Malcolm Muggeridge (an old English literateur) once said that George Orwell “was no good as a novelist, because he didn’t have the interest in character.” Well, I didn’t need to tell you who George Orwell was, so you may doubt the judgment of the largely forgotten Muggeridge. But I think he was very close to an important factor for the novelist.
Here’s why: Character creates empathy in a novel. It puts the reader in a relationship with the work. Muggeridge’s…
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Added by Matt Rees on May 27, 2010 at 11:42pm —
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NABLUS, West Bank — Six years ago, during the Palestinian intifada, I sat on a dusty hilltop overlooking this most violent of West Bank towns with a dozen of the top Israeli officers in the area. The brigade commanders told their regional chiefs that all the police work and house-to-house fighting of the intifada had made their troops ill-prepared for a real war. “If we had to fight in Lebanon, my men wouldn’t know what they were doing,” shouted one.
In 2006,…
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Added by Matt Rees on May 23, 2010 at 7:47pm —
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I often receive emails from book stores, amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, and online literary sites telling me how much I’d like the novels of Matt Beynon Rees. I’m delighted to see these emails, which are based on my other purchases and interests, as only I can truly know just how much the novels of Matt Beynon Rees have changed my life. (Try them, I’m sure you’ll agree.)
Of course, I also get the occasional email informing me that if I like Matt Beynon…
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Added by Matt Rees on May 21, 2010 at 12:42am —
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I was at Oxford University at the same time as Britain's new prime minister. But while I spent all my free time at a famous old pub opposite the historic Bodleian Library with a pint of Guinness in the company of some old Irish porters, I never saw David Cameron there. Which makes me doubt his suitability for office.
That's not because I think the prime minister should be overfond of alcohol (at Oxford, Cameron was a member of a very upper-crust private drinking…
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Added by Matt Rees on May 14, 2010 at 5:21pm —
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“Exotic” crime fiction has taken off in the last decade. People want to read about detectives in far-off places, even if they don’t want to wade through learned histories of those distant lands.
Many of the biggest selling novels of the last decade have been “exotic crime.” You’ll find a detective novel set almost everywhere in the world, from the “Number One Ladies Detective Agency” in Botswana through Camilleri’s Sicily to dour old Henning Mankell in…
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Added by Matt Rees on May 13, 2010 at 7:30pm —
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Hamas is rebuilding its underground powerbase in the West Bank, stockpiling weapons and material underground, biding its time for a renewal of the conflict with its Fatah rivals.
Palestinian security officials have been telling me this for some time, and they are frankly filled with fear and foreboding. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas mentioned it again in an interview with the Arabic newspaper al-Sharq al-Awsat during the week, accusing Hamas of smuggling…
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Added by Matt Rees on May 10, 2010 at 5:10pm —
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A friend of mine was lunching with a Scandinavian author a while back. At one point, the writer joked: “But that’s enough of me talking about myself. What do YOU think of me?”
Unlike that writer, I don’t care what you think of me. Don’t be offended – I don’t care what I think about other people, either. The more I write, the more I realize that I’m interested in myself alone.
That, I believe, is the necessary focus of all art – even…
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Added by Matt Rees on May 6, 2010 at 7:22pm —
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BETHLEHEM, West Bank — The good news is that the West Bank is normal — kind of — and that people are content — sort of. The bad news, the Palestine Liberation Organization thinks it’s responsible for the good news.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who’s also the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) chief, has decided to stamp down on the man who’s actually made life bearable in the West Bank, Prime Minister Salaam Fayyad, and his plan to declare…
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Added by Matt Rees on May 5, 2010 at 11:35pm —
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Every couple of days a little alert pops up in my email account letting me know that I can read my books for nothing in Norwegian. My Norwegian’s not so great and I can read my books for nothing any time. But that’s not the point.
Scandinavia is a major center of so-called Cyberpunks who have willfully misinterpreted an old hacker adage that “information wants to be free” to mean “go ahead and steal things from which someone else expects to earn his livelihood.” Such Cyber…
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Added by Matt Rees on April 29, 2010 at 6:35pm —
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Stephen Farrell was sipping coffee in the office of his money changer on Salah ud-Din Street, East Jerusalem’s main commercial strip, four years ago, when Beverley Milton-Edwards entered. From his rucksack, Farrell produced a copy of a book about Islamic militants written by the Queens University Belfast professor.
“Your book saved my life when I was kidnapped in Iraq,” he said, referring to a brief period of captivity by militants in Baghdad in 2004…
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Added by Matt Rees on April 25, 2010 at 7:59pm —
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Robert Harris has been one of my favorite authors since I first laid hands on “Fatherland,” his “what if the Nazis had won” thriller. “Enigma” and “Archangel” were even better. His first two Roman ventures “Pompei” and “Imperium” were by no means the worst books I read in the years of their publication.
Then came “The Ghost.” The story of a hack hired to ghostwrite the multi-million-dollar memoirs of a former British Prime Minister — transparently Tony…
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Added by Matt Rees on April 23, 2010 at 9:00pm —
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I can’t believe the extent of the corruption being uncovered in Israel’s government.
My predecessor as Prime Minister moped home from vacation yesterday – without any envelopes stuffed with cash, as far as we know -- and made a weepy statement about yet another police probe into bribery and fraud and breach of trust on his part. He’s alleged to have been in cahoots with a bunch of shady property developers, lawyers and municipal officials, so that a big, tacky…
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Added by Matt Rees on April 17, 2010 at 12:14am —
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If there’s one thing that authoring a series of novels will teach you, it’s that you can’t wait for inspiration. But you can prompt it, give it little shocks that’ll keep it bubbling within you. Here are a few methods I use to do just that.
I travel to the places I’m writing about. I talk to people who might be similar to (or even provide the basis for) my characters. I read about them and their world. I engage in the same activities in which they…
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Added by Matt Rees on April 15, 2010 at 6:13pm —
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JERUSALEM — The heads of all the crime families in New York used to get together every Wednesday night at the Ravenite Social Club on Mulberry Street in Little Italy. If you were looking for an Israeli parallel, you could do worse than the gym I work out at.
The Cybex Club at the David’s Citadel Hotel has a nice view of the Ottoman walls of Jerusalem’s Old City. It’s also where the legal, political and business elite come to sweat (actually, being Israelis, they…
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Added by Matt Rees on April 11, 2010 at 11:20pm —
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No Palestinian state this week. Can't say I really know why there isn't. At this point I’d be content to sign off on anything at all, just to get it off my plate. I’ve told the Americans that, but they seem convinced I’m some kind of hardliner—they think I’m bluffing when I say “Barry, where do I sign?” I think it’s because of the way I lift my eyebrow in my official photograph. I thought it was sexy and devil-may-care, but apparently it makes me look hawkish and too clever for…
Added by Matt Rees on April 8, 2010 at 7:12pm —
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JERUSALEM — There’s an old Arab aphorism: “A man with a plan takes action; a man with two plans gets confused.” Apply that to the Israelis and to the Palestinians, and the nonsensical sequence of recent events in the Middle East starts to fall into a comprehensible pattern.
It’s not a pleasant pattern, because it leads to war.
First, before we get to the fireworks, let’s recap all the nonsense.
The…
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Added by Matt Rees on April 6, 2010 at 8:01pm —
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In this weekend's Sunday Times of London, reviewer John Dugdale describes my Palestinian detective Omar Yussef as "one of the most beguiling of current sleuths." You can
read the roundup in full at Times Online, but here's the bit about my newest novel
THE FOURTH ASSASSIN:
Set in a pulsating,…
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Added by Matt Rees on April 5, 2010 at 6:31pm —
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Since 9/11, writers have tried to understand the extremists committed to the destruction of the West and, often, that of their own societies in the Middle East. Most have attempted to do this by “going inside” the world of those extremists, giving us the inner life of suicide bombers or of the “American Taliban.”
It’s a worthwhile premise, because it’s aimed at comprehending people who are frequently written off as bestial, bloodthirsty psychopaths, as though…
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Added by Matt Rees on April 2, 2010 at 8:05pm —
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GIVAT ONAN, West Bank—On this windblown outpost in the hills north of Jerusalem, a small fringe of Israeli settlers strives to bring the day of redemption promised, as they believe, in the Bible.
A controversial sect shunned by nearby Israeli settlements, the Brothers of Onan believe that by “spilling their seed” on the land of the ancient biblical Jewish homeland, they will hasten the coming of the Messiah. With the Israeli communities of the West Bank…
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Added by Matt Rees on April 1, 2010 at 6:00pm —
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The original Swedish title of the opening installment in Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy was “Men Who Hate Women.” Which proves that you can write a huge international bestseller and not know why people would read your book.
Larsson’s U.K. publisher changed the title to “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.” With his original title, Larsson would’ve been a posthumous hit (he died in 2004 of a heart attack at the age of 50) in Sweden, where he was well-known as a…
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Added by Matt Rees on March 30, 2010 at 10:42pm —
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