by Miguel Cullen

Author Piers Paul Read

The August afternoon hangs dappled over the low Hammersmith terraces, and Piers Paul Read is speaking into a microphone. He is reflective, going over his whole life, from school up to his latest book. Read will forever be remembered for his book Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors, a grisly and deeply spiritual documentary on the Uruguyan rugby team that crash landed in the Andes in 1972 and resorted to cannibalism to survive.

Long before this Read had shared a flat with Tom Stoppard and Derek Marlowe in Pimlico, London, and Stoppard once wrote to Read in praise of one of his books: “[It is] written in a a way that I envy; it seems so cool and in control and unflashy, and yet, mysteriously, much more compulsive than more ostentatious and overt skills.”

Speaking to him one is aware that this style is not conscious. Unlike Hemingway’s deliberate economy of prose, Read’s writing merely reflects his personality.

Despite his abrupt side parting and roughly-hewn features, Read at first appears a poised figure, speaking in fine, languid tones from his armchair in his shaded study.

Slowly his personality reveals itself, honest, warm and rather old school: “Updike is pornography” he says, before revealing that the novel he is working on has “some obscene passages” [shifts awkwardly in armchair], and that he is apprehensive as to how Catholic devotees of his just-out church thriller will take to his next,. more saucy offering.

In his biography of Alec Guinness Read’s lightness of touch is evident; he deals with Guinness’s homosexuality very well, deftly handling a topic that has proved the subject of morbid speculation for previous biographiers.

“When Alec’s son was first presented with the idea that Alec was probably a homosexual, he said ‘No it can’t be true’ – but then when I presented him with the evidence he agreed.”

Guinness’s is Read’s only biography, but his thorough, perceptive style has lent intself to other works of non-fiction – he has written a series of documentaries: Ablaze: The Story of Chernobyl, The Train Robbers [on the Great Train Robbery] and, of course, Alive.

“My US publisher called me and said he’d heard about the plane crash story and that he’d pay for a first class return to Montevideo. I thought – this is great – a free ticket – I had no intention of writing the book. All I had read about it was the bit about cannibalism so I thought it was disgusting.

“But then I got chosen over more famous writers, because I was nearer their age, because I was Catholic. I had the advantage that they wanted to unburden themselves about it. They didn’t want to talk to their parents, a priest or an analyst. You had to be a good listener, and not express any disgust or horror when they were telling you what were pretty gruesome details about their ordeal.”

One uniting force during the ordeal was the group’s strong faith – they believed that the consumption of their comrades’ bodies was a form of holy communion.

Read adds: “They were all from the same class which kept them together I think. If they had come from different classes it would have made things uglier. When they first saw the book they were horrified. They kept saying – you’ve put in all the details – we’ll be stoned in the street!

“I personally don’t think I would have survived the experience. The weedy intellectuals didn’t do as well as the tough guys, and I was always a weedy intellectual, not a tough guy.”

A list of Read’s correspondents over the years reads like a literati Debrett’s, and he’s not shy about how he used to view society: “You can’t be immune to the values of those around you – those around me were very snobbish. I was very keen to establish myself as an English gentleman. I would imagine myself as Georges Duroy in Bel-Ami by Maupassant, or Julien Sorel in Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le Noir [both young men set on conquering society].

Read’s father was the deeply influential art critic Sir Herbert Read, known as “the apostle of modern art”. He was friends with Henry Moore and Stravinsky ["He is a darling - tiny like the ghost of a flea" wrote Read's mother of the composer] and would give his son frightening advice like: “You may “se débrouiller” so long as you are alone, & don’t get entangled in marriage & children…but it is equivalent to becoming a monk, and there is no compromise.”

Before duly ignoring his father’s advice by getting himself a wife and four children, Read would hang out with writers and artists of the time – outside Derek Marlowe and Tom Stoppard ["We would never creatively inspire each other" he tells me] was political hack Alexander Cockburn, who he met working at the TLS, John Updike ["A shit" he wrote in a letter - maybe that's where the pornography comment comes from] and Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee ["I've been "promising" all my life. When will I start to achieve? Perhaps never..." she moans to Read]

It was when researching the Alec Guinness biography that Read began to value how privileged his early life had been. “Writing it I thought how lucky I was to have had such a life, with a father who adored me, a very secure family life, a privileged upbringing. Then there was poor Alec, with his ghastly drunken mother – he was a starving waif when he started out.”

Read and Guinness struck up a strong friendship after Read interviewed Guinness for a newspaper: “I was going to have lunch with him but was told very firmly that he would take me out to lunch, and before I could tell him that I admired his acting, he said he’d read my novels and admired them – so he was always in control.

“He would come and stay at the Connaught in London and had a list of friends and when his other friends were busy he’d call up and invite us to dinner. We’d go to very, very expensive restaurants and have a wonderful evening, sitting and listening to Alec.”

Read is well known as a Catholic author, and has written a history of the Knights Templar as well as various other Catholic-themed novels. His latest book, The Death of a Pope, has been billed the high-brow answer to Dan Brown – the book is all Vatican intrigue and terrorist plots, whilst including some of the major Catholic debates of recent times.

An hour has passed, and Piers Paul Read has stopped speaking into the microphone. Walking back into the impressionist afternoon, an image emerged of a man who in his loose, abstracted way, achieved what baroque flourishes could not – letting the subject speak for itself.