The Modigliani Scandal

INTRODUCTION

IN A MODERN THRILLER the hero generally saves the world. Traditional adventure stories are more modest: The central character merely saves his own life, and perhaps the life of a faithful friend or a plucky girl. In less sensational novels—the middlebrow, well-told narratives that have been the staple diet of readers for more than a century—there is less at stake, but still a character′s efforts, struggles, and choices determine his destiny in a dramatic fashion.

I don′t actually believe that life is like that. In reality, circumstances quite beyond our control usually determine whether we live or die, become happy or miserable, strike it rich or lose everything. For example: Most rich people inherit their money. Most well-fed people simply had the luck to be bom in an af fluent country. Most happy people were born into loving families, and most miserable people had crazy parents.

I′m not a fatalist, nor do I believe that everything in life is blind chance. We do not control our lives the way a chess player controls his pieces, but life is not roulette either. As usual, the truth is complicated. Mechanisms beyond our control—and sometimes beyond our understanding—debermine a person′s fate, yet the choices he makes have consequences, if not the consequences he anticipated.

In The Modigliani Scandal I tried to write a new kind of novel, one that would reflect the subtle subordination of individual freedom to more powerful machinery. In this immodest project I failed. It may be that such a novel cannot be written: Even if Life is not about individual choice, perhaps Literature is.

What I wrote, in the end, was a lighthearted crime story in which an assortment of people, mostly young, get up to a variety of capers, none of which turns out quite as expected. The critics praised it as sprightly, ebullient, light, bright, cheery, light (again), and fizzy. I was disappointed that they had not noted my serious intentions.

Now I no longer look on the book as a failure. It is fizzy, and none the worse for that. The fact that it is so different from the book I intended to write should not have surprised me. After all, it rather proves my point.

—KEN FOLLETT, 1985