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The Oligarch: A Thriller (e-book)
newsletter |
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Issue:
2 |
November 2012 |
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STOP PRESS!!!! The Oligarch: A Thriller
has been nominated for the 2013 Global E-Book Award.
Further book industry consolidation should be resisted A merger between Random
House and Penguin has recently been announced designed to create a
"super-publisher" with worldwide revenues of £2.6 billion. While
this may help both publishers stand up to the threat posed by Amazon, surely
such further consolidation in the industry can only be regarded as a
retrograde step? Already, finding publishers to take a chance with a new author, even
if they like a project, is nigh on impossible - especially in a competitive
genre like thrillers. Existing publishing conglomerates have their portfolio
of established writers whose works automatically sell the day they are
released. As far as they are concerned, these writers are a herd of cash
cows, as a result of which they don't see the need to risk a debut author.
It's the same in any industry that has consolidated as publishing has done:
choice is one of the first things to disappear. Whereas twenty or so years
ago an aspiring author could find forty or fifty publishers to consider his
or her book, the options are dramatically more limited nowadays. And of
course it's not just the writers who suffer - these sleeping, play-safe also deny
the public the chance to read new books by new authors. This proposed merger should be resisted. Mergers, antitrust and
competition authorities, take note! |
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Contents: ·
STOP PRESS: Global E-book Award nominee ·
Further book industry consolidation should
be resisted ·
Highlights from my October Blog Tour ·
Excerpt from interview with Jennifer Walker ·
About The Oligarch: A Thriller -
Synopsis -
Some extracts from recent reviews -
Where to buy Editor: George
Eccles Website:
the
oligarch thriller Facebook:
gweccles Blog: G W Eccles
blog Twitter:
@gweccles George Eccles lived in Russia and Central Asia for ten years during
the tumultuous period that followed the breakup of the Soviet Union. Deeply
immersed in Moscow's business world, his work brought him into regular
contact with the murky world of real life oligarchs as they struggled to get
to grips with the fallout of Yeltsin's controversial 'loans for shares'
scheme. He now lives in the South of France. |
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Highlights
from my October Blog Tour On Putin and the oligarchs: When Putin
took over from the ailing and often tipsy Yeltsin in 2000, he did nothing
to disguise his disapproval of the sham auctions in which the oligarchs
had obtained their riches. However, nothing if not a pragmatist, he
realised that he was in no position to reverse the process, so he
effectively made a deal with the oligarchs. Put simply, he told them that
(a) there were to be no further attempts to secure State assets, and (b)
they could keep what they had provided that they did nothing to oppose
him ..... Most recently, Putin has suggested that the oligarchs who made
fortunes out of the ‘loans for shares scheme’ should make a one-time
windfall payment to legitimise their holdings. “We need to turn the page
on this period,” he has explained. “We must establish the
social legitimacy of private property.” He has not to date specified how
this process might work or how much the payments are likely to be, but this
signals another attack on the oligarchs in the making. Who, though,
would take a bet on Putin’s campaign stopping there? With another term
of office likely to follow his current one, how long will it be before
he really sharpens the knife and strips away their assets altogether,
just as foreseen in THE OLIGARCH: A THRILLER? When this happens,
remember that you read it first here! (Published in
Reviewing Shelf) On Russian security services: The KGB might have gone, but the FSB
remains. What is the difference? To be honest, not On terrorism in Russia: In Russia, things are often not what they
seem. A barrage of international and Russian journalists have accused the FSB
(Russian Security Service) of stage-managing many of the terrorist incidents
in order to justify planned Russian acts of repression. Just as |
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Hitler simulated acts of aggression by Polish troops
to justify the Nazi invasion of Poland, many people believe, for example,
that the apartment bombings in 1999 were in fact perpetrated by the FSB in
order to legitimise the subsequent invasion of Chechnya and the assumption of
power by Putin, its former head. Does this sound far-fetched? Well, if you
think so, take into account the fact that, at the time of the apartment
bombings, an unexploded bomb was found and defused in Ryazan which turned out
to have been planted by three FSB agents! And this is far from the only
example of the FSB's hand being behind acts of terrorism: many Russian
commentators have accused the FSB of being involved in the bomb explosions in
the marketplace in the southern Russian city of Astrakhan in 2001, at the bus stops in
Voronezh (a city more or less on the Don river) in 2004 and on the
Moscow-Grozny train in 2005. There is also strong evidence that the FSB
organised the kidnapping of numerous journalists and international NGO
workers during the Chechnya conflicts, pretending to be Chechen terrorists,
in order to build up international support for the Russian invasion. (Published in
my own blog) On corruption in 1990s Russia: Not all the corruption in
Russia was illegal, at least not according to the Russian laws in force at
the time. Yeltsin’s advisers saw the privatisation programme as key to making
it impossible for the Communists to get back in power, so every day an announcement
was made of the intention to privatise another monolithic Russian company.
Close examination of the prospectuses generally revealed that among the major
shareholders were numerous government ministers and public officials who each
stood to make millions out of the listing. Similarly, a friend of mine told
me that, once when he was leaving a meeting in the Duma, he was taken to a
side-room and introduced to someone purporting to be Yeltsin’s investment
adviser. This stranger explained that Yeltsin had over 10 million shares in
Rostelecom (valued at several dollars per share) which he was wanted to divest,
and he tried to enlist my friend’s help to find a buyer. (Published in David Wood Web) On the fears of older people: The horrors of the Soviet system
significantly affects the way older people behave: if you are walking along a
main street, for instance, you will be struck by the way that older people
look steadfastly ahead of them or stare at the pavement, reluctant to catch a
stranger's eye. This goes back to the days when acknowledging someone who
might be 'under investigation', albeit accidentally, was a dangerous
practice. On one occasion in mid-winter, the temperature about -20C, I
watched from my car |
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window as pedestrians stepped over a
drunk lying unconscious on a centre traffic island and in severe danger of
dying of hypothermia. No one would risk helping a stranger. (Published in Le-Grande-Codex) On Siberia: Many people’s
vision of Siberia derives from the scene in Dr Zhivago when Yuri and Lara
take refuge in the family dacha there. Siberia is an enormous place, and in
the winter when the snow piles high, there are places which look almost as
idyllic as this. However, Siberia is also the industrial heartland of Russia:
whole cities exist simply to service one activity, perhaps a mine, or a
steelworks, or even a vast vehicle manufacturing plant. The Soviets never
took much interest in global warming, so many of these cities suffer from
horrific pollution, some having a sulphur cloud that hangs a hundred metres
above them. Most began as gulags: political and other prisoners were
sentenced here to provide a local workforce, often for minor or no offences.
Interestingly, many of the people who now live there are what are known as
‘gulag babies’ – their parents were thrown into a gulag and they, as
children, lived and were educated in tough conditions nearby, able to meet
their parents through the wire only on rare occasions. (Published in Kelly McClymer's
blog) On casting The Oligarch movie: Interestingly one of the
most consistent comments I have received from people who have read the book
so far is that it is almost tailor-made to be a film. I have to admit that I
felt this myself as I was writing the book, though it was not at any time an
influencing factor. Who would I cast? I can see Damian Lewis as
Leksin. In Homeland he plays another complex character struggling to relate
to people and to cope with the pressure, just as Leksin does. Blok, the oligarch, is
slightly more difficult. He is not a very nice man, yet notwithstanding his
outrageous behaviour, we can't help having some sympathy for him. Thinking a
little out of the box perhaps, I have in mind Hugh Laurie for the role since
we all have a similarly ambivalent attitude towards House. Dustin Hoffman's
portrayals often have similar characteristics. Anya, his daughter, is
easier, so far as I'm concerned. Rooney Mara. Anya starts off as a spoilt,
bored, rich girl, but once the man she loves is under threat she really shows
her mettel. When this happens, I see Anya in many ways as a somewhat
better-adjusted version of Lisbeth in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. (Published in Jennifer's
Book Review) |
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Excerpt from
interview with Jennifer Walker JW: The hero of the story
is Leksin, a British business troubleshooter of Russian descent and now
living in Russia. In many ways, he's
not the usual clean-cut charmer that one's used to seeing as hero. Was this
your aim? GE: I wanted a hero who was every bit as manipulative as the oligarch he
would confront in the story. Russian oligarchs are generally not nice guys -
while there may be exceptions to the rule, many of them are more akin to
gangsters than businessmen, and they react very badly to anyone or anything
who gets in their way. For evidence of this, just look at the number of company
owners and directors who were murdered during the turf wars that went on
while the oligarchs were amassing their fortunes . If Leksin is to take on
such people, then he needs to share many of the same qualities - a wallflower
wouldn't survive a minute. As a human being, Leksin is
flawed. Like the oligarchs, he is driven to succeed. In his case, this
amounts to an obsession: he cannot tolerate failure either in himself or
other people. In his personal life, this means he is unable to sympathise
with his dependent and unstable sister. To him, she is a chore. He pushes
himself so hard in his work that he has to resort to cocaine in order to cope
with this self-imposed pressure. Moreover, although attractive to women, his
personal relationships always come unstuck because he regards them as an
unacceptable distraction from his assignments. In one sense, Leksin is
amoral. He tends not to pass judgement. If the President had been portrayed
as a much more sinister, Putin-esque character, that would not have stopped
Leksin working for him. Similarly, Leksin might not like Blok, the oligarch,
but he has an underlying admiration for the way the man had played the system
to build up his vast business empire. Such disapproval as he expresses
reflects how third parties feel about Blok rather than his own views. So why do we empathise with
Leksin? Well, partly because we like the people who like Leksin: their
fondness for, and loyalty to, Leksin indicates that he must have things going
for him. We learn how Leksin took Nikolai, now part of the government and his
closest friend, under his wing when Nikolai first arrived in Cambridge
feeling out of place and an outsider. We approve of the way that he takes
great pains to care for his mentally-ill sister despite his disappointment
with her. His love of art and the meticulous manner in which he is gradually
buying back the paintings that were appropriated from his grandfather during
the revolution also gives us an insight into a different side of Leksin's
character. And we like Anya, the oligarch's daughter, who falls in love with
Leksin. |
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Synopsis:
THE OLIGARCH: A THRILLER Following
his controversial election for a third term amid widespread protests and allegations of vote
rigging, the Russian President is determined to destroy the oligarchs before
they destroy him. When the global economic meltdown decimates their wealth,
the President seizes this chance to demolish their power base. His greatest
opponent - Anton Blok, owner of the mighty Tyndersk Kombinat - has a secret
agenda and faces far more than just financial ruin as his empire threatens to
fall apart, and the President knows that his old enemy will stop at nothing
to avoid catastrophe. With battlelines
drawn, he turns to Alex Leksin, a British business troubleshooter of Russian
descent, to thwart Blok's plans. Against the challenge of hostile Arctic
conditions, Leksin must tread a dangerous path through a labyrinth of
corruption, terrorism and obfuscation until the exciting and unexpected
denouement takes place in Russia’s northernmost seaport. Set in Moscow, Ingushetia
(Chechnya’s neighbour), and Tyndersk, a Siberian mining town inside the
Arctic Circle and geographically cut off from the rest of Russia, this
thriller's plot twists and turns within an
authentic and disturbing background. Some
extracts from recent reviews "If I were to doze off and re-awake in a hundred
years and someone asked me what is happening in Russia, my answer would be
unhesitating : people are drinking and stealing. As a "Russia
veteran", George Eccles knows that Saltykov-Shchedrin's formula from the
mid nineteenth century always holds true. But his new novel, "The
Oligarch", stands out, not just because it depicts theft and corruption
on a Herculean scale, but because the author has a professional understanding
of just what was stolen under the political loans-for-shares deal in the mid
nineties (the country), and how (financial sleight of hand). Were the seven
banker-oligarchs ("semibankirschina") who constructed that deal
merely opportunists, lucky enough to have been in the right place at the
right time? Eccles thinks not. They would have needed to have had backing
from rogue elements of the ex-KGB. His theory resonates with the real-life
comments of Andrei Illarionov, a former economics adviser to President Putin,
who views the conflict between today's liberals and the Kremlin's powerbrokers
as the messy unwinding of the marriage which originally brought about the
collapse of the USSR. But if Eccles's
novel has its genesis in the real politics of the Yeltsin era, its action is
set in the near future. The oligarchs won power in a time of great
instability. What might happen in a renewed period of instability? Would such
a situation provide an opportunity for a trust-busting President to destroy
them? Or would their economic might prevail over any governmental effort to
bring them to heel? Eccles's
assumption of a conflict of interest between an acting Russian President and
the Oligarchs is realistic enough. Of the original, real-world
Semibankirschina, only two have been left standing today by President Putin.
But even if several of the real-life precedent situations have resolved
themselves in Presidential victories, surely that only underlines the probability
of similar conflicts in |
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future, and
Eccles's premise, that in troubled times an oligarch might be able to bring sufficient
force to bear to challenge the Government, is entirely realistic. Admittedly,
Eccles's Oligarch, Maxim Blok, doesn't resemble Vladimir Potanin or Mikhail
Fridman (even if the capital of his fictional Empire, Tyndersk, is modelled
on Potanin's Norilsk). And his President is more a sort of Russian Theodore
Roosevelt than a Vladimir Putin lookalike. But the underlying dynamics are
realistic and add up to an exciting read. Appointed not
to investigate a crime, but to work out how Blok can muster the resources to
topple the Government, the novel's protagonist detective, Leksin, together
with his Russian and American confederates, is drawn into a Russia of
irresistible venality, nuclear proliferation, slave labour camps and
interethnic war. One hopes these things are Eccles's fiction. But the way he
depicts them - with an academic understanding of the complexities involved -
they appear frighteningly realistic." (Gerhard Nicklaus, Amazon USA) "Fast paced and
plausible. The book gave a terrific view of current day Russia and of
conditions in the wastes of Northern Siberia. I am looking forward to the
next one!" (William K Monroe,
Amazon UK) "Swift, dramatic stuff
indeed. . . This book is right up my street!" (JLB Wye, Authonomy) "This is clearly an interesting book for
the general reader, written with a great deal of specialised knowledge. It is
well written with good story lines, neatly interwoven." (Philip John, Authonomy) Where to buy Click on the 'buy now' link below to be taken to a full list of
online bookstores selling The Oligarch: A Thriller: Direct links to the e-book's page at some international stores are below: |
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