Read, Piers Paul 1941–

PERSONAL: Born 1941, in Beaconsfield, England; son of Herbert Read (a poet, essayist, and critic). Education: St. John's College, Cambridge, B.A., 1961, M.A., 1962.

ADDRESSES: Agent—c/o Author Mail, Simon & Schuster, Inc., 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

CAREER: Writer. Times Literary Supplement, London, England, subeditor, 1964–65; writer, 1965–. Columbia University, New York, NY, adjunct professor of writing, 1980. Appeared in television programs Alec Guinness: A Secret Man and Britain's Finest.

MEMBER: Catholic Writers' Guild (chair, 1992–).

AWARDS, HONORS: Ford Foundation fellow in Berlin, Germany, 1963–64; Harkness fellow in New York, NY, and Lexington, MA, Commonwealth Fund, 1967–68; Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, Faber & Faber, 1969, for The Junkers; Hawthornden Prize, Hawthornden Trust, 1970, for Monk Dawson; Royal Society of Literature fellow, 1972; Thomas More Association medal, 1974; Somerset Maugham Award, Society of Authors, 1980; Enid McLeod Award, Franco British Society, 1988; James Tait Black Memorial Prize, University of Edinburgh, 1988.

WRITINGS:

FICTION

Game in Heaven with Tussy Marx, Weidenfeld & Nicolson (London, England), 1966, McGraw-Hill (New York, NY), 1967.

The Junkers, Secker & Warburg (London, England), 1968, Knopf (New York, NY), 1969.

Monk Dawson, Lippincott (Philadelphia, PA), 1970.

The Professor's Daughter, Lippincott (Philadelphia, PA), 1971.

The Upstart, Lippincott (Philadelphia, PA), 1973.

Polonaise, Lippincott (Philadelphia, PA), 1976.

A Married Man, Lippincott (Philadelphia, PA), 1979.

The Villa Golitsyn, Harper (New York, NY), 1981.

The Free Frenchman, Random House (New York, NY), 1987.

A Season in the West, Random House (New York, NY), 1989.

On the Third Day, Random House (New York, NY), 1989.

A Patriot in Berlin, Weidenfeld & Nicolson (London, England), 1995, published as The Patriot, Random House (New York, NY), 1996.

Alice in Exile, Weidenfeld & Nicolson (London, England), 2001, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 2002.

NONFICTION

Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors, Lippincott (Philadelphia, PA), 1974, reprinted, HarperCollins (New York, NY), 2005.

The Train Robbers, Lippincott (Philadelphia, PA), 1978.

Ablaze: The Story of the Heroes and Victims of Chernobyl, Random House (New York, NY), 1993.

The Templars, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 2000.

Alec Guinness: The Authorised Biography, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 2005.

OTHER

Author of play, The Class War (play), produced in London, England, 1964.

Author of television plays produced by British Broadcasting Corp., including Coincidence, 1968; The Family Firm, 1970; The House on Highbury Hill, 1972; The Childhood Friend, 1974; and Margaret Clitheroe, 1977.

Contributor to books, including Winter's Tales 2, edited by Robin Baird-Smith, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 1986.

ADAPTATIONS: The novel A Married Man was adapted for television, 1993; the novel The Free Frenchman was adapted for film, 1989; the nonfiction book Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors was adapted for film and released as Alive, 1993; the novel Monk Dawson was adapted for film, 1998; Read's biography of Alec Guinness was adapted for television as Alec Guinness: A Secret Man, 2003.

SIDELIGHTS: Piers Paul Read is an English novelist whose stylistic works explore caste, crime, and Catholicism in modern society. Although perhaps best known for his nonfiction best-seller Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors and other nonfiction works, Read has spent much of his career producing fiction and has won several of Britain's most prestigious literary awards. In Commonweal, Carl Senna noted that Read's works reflect "an unmistakable concern for the moral fate of our affluent culture," adding: "Read's message seems to be that life is not meaningful unless it is rational; and necessity, not possibility, makes it so." Time magazine reviewer Melvin Maddocks called Read "a sad, skilled connoisseur of the moral blindness that occurs when self-righteousness and self-interest try to be one."

Read published his first novel, Game in Heaven with Tussy Marx, in 1966. In the Dictionary of Literary Biography, essayist Philip Flynn contended that even in this experimental piece, Read employs themes that are central to him: "The emptiness of secular society … the danger of social stagnation … the importance of marital fidelity … and the strange connection between Communist and Christian ideals." The tone is ironic, however, and critics noted a vein of cynicism and nihilism in the work.

Read's themes become more obvious in subsequent novels such as The Junkers, Monk Dawson, and A Married Man. Maddocks characterized these books as "cool little horror stories about decent, well-intentioned people who suddenly find themselves up to their lily-white necks in evil." Religion and morals preoccupy the author in the novels, but he offers more than a tract on the easy solutions offered by orthodox faith.

Read has also addressed the issue of social class and its petty distinctions in his work. A contributor to the New York Times Book Review, Jane DeLynn, argued that the author "is at his best dissecting the tangle of … drives—laziness, greed and desire to impress others—that shape our actions." Also in the New York Times Book Review, Malcolm Bradbury wrote: "Mr. Read is a realist, a densely social novelist who knows that public and private worlds intersect at every point…. But … Mr. Read uses realism for irony. The social world, which demands attention, is also a delusion, a source of inexhaustible hypocrisies." This observation provides a theme for several Read novels, including The Upstart, The Professor's Daughter, and A Season in the West.

In 1973, Read turned to nonfiction for the first time and published Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors. The work describes the aftermath of a plane crash in the remote Andes Mountains, where a group of young athletes had to cannibalize the crash victims in order to survive. Read's Roman Catholic background enabled him to understand the moral quandary of the Uruguayan survivors, and he presented their experiences in a religious context. Flynn wrote of Alive: "This book's religious piety and sacramental vision could not be dismissed by readers as merely the writer's own. These things had really happened, these emotions really had been felt…. Distanced by his role as reporter or historian, effective in his sparse prose style, Read seems to let [the survivors'] story tell itself." A contributor to Rolling Stone, Michael Rogers, concluded: "The lives most of us lead give no hint as to what we may be capable of; the value of stories like Alive is the way they remind us of the deepest strengths of the organism. By sighting on that, Read has risen above the sensational and managed a book of real and lasting value."

Read chronicles another real-life horror story in Ablaze: The Story of Chernobyl, an examination of the 1986 accident at a power plant in the Soviet Ukraine. On April 4 of that year, an explosion and fire at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant caused the immediate deaths of thirty-one people from acute radiation poisoning, and probably planted the seeds for a cancer epidemic in the years to come for those living in the region affected by fallout.

Read wrote his story a decade after the accident, after the breakdown of the Soviet Union allowed greatly increased freedom for research. He managed to make the ten-year-old story gripping and immediate, stated Time reviewer Michael D. Lemonick. He wrote: "If Piers Paul Read had simply rehashed the same story, Ablaze would have been unexceptional. Instead he has probed deeply into the history of Soviet nuclear power and into the personal stories of people who operated within a corrupt political system to try to make a dangerous, haphazardly designed technology work." Lemonick favorably compared Ablaze to Alive, stating that Read "takes us through the accident, minute by minute, describing the deliberate rule bending and honest mistakes that led to the explosion, the terrible bravery of technicians and fire fighters who tried to limit the damage, and the way the survivors coped with their shattered lives."

Modern European history forms the basis for two other Read novels, Polonaise and A Free Frenchman. Both works concern families caught in the political upheavals occasioned by the Second World War: Polonaise follows the fortunes of Polish refugees and A Free Frenchman explores the divided loyalties in a French family during the years of German occupation. In Newsweek, Margo Jefferson noted that in Polonaise Read "traces the tension between the implacable demands of history and the idiosyncrasies of personality. Polonaise is, in the best sense, a historical novel: the main currents of politics and morality in the first half of the twentieth century are the shaping influences of its characters."

In 1995, Read tried a new venture—a political thriller titled The Patriot. Drawing on his interest in and knowledge of the Soviet Union, the novel tells the story of spies and revolutionaries in Berlin and Moscow during the early 1990s. Acknowledging Read as a "fine, sometimes masterful, novelist," a reviewer in Publishers Weekly nevertheless stated that "a savvy thriller-writer he's not, as evidenced by this plunge into the genre." Flawed plotting and flat characterizations are cited as the novel's major shortcomings, but the reviewer also observed: "Read brings his usual erudition and insight to this book, commenting insightfully on the ideological identity crises at play as anticommunists discover the flaws of Western capitalism." Booklist reviewer Donna Seaman called The Patriot a "slick" and "lively mix of art history, espionage, and doomed love."

Read returned to historical fiction with his novel Alice in Exile. Set in England and Russia in the early twentieth century, the story focuses on the adventures of London-born Alice Fry. The daughter of a publisher, Alice was raised in liberal fashion. Her engagement to Edward Cobb is ended by him because of the public harm caused by a sex-related scandal involving her father. Alice learns that she is pregnant by her former fiancé, and finds escape when she becomes involved with Russian aristocrat Baron von Rettenberg. The nobleman takes her to Russia, where she cares for his children as their governess, becomes his lover, and gets caught up in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution. Edward eventually reenters her life, and she must chose between her suitors. A Publishers Weekly critic noted, "Sophisticated in tone yet unapologetically romantic, this is a thoroughly satisfying effort."

Returning to nonfiction, Read published his first biography, Alec Guinness: The Authorised Biography, with the cooperation of the Guinness family. Given access to the well-known British actor's letters and diaries, as well as interviews with some of his family, Read describes what drove Guinness both personally and professionally. Though his acting career was highly regarded on both stage and screen, Read finds that being born illegitimately, living without a father, and uncertainty about his longtime marriage were burdens Guinness felt deeply throughout his life. Reviewing the book for Variety, Joel Hirschhorn maintained: "Guinness is a compulsively absorbing personality, and Read admirably captures his complex nature." Critics such as the reviewer for Publishers Weekly noted that Read spends many pages questioning Guinness's homosexuality. This reviewer noted: "Guinness may have wrestled with an attraction to men … but the issue probably doesn't require quite so much attention." Summarizing the appeal of Alec Guinness, Stephen Rees of the Library Journal called it "a sympathetic but revealing biography of his famous friend."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 4, 1975, Volume 10, 1979, Volume 25, 1983.

Contemporary Novelists, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1996.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 14: British Novelists since 1960, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1983.

PERIODICALS

Booklist, February 1, 1996, Donna Seaman, review of The Patriot, p. 918.

Commonweal, November 12, 1971, Carl Senna, review of The Professor's Daughter, p. 164.

Library Journal, June 1, 2005, Stephen Rees, review of Alec Guinness: The Authorised Biography, p. 132.

Newsweek, December 27, 1976, Margo Jefferson, review of Polonaise, p. 60.

New York Times Book Review, December 30, 1979, Malcolm Bradbury, review of A Married Man, p. 3; August 13, 1989, Jane DeLynn, review of A Season in the West, p. 21.

Publishers Weekly, December 11, 1995, review of The Patriot, p. 56; September 23, 2002, review of Alice in Exile, p. 47; May 9, 2005, review of Alec Guinness, p. 57.

Rolling Stone, May 23, 1974, Michael Rogers, review of Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors.

Time, October 25, 1971, Melvin Maddocks, review of The Professor's Daughter, p. 92; May 17, 1993, Michael D. Lemonick, review of Ablaze: The Story of Chernobyl, p. 70.

Variety, July 11, 2005, Joel Hirschhorn, review of Alec Guinness, p. 35.