Obituaries / Bernice Rubens

Bernice Rubens

Bernice Rubens

Booker-winning novelist whose work focused on the more disturbing aspects of human behaviour

Janet Watts

Thu 14 October 2004

Bernice Rubens had just completed her autobiography when she died, at the age of 76. She worked most days. "I feel unclean if I don't write," she explained. "I don't love writing. But I love having written." Though this was her third career - she taught English and made documentary films before she took up her pen at the age of 30 - she published 24 novels, which won critical acclaim, popularity and prestigious prizes. Her autobiography was her first work of non-fiction.

Rubens's fourth novel, The Elected Member, won the 1970 Booker prize, beating work by Iris Murdoch, William Trevor and Elizabeth Bowen. She was almost unknown at the time. Though the book was a Literary Guild choice in America, at home it had been ignored by some newspapers and magazines and had sold only 3,000 copies. She did not win the prize again, although her ninth novel, A Five Year Sentence (1978), was a runner-up.

Her second book, Madame Sousatzka (1962), became a film starring Shirley MacLaine and directed by John Schlesinger; her seventh, I Sent A Letter To My Love (1975), was also filmed, with Simone Signoret; and her 13th, Mr Wakefield's Crusade (1985), was made into a BBC TV miniseries.

Rubens enjoyed the respected place she had achieved in the literary world. She was an honorary vice-president of International PEN and served as a Booker judge in 1986. She maintained close friendships with a chosen group of colleagues, including Beryl Bainbridge, Paul Bailey and Francis King. She could be combative with writers she did not like, famously disparaging Martin Amis for his backward-written Holocaust novel, Time's Arrow, both on radio and in her novel Autobiopsy (1995).

Success did not cure the insecurity that such aggression (quite convincingly) concealed, or change the wry, matter-of-fact view she took of her own writing. "Better than most, not as good as some," was her crisp verdict.

She was a compelling storyteller, weaving her novels from many strands: her own vivid experiences, her friends' and family's lives, centuries of Jewish tradition and history; above all, her remarkable and disturbing imagination. In everyday places - a suburban villa, an English public school, a home for the elderly - Rubens showed the horrors that can lie behind net curtains and cosiness, polite conversation or an unexplained wink.

Though her novels have many themes, she admitted that she really only wrote about one thing. Human relationships were the core material of her books, especially within a family. ("Everything that happens in a family is more so in a Jewish family," she said.) To this subject she brought her unsparing scrutiny, ruthless candour and a dark, unquenchable humour.

As her prolific output suggested, she was good at getting ideas for novels and fast in putting them down on paper. She only wrote one draft and she claimed she did not know what was going to happen in her ingenious plots before she wrote them. That would have been boring. But she knew her characters.

In these people lay the paradox of her fiction, which was (like them) at once intensely human and deeply bizarre. In the cavalcade of their lives - painful, funny, grotesque - death is a constant presence. A high proportion of her characters commit suicide or murder; some do both. What the others get up to may be more easily hidden, but in its own way it is no less extreme. Rubens got inside their minds, and what she found and showed there offered her readers little comfort. Fear; greed; fanaticism; cruelty; malignity (sometimes motiveless). Or the cold hell of loneliness, that itself begets monsters. She once admitted that she had lived in that all her life.

She was born in Cardiff. Her father, Eli Rubens, was a Lithuanian Jew who thought he was escaping anti-semitism for America when he boarded his ship at Hamburg around 1900. But the ticket tout had swindled him: he was shoved off at Cardiff. It was a fortnight before he realised he wasn't in New York. He married Dorothy Cohen, whose family had emigrated from Poland, and became a "tallyman", buying suits and shoes and selling them to miners for a shilling a week.

Bernice Rubens

Eli had brought a half-violin with him, and his two sons and elder daughter all became professional musicians. Harold, his firstborn, was to suffer the tragic loss of his exceptional gifts to illness; Cyril, the youngest in the family (and for Bernice, "the love of my life"), became a violinist in the London Symphony Orchestra. To her great sorrow, he was the first of her siblings to die, in 1997.

Bernice, Eli's third child, refused the half-violin. She wanted to play the cello, which was too expensive. So when the extended family visited and marvelled at the other children's playing on Sundays, she sat apart, feeling an outsider.

"You are an observer," her mother told her, perhaps in consolation. Later, she did learn the cello and the piano, and played them for the rest of her life. She liked to present herself as a failed musician rather than the accomplished writer she was.

She read English at the University of Wales, Cardiff, and married young. Her husband, Rudi Nassbauer, a wine merchant who also wrote poetry and fiction, came from a family of German Jews who held eastern European Jews such as Bernice's family in low esteem. Bernice bore two daughters, taught English at a Birmingham grammar school from 1950 to 1955, then went into the film industry. Her documentaries were well received, one entitled Stress winning the American Blue Ribbon award in 1968.

Another film took her to Java, where she was appalled at the failings of the international aid agencies and developed a deep respect for the traditional wisdom. Impressed by a local medicine man's treatment of a man who in the west would have been diagnosed as schizophrenic, she asked the healer if he had heard of Freud. "Does he live in Jakarta?" he replied. It was a bright moment in Rubens' lifelong loathing of the psychotherapeutic industry, later shared by the narrator of her 2002 novel, Nine Lives, who kills nine shrinks (and one dentist, by mistake).

Her writing began as she did, with her orthodox Jewish family in south Wales. She took the title of her first novel, Set On Edge (1960), from Ezekiel: "The fathers have eaten sour grapes and the children's teeth are set on edge." She dedicated it to the memory of her father, who died in 1958. It was a success: she wouldn't have continued if it hadn't been, she said later.

Her family provided her with material throughout her writing life. Madame Sousatzka was a story about a child prodigy very like her gifted elder brother Harold. The scapegoat hero of The Elected Member, driven by the pressure of parental expectations into drug addiction and incarceration in mental hospital, replayed a desperate period when Harold suffered a similar confinement.

Despite her aversion to psychiatry, Rubens prefaced this book with a line from RD Laing, who observed that patients who were "disturbed" often came from "very disturbing" families. While withholding judgment on the efficacy of Laing's practice, she admitted that she found his ideas - on a purely literary basis - "exciting".

Her third novel, Mate In Three (1965), drew less successfully on personal experience: her collapsing marriage. Rudi left her after 23 years, having fathered a son by another woman. Her sixth novel, Go Tell The Lemming (1973), covered their divorce. Rudi's departure shattered her, but her distress melted, in time, into friendship. He died in 1997. She spoke often of her ambivalence about living alone.

In her later books, Rubens moved from family life to broader historical subjects. Though she usually denied any religious feeling, her Jewishness had a central importance to her, and the theme of Jewish identity surfaced repeatedly in her fiction. It found its fullest expression in Brothers (1983), a 500-page novel that follows several generations of a Jewish family through a fight for survival that takes them from 19th-century Tsarist Russia to western Europe and Nazism, then back to modern Russia and its continued persecution of the Jews.

She talked and worried about anti-semitism and Israel, and her growing concern came out in her social relationships as well as through such recent books as I, Dreyfus (1999) and The Sergeant's Tale (2003). I, Dreyfus is a clever reprise of the French legal scandal at the turn of the 20th century in a drama of contemporary Britain. The book's hero, Sir Alfred Dreyfus, is a "closet Jew", a type of concealment that stirred his creator's anger and scorn. The novel tells of his journey through the trauma of his conviction and incarceration for child murder into a transformed relationship with his Jewishness and the suffering of his Jewish forebears.

Rubens felt more and more Jewish as her life went on, she said towards its end. But by an irony of her chosen profession, the Jewish consciousness that was to her a personal strength seemed to some critics a literary weakness, a diminution of her proven skills in creating and dwelling in imaginary worlds into what they saw as moralising or reworking history. She didn't care. Her best book was Brothers, she insisted: "because ... what it's about matters".

Her daughters Sharon and Rebecca survive her.

Paul Bailey writes: I have many happy memories of Bernice Rubens, my good friend of 24 years, but the happiest is also one of the earliest. We were in Leicester, where we'd recently met, on a tour for the Arts Council.

One day we were invited to talk to sixth-form students at a school in the city. We were met by two teachers, a man and a woman, who charmed us by asking: "Should we know your work?" We giggled, I remember, and mumbled something along the lines of: "Well ... " or: "If you want to." The man took me into a classroom, where I talked about Jane Austen.

Every so often, I heard laughter from the adjoining room, where Bernice was obviously entertaining the boys and girls. It transpired that the teacher had introduced Bernice as Denise Robins, the blue-rinsed queen of slush who was Barbara Cartland's only serious rival. Instead of being outraged, Bernice pretended to be Denise for an entire hour. When a girl asked: "How do you work, Miss Robins?" Bernice/Denise retorted: "Very quickly." Our friendship was lastingly sealed that afternoon.

Claire Armitstead writes: At this year's Hay Festival, Bernice Rubens was on fighting form. "Have you actually read my book?" she asked, fixing me with a beady eye as we made our way to the marquee in which we were to discuss her novel The Sergeant's Tale. "Of course," I stammered, with the slightly guilty knowledge that I had galloped through it overnight. "Oh, I don't mind if you haven't," she replied. "It's just easier if I know."

On stage, she was witty, candid, shrewd - and never more so than when a woman in the audience asked if she felt dissatisfied with any of her books. Yes there was one, she recalled, which she wrote just after the breakup of her marriage. "It was good therapy for me, but a rotten novel. You should always write in yesterday's blood." I, for one, won't forget that pearl of hard-won wisdom.

· Bernice Rubens, writer, born July 26 1928; died October 13 2004.

THE GUARDIAN

Sweet like chocolate / Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory

 Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka in the 1971 film. Photograph: Allstar/Warner Bros.

Adaptation of the week

Sweet like chocolate: Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory

Andrew Pulver

Saturday 11 September 2004

Author: Roald Dahl (1916-1990) began his prolific writing career after being invalided out of the RAF during the second world war, and being posted to the US. His first book, The Gremlins (1943), became a Disney film. In 1960 he moved back to England, and started writing in earnest, with James and the Giant Peach (1961) becoming his first significant success. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - inspired, so he said, by being used as a test consumer by the nearby Cadbury’s factory while at school in Repton – was published first in the US in 1964. A string of successful children’s books followed, including Fantastic Mr Fox (1970), Danny: The Champion of the World (1975), The BFG (1982), The Witches (1983) and Matilda (1988). He died of leukemia in 1990.

Story: Dahl’s children’s fantasy tale is set in an un-named town that’s recognisably English (and still suffering the after-effects of war and rationing). Poverty-stricken child Charlie Bucket is one of five winners of a competition to visit the chocolate factory run by the mysterious Wonka. The factory tour introduces them to a string of bizarre confectioneries (Everlasting Gobstoppers etc) as well as the Oompa-Loompas – the pygmy-sized workforce. But the fairy tale becomes a cautionary one as Charlie’s fellow competition winners are consigned to humiliation for indulging in Dahl’s pet hates - eating too much, chewing gum, being grasping, and watching TV. Charlie is then handed ownership of the factory by Wonka as the “winner”.

The film-makers: Mel Stuart (b 1928) was originally a TV documentarist, and was told about the book by his 11-year-old daughter. The $1.8m budget was raised from Quaker Oats, who were planning to market a chocolate bar around its release. Dahl wanted Spike Milligan to play Wonka, but he was considered too much of a risk for the US market. Gene Wilder, hitherto best known for his role in Mel Brooks’s The Producers (1968), was cast instead, opposite a group of unknown child actors. Anthony Newley and Leslie Bricusse wrote the songs.

How book and film compare: The film is first and foremost a children’s musical, with catchy tunes such as The Candy Man Can and Oompa Loompa. Though the setting remains physically similar, the film is considerably more transatlantic than the book, with most of the principal cast being American. (Augustus Gloop, the glutton, is German; Veruca Salt, the spoilt kid, is English.) The film added two significant plot elements: the sinister figure of Slugworth, who tries to persuade each child to tell him the secret of Everlasting Gobstoppers; and Wonka’s threat to expel Charlie along with the other children after he samples the Fizzy Lifting Drinks. The film transforms Dahl’s story into a classic of pop-art kitsch, with costumes, design and lettering all contributing to an extravagantly imagined work. But the author was vocal about his unhappiness with Stuart’s changes.

Inspirations and influences: The success of previous children’s musicals like Oliver! (1968) and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968) - on which Dahl had worked - meant that a market for this movie appeared assured. But it failed at the box office, and it wasn’t until the advent of video in the early 1980s that its bizarre stylings were rediscovered. Director Tim Burton was particularly affected: he is currently directing a remake of this film, having produced an animated adaptation of another Dahl book, James and the Giant Peach, in 1996.

THE GUARDIAN

 

'An Evening of Long Goodbyes': This Man Is an Island

An Evening of Long Goodbyes / Review

By Stephen Amidon
September 5, 2004

AN EVENING OF LONG GOODBYES By Paul Murray. 424 pp. Random House. $24.95.

The economic boom that has transformed the long-stagnant Irish economy into one of the world's most productive is not without its detractors. The Celtic Tiger (as this upswing is grandiosely known) might be good news for tech entrepreneurs and real estate brokers, but the prospect of lattes by the Liffey and cellphone towers on Ben Bulben is driving many traditional Irishmen to distraction.

Charles Hythloday, the bibulous, buttonholing narrator of Paul Murray's first novel, "An Evening of Long Goodbyes," is just such a malcontent. Marooned in Amaurot, his family's seaside manor outside of Dublin, this 24-year-old gentleman of leisure casts a cold eye on the encroaching modern world. For Charles, even the briefest sortie into the "encircling suburbs" can prove a descent into hell. "The shopping center frightened me, the alien, prefabricated meanness of it: the cut-rate hair salon, the boutiques of bleak pastel frocks, the newsagent's whose staff were in a state of perpetual regression." Far better to stay at home, draining his recently deceased father's wine collection, feeding his pet peacocks and doting on his beloved sister, Bel, a would-be actress with a turbulent emotional history. He sees himself as living by the Renaissance code of sprezzatura, which dictates that every action (or, in Charles's case, inaction) must be carried out with effortless grace. Attention should be paid to beauty rather than results. "Thus, if one were to work at, say, law, one should raise it to the level of an art; if one were to laze, then one must laze beautifully."

It is, of course, an idyll doomed to failure. If there is anything the modern world disdains more than grace, it is a lack of results. Charles's nemeses are legion, and they all seem intent on driving him from Amaurot. First and foremost is Frank, the loutish "architectural salvage" specialist currently wooing Bel. There are also the Bosnian refugees squatting in the Folly, an extravagant but useless edifice that Charles is having built on the estate's grounds, as well as Charles's alcoholic mother, who returns unexpectedly from the upscale institution where she has been drying out. Rounding off this roster of tormentors is Harry, the social realist playwright who wants Bel to star in his latest work, "Ramp," a sublimely po-faced drama about the disabled.

These early scenes, in which Charles tries in vain to protect the sanctity of his ancestral home, are the novel's best. As long as he stays at Amaurot, "An Evening of Long Goodbyes" succeeds as a spirited howl against so-called progress. Once Murray casts his hero out into the world, however, the narrator begins to lose his voice. Charles's long, improbable residency with Frank in a Dublin slum lacks the sparkle of the Amaurot sequences, as does his servitude in a "bread factory" in the Cherry Orchard industrial park. (Murray has a rookie's weakness for literary allusion -- the telephone company that threatens to buy out Amaurot from the dithering, Hamlet-esque Charles and his Ophelia-like sister is named Telsinor). Since there is no doubt that Charles's foray into modern Ireland will turn out to be a disaster, his encounters with Dublin's drug lords and yuppie go-getters soon feel redundant. Murray also tends to rely on crude, knockabout humor to move his narrative along. The result is a novel whose 400-plus pages begin to weigh on the reader not long after the midpoint. Only when Charles straggles home, considerably worse for wear, does the author regain his deft touch.

If plotting is a difficulty for Murray, prose style most certainly is not. He writes with the cunning and confidence of a seasoned pro. Memorable images are frequently conjured, such as when Charles's father, a famous inventor of cosmetics, tries to mask the ravages of his fatal illness with his art: "And so the makeup was caked on with trembling fingers, layer upon layer; he lay in the half darkness like a sad, syphilitic Pierrot, his gaunt cheeks stained concavely with rouge." Charles's lacerating, hilarious voice proves as effective a weapon against creeping globalism as any smoke bomb or human blockade. The arriviste house hunters who are snatching up

the land around Amaurot are dismissed as "new people: pale and crepuscular from days and nights holed up in their towers of cuboid offices, crawling down the narrow, winding roads in BMW's or hulking Jeeps, scouting for property like toothless anemic sharks." Charles's caustic snobbery, which Bel calls his "feudal outlook," is oddly endearing, especially when it comes up against characters like Gemma from "Sirius Recruitment, Ireland's leading premium specialist in I.T., multimedia and e-business solutions NOW," whom a penniless, job-seeking Charles unwisely visits in a "slightly foxed" dinner jacket and "gaudy" waistcoat.

While Charles proves an acute commentator on the outside world, he is considerably less reliable about his inner landscape, opening a further comic dimension for the reader to savor. His project to save Amaurot as a haven "unlike the shifting, unstable world outside" is clearly doomed, especially once the chairman of Telsinor announces his plans to transform it into a corporate "Center for the Arts." Charles's relationship with his sister is even more deeply self-deceptive -- though he thinks he is simply protecting her from unsuitable suitors, he is clearly in love with her, an incestuous obsession that took root during their languid, cloistered childhood. The novel achieves an unexpected poignancy as it becomes clear that Charles's paralytic attachment to the past has as much to do with this impossible love for the fragile Bel as it does for ancient Ireland.

The story's key moment comes when its hero, quite literally, goes to the dogs. Before returning home for his final showdown with Amaurot's interlopers, Charles visits a greyhound racetrack in a desperate attempt to raise money. Championing a clapped-out old hound with the unlikely name of An Evening of Long Goodbyes, he manages to come up a winner, even after his dog is savaged by a brute called Celtic Tiger. At this moment of triumph, Charles is visited by the ghost of W. B. Yeats, who compliments him on his sprezzatura, then quotes Oscar Wilde, another Irishman who would have little time for the brave new nation around them: "In a good democracy, every man should be an aristocrat." It is a risky scene, but Murray's gamble pays off, placing his alienated narrator squarely in his nation's best traditions. In a contest between the aristocratic Charles and the egalitarian representatives of new Ireland, I suspect that many readers will be inclined to give Charles their votes.

Stephen Amidon's novels include "The New City" and "Thirst." His new novel, "Human Capital," will be published in October.

THE NEW YORK TIMES

Summer readings / Henning Mankell

SUMMER READINGS

Faro Island, The Baltic

By Henning Mankell

Sunday 15 August 2004 01.10 BST

I have always been on the move like a Scandinavian nomad in an unknown tribe, doing serious writing wherever I happened to be. When I was very young, I remember once living clandestinely in an empty apartment in Stockholm. There were no lamps in the flat. The only light I could find was when I opened the oven. Fine by me. I used the oven as a table, put my typewriter there and had all the light I needed.

Everything is possible. I still remember in 1992, writing The White Lioness in Maputo, east Africa. I lived in a small room where I was surrounded by other small rooms, and - I counted them - seven radios, playing loudly, but tuned into different music stations. It happened that I, maybe once a week, lost my temper and asked them if they at least not could choose one programme to listen to. Everyone was very understanding; they turned off the radios completely for 15 minutes and then it started all over again.

I loved my neighbours. And I wrote the novel. So I think I can write almost anywhere. I can never excuse myself for failing in my work by blaming the room, wherever or whatever it may be.

But perhaps this is not completely true. There is an exception to this rule. There is a sacred spot somewhere in the world. I spend time in this sacred spot and I must admit that I sometimes long to go there. On the other hand, I am always afraid to lose my independence. I can not fall in love too much with that little house.

North of the island of Gotland, this very rare and magic island in the Baltic, some 35 minutes' flying time from Stockholm, there is another island, even smaller. Its name is Fårö - meaning Sheep Island, and it is separated from Gotland by a firth where there is a ferry. This island has a magical landscape - it could be Ireland, the Hebrides or even the bush in north-eastern South Africa. All by itself on the eastern rocky beach is a small wooden cabin. It was originally built in the 1930s by a man who used to hunt during the winter season. Today, I can occasionally use it to live and work in. The cabin is situated some 30 metres from the sea. When the wind is strong, the salty waves almost reach the windows.

In this cabin, there is a kind of emptiness that is strange, rather impossible to explain. When I enter, I have a feeling that someone has just left, even though the house may have been abandoned for months. I am not talking about 'ghosts'; it is more the feeling that this cabin is breathing. But what is really magical about this cabin is that the mostly fictional characters I write about seem to like the cabin as much as I do. In just a couple of days, they fill the room with their voices. They share my bed, my food and they walk with me on the beach.

It took me some years to realise that this cabin is good when I have something really difficult to write. The house is a masterly servant. So I am happy that this cabin exists. And that I occasionally can use it. Among all the various rooms where I write, this little cabin is the centre that does not move, that is always there.

By the way, the owner of the cabin is Ingmar Bergman, who happens to be my father-in-law. As far as I know, he has never done any writing there.

· Henning Mankell's prize-winning Inspector Wallander thrillers consistently top European bestseller lists

THE GUARDIAN

Summer readings / AS Byatt

Summer readings

Cevennes, France

by As Byatt

Sunday 15 August 2004 01.10 BST

What I need to write well is a combination of heat, light and solitude. My first experience of southern heat and light was when I was au pair to a French family in a vineyard on the hot plain near Nîmes. We now spend our summers in a tiny house in the Cévennes, not far from Nîmes, but in very different country. There is ridge after ridge of craggy mountain hillside, all densely wooded with oaks and chestnuts up to the bare stony mountaintops, where the flocks of sheep spend the summers.

The mountains were eaten bare by the sheep before the 18th century and the trees are the work of one imaginative man called Fabre, who replanted huge areas of mountainside. I like it here because the sheep and the uplands remind me of the Yorkshire moors, the magical landscape of my childhood holidays. But this is on a grander scale and it is mostly very hot and bright.

Our house is on the edge of a village. We have two bedrooms and a living room - the house is the converted carriage shed of the house opposite. When we came, it was infested up to its upper balcony with a dense jungle of brambles, nightshade and bryony. It had been empty for 11 years. We cleared the land with machetes and, after much soul-searching, cut down a 100-year-old mulberry and built a pool and a terrace in front of our door.

The terrace looks down on to our own patch of rough hillside, going down steeply to a river which moves fast and has been known to rise five metres. I sit on the terrace and write, in a kind of bowl of bright blue light, staring at the edges of the mountains, which are never the same for half an hour - sometimes vague and misty, sometimes bright green and gold trees, and at night a black silhouette against the stars, the crest of a line of conifers, the knife-edge of a ridge like a lizard's back.

I've become a creature of routine, here in the sun. I get up early, walk to buy the bread, in the grey morning, take a walk round the hillside for an hour, climbing up under trees, passing a collection of goats and geese, saying good morning to the same six or seven people. You can think writing out on foot, the rhythm is good for thinking. Then I sit at a metal table in the weather, and write furiously - longhand - until I need to stop for lunch. I have a large number of stones and a monstrous fossil which I carry out ceremoniously to hold the papers down.

The weather here is extreme whatever it is doing. If it is hot and still, you can see the heat shimmer. But there are sudden tempests of wind, which rattle in from nowhere, and pages fly up and over the edge of the terrace and whirl away in the river. I get more patient as I get older. Bad weather here is unworkable in. The storms bang in one's head, and all electric things - computer, telephone, television - have to be turned off.

We had a summer hailstorm so violent once that huge pieces of ice came down an air vent and mashed up the Collected Letters of Arthur Henry Hallam which I'd borrowed from the London Library. There is nothing to do in bad weather but endure. I sit on my bed and read Terry Pratchett and watch the trees bend and hurl themselves about.

In the afternoons, I sleep, and then I swim, and then I read, and then I walk down to the local auberge and eat dinner in a courtyard under great trees (cedars, palms, a lime.) In our early days here, we used to shop for delicious food in the local market and make meals to eat by candlelight. Now I've got it down to essentials - I've not got so long left to write books in - and I never cook. Salad and sheep's cheese and melon for lunch. Delicious mussels and omelette aux cèpes and poulet aux ecrevisses cooked by a good friend in the evening - and I can go on working over dinner. I carry a bag of books down with me and read German with a dictionary before the food arrives and then useful research books with the meal. I have my own bottle and drink a glass or two with my dinner.

I've got the solitude right too. No house parties, no visitors. We do have another small house at the other end of the village where the family can stay and cook and play table tennis and go for walks and come up the river to swim in the pool. My main problem is people feeling sorry for me when neither my husband nor my family are here. They come in and invite me to social gatherings, and I stare wildly at them with my head full of uninterruptable strings of words I must remember, and ideas I must keep hold of, and stammer that I like being alone, I need to be alone. But they don't quite believe me. They think I must be sad when I am fiercely happier than I have ever been.

· AS Byatt is the author of many novels. Possession won the Booker Prize in 1990

THE GUARDIAN

Digital Fortress by Dan Brown / Digest read

Digital Fortress by Dan Brown

This article is more than 19 years old

Mon 9 Aug 2004 12.41 BST

Tankado died with the three good fingers of his shrivelled hand pointing heavenward.

Susan Fletcher was woken by the phone. It was David. "I've got to postpone," he said. "Something's come up." The phone rang again. It was Strathmore, deputy head of the NSA. "Something's come up," he said. "Come in."

Few people have heard of the NSA. Fewer still have heard of TRANSLTR, the world's most powerful computer, buried deep underground in NSA headquarters. It can decipher any code.

"It's bad, Susan," he said. "Our ex-employee Tankado has created an algorithmal code TRANSLTR can't decipher. He has a partner called NDAKOTA who has the pass code. That's where you come in. I need you to trace his untraceable email address."

David was having a bad day. He hadn't told Susan that Strathmore had sent him to Spain to get the code from Tankado's ring. Now Tankado was dead, the businessman and the prostitute who had taken the ring were dead, the American punk who had bought the ring off the prostitute was dead, and the assassin was after him. Worse still, the ring was a red herring: there was no code.

Greg Hales entered the NSA inner sanctum. Susan thought he might be NDAKOTA. "It's not right we should be able to spy on ordinary Americans," he said.

"TRANSLTR has already saved America from two terrorist attacks," she replied.

"Then how come we couldn't stop 9/11?"

"Because this book was published in the US in 1998 and it's only getting an outing in the UK to cash in on The Da Vinci Code."

Susan's superfast decryption programme suggested Tankado and NDAKOTA had the same email. Of course, she thought, they're anagrams of one another. She looked up to see Greg Hales kill a security officer.

Strathmore was starting to panic. He would have to tell Susan. "It's not an algorithmal code," he said. "It's a worm. I was trying to add a mutation that would allow us to read every secret in the world. But I've failed and now all America's secrets are going to be available online unless we get this code."

Susan and Strathmore cornered Hales. "It's Strathmore," yelled Hales. "He killed the security officer." But no one believed him and he died a nasty death.

Strathmore loved Susan. He had no regrets about telling the assassin to kill David.

Susan read Strathmore's pager. David was dead and Strathmore was bad. He died a horrible death, too. She called the NSA head. "We've got two minutes to save the world," she said. "The code must be a prime number." She stared at images of Tankado's three fingers.

"Saved with only seconds to spare," said the NSA head.

The phone rang. It was David. "I'm alive. Marry me."

THE GUARDIAN