One summer in Cambridgeshire’s Grantchester Meadows, about 25 years ago, I was taking part in a charity cricket match that pitted the local newspaper’s team against local celebrities.
The scene was lyrical; more to the point, I was batting well. I middled a ball to the square-leg boundary, confident of adding four more runs. But the man fielding there moved to one side and had the audacity to catch me.
Lord Archer of Weston-super-Mare, or plain Jeffrey Archer as he was then, intercepted me in the pavilion at tea. “That was a good catch,” he said of his impressive effort.
“You were going well.” And the exchange stayed with me, for its sheer brazenness and slightly tactless tone of self-congratulation.
But that was 25 years ago, and in truth, we hadn’t seen anything yet.
I recount the details of the catch as we sit in Archer’s penthouse apartment on Albert Embankment, and his face beams. “How very rude of me,” he says, twice, but he doesn’t mean it of course.
Nothing could mean more to him than a compliment on his sporting prowess. He is the cat that got the cream, sidled away, and then discovered a whole vat round the next corner. “I couldn’t bat and I couldn’t bowl but I could field,” he says, managing to sound both self-deprecatory and self-satisfied, a frequent Archer trope.
Writer’s return
No less than on that sunny afternoon, Archer appears pleased with himself and with his reconfigured life. The 67-year-old is confident of the success of his 14th novel, A Prisoner of Birth.
“I have put more into this than anything since Kane and Abel,” he says, referring to the 1979 world best-seller that helped cement his reputation as a publishing phenomenon.
An update of Alexandre Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo, it is his first novel to address prison life, a subject Archer unwillingly researched during his much-publicised incarceration for perjury and conspiracy to pervert the course of justice (he was released in July 2003, having served two years of a four-year sentence), as his young protagonist, Danny Cartwright, fights against wrongful imprisonment to plot his improbable escape and elaborate revenge.
He doesn’t make prison sound very unpleasant, I say.
“No. And what is misunderstood by middle-class people is that you have a fear of prison, for understandable reasons, but 99 per cent of it is just plain boring. I saw three violent incidents there in two years.”
Back to the novel. I enjoyed reading it, I say truthfully, but I had one or two plausibility issues with it. Archer, thinking of his hero Danny’s near-miraculous educational feats in prison, reckons he knows what I am going to say and pre-emptively opens a copy of the novel, pointing to one of the acknowledgements. It is to “Billy Little, BX7974, HMP Whitemoor, LVCM (Hons), BSc (Hons), Soc Sci (Open), Dip SP&C (Open)”.
“He went in unable to read or write,” Archer says quietly and with dramatic effect. “I have been backing him for the past seven years. He is doing 22 years for murder and he is now doing a PhD, studying the media. He is an expert on the BBC.”
Learning behind bars
An acquaintance from prison days?
“We met at Belmarsh. He wouldn’t speak to me at first. But when we were on our own, I said to him that he was very bright and, if he had had a formal education, he could have gone to Oxford or Cambridge. I told him that if there was anything he wanted help with in his education, he would have it. And he started the next day.”
In the novel, Archer’s prisoner of birth, Danny, is drawn as a one-dimensional, salt-of-the-earth hero, with not a flaw in his character. In sharp contrast, a quartet of seemingly respectable men — a barrister, an aristocrat, an actor and a City type — are vipers. Was he making a point? “It would have been boring the other way round,” he says.
I say that the character Archer seems to admire most in the book is Munro, a Scottish lawyer who is the embodiment of calm, understated Enlightenment values. “You’ve got it in one. I fell in love with him. I’ve met people like that, too.”
Soon, we are talking about Archer’s other great passion, sports. I ask if he has ever considered investing in a team. “Never. Lunacy. I’d rather have another painting. What would you rather have, Ronaldinho or a Monet?”
Then I leave, musing that if I were Archer’s therapist, I would underline the traits he seems to venerate in conversation and fiction these days: straightness, propriety and understatement. And, dare I say it, cricketers who pocket a catch and trot to congratulate the bowler — without saying a word.
