Writing out loud

Author Henry Porter has written about 90 newspaper columns on liberty. Photo / Supplied

Henry Porter isn't one for pussyfooting around. In his fifth and latest novel, The Dying Light (Orion, $37.99), there's no attempt to hide his personal agenda. A long-time commentator on civil liberties, Porter intends this political thriller to be a wake up call of Orwellian proportions.

"I didn't mean it to be a real thriller at all," he admits over the phone from his London home. "I wanted to say something and that was just as important as the plot."

Not that the plot isn't gripping. The Dying Light is set a little way into the future and opens with an inquest into the death of disgraced government adviser David Eyam. His one-time lover Kate Lockhart is surprised to find she's been bequeathed his country cottage. Then the former intelligence officer discovers the rest of Eyam's legacy and is caught up in a covert battle against sinister government forces that threaten to rob ordinary people of their privacy and freedom.

All of Porter's novels have had some sort of moral impetus but The Dying Light is the culmination of what has become more of a personal crusade.

A freelance journalist and the UK editor of Vanity Fair magazine, his obsession with civil liberties started when he wrote a novel set at the end of the Cold War. Much of the research for that book centred on the surveillance techniques of the repressive Stasi secret police.

"A while later I was asked to do a newspaper column," Porter recalls. "I started reading the law that had been passed in Britain over the past 10 or 12 years and realised we were heading down the same route. We had put in place laws that could lead to a regime like the Stasi, laws to track people, massive surveillance. And that's what tripped my switch."

Week after week, Porter's columns in the Observer newspaper reminded Britons of facts they might prefer not to consider: that there are now four million closed-circuit cameras in the country for instance, more than in the rest of Europe put together, and that there are laws that allow for basic freedoms to be suspended in cases of civil emergency.

Eventually his newspaper columns led to a public email debate on liberty with then Prime Minister Tony Blair. Then in February, Porter brought together a group of thinkers, writers and politicians to debate the erosion of rights in what he called the Convention on Modern Liberty.

"It was really a talking shop," he admits. "But there was a buzz about it. It showed there are people out there who are pro-democracy. It signalled that we're organised and very effective in terms of press coverage."

In all Porter has written about 90 newspaper columns on liberty. "I've bored a lot of people rigid, I know I have," he laughs. "But newspapers can ram a message home in a way other mediums like TV can't. Newspapers can change opinions."

Giving his crusade new life in a novel was a smart move. What's so disturbing about The Dying Light is that almost everything that happens seems plausible. But it's also a pacey, suspenseful read with some great characters, in particular the strong and sassy heroine Kate Lockhart.

"I've met several female spies like her," says Porter. "They're brave and confident but they tend not to have a lot of time for love. "I wanted to write about a character like that - steely but feminine - and based her on a woman I met who did amazingly courageous things in Russia 20 years ago."

Since the end of the Cold War and the heyday of spying, Porter says he's sensed a softening in the British character. "Something has changed fundamentally in Britain. We've become less robust, less intellectually rooted. People don't know the struggle it took to gain our rights. We live in a vacuum of historical knowledge."

Although he has plans to write a follow-up to The Dying Light, this time it won't involve politics or civil liberties. "If I go on and on I run the risk of becoming fanatical and boring.

"So this book is my last throw of the dice. Unless they do something drastically stupid, I think I'll move on to something else."

Exclusive offer for Herald on Sunday readers - buy The Dying Light at www.fishpond.co.nz and receive an additional $5 discount when you enter the voucher code PORTER at checkout. Offer expires August 30, 2009.