can write from avarice, malice, pride, sloth, or any other motive, and the possibility of producing a good book will make your sin forgivable. But by that same liberal standard, prevention of the publication of someone else's work is a contemptible motive.
Wondering whether the book was a hoax, I checked with the publishers who con- firmed that they regarded The Feather Men as non-fiction. The Daily Telegraph con- firmed the date and circumstances of Major Kealy's death in 1979. And the office of Colonel Tommy Macpherson, who is alleged to have managed the SAS vigilantes on behalf of the regiment's founder, David Stirling, confirmed his existence without endorsing the rest of the book's veracity. Leaving aside any wider implications, what is to be made of a book with such a provenance, which wants to be believed as both fact and fiction?
T.E. Lawrence, whose behind-the-lines desert exploits anticipated Stirling's, remarked cogently of covert operations, 'To be "secret" for any sum of time ruins the nerves'. Specifically, it blurs the perception of difference — initially between information and propaganda, and eventually between reality and paranoia. On the evidence available here, I conclude that Fiennes' chief and most secretive source was suffering from this occupational hazard. I am sorry that such • material should have been presented in this fashion, but at least the style of writing manages to rob it of any authority or conviction.
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