Sequels are a nearly impossible genre. Writers who try to revisit imaginative territory in which, perhaps not five years before, they had a huge success, invariably seem to come unstuck.
This thought occurred to me this week as I wrestled with Joe Klein's new novel, The Running Mate (Chatto £16.99, pp405), the follow-up to his mega-bestselling Primary Colors or, as his publishers would have it, 'the sensational new political novel'.
Well, if only. There is something avaricious about a sequel that spells doom to the whole enterprise. With the best creative will in the world, the sequel-bound author rarely rekindles the white heat of inspiration that fired the composition of the original. When all is said and done and the sequel, or follow-up, is finally out there in the bookshops, the public is strangely less interested in a second look at last year's fashion.
That's not the whole story, either. The plain fact is that the reading public does not love opportunism. Say what you like, the smell of opportunism clings to a sequel like cigar smoke to silk pyjamas. This, I guess, is what has happened to Joe Klein. Primary Colors was a well-deserved hit. It was brilliantly plotted, supremely well written, sharp, satirical, pacy and, best of all, absolutely of the moment.
It captured a widespread American cynicism about the primary election process during Bill Clinton's rise to power, fictionalised it deftly and supplied the East Coast political establishment with some much-needed summer reading. The further contrivance of having a tantalising and near-libellous roman à clef written by 'Anonymous' (someone obviously well-informed) was a masterstroke that kept the wheels of publicity spinning long after the reviewing cycle was over.
The success of Primary Colors is explicable with hindsight, but at the time it was the classic example of a literary lightning strike. The Running Mate is emphatically not a sequel to Primary Colors, but it inhabits the same narrative milieu and even has a walk-on part for Governor Jack Stanton.
It mixes fact and fiction in the same teasing way and invites us to speculate about the real-life identities of its protagonists. Is Charlie Martin, who is running for office, Al Gore, John McCain or Senator Kerrey? Who is Donna Mendoza? Is Hillary Clinton to be detected in Charlie Martin's Nell?
Perhaps if you live in Washington DC, living and breathing politics, this is intriguing, but where Primary Colors had the great advantage of fictionalising an already sensational story, this time around we have the fascinating paraphernalia of the campaign trail, but nothing like a compelling natural plot. The primaries of 1992 were gripping in a way that's impossible to repeat. Klein has mixed together many of the ingredients that worked so well for Primary Colors, but the taste of The Running Mate, at least to my palate, is as sawdust after the gourmet delights of the first helping.
Perhaps the best way to write a sequel is to make no bones about your intentions and to declare your ambition to write a series at the outset. This, it seems, is what Bernard Cornwell (another pseudonymous author) has triumphantly done with his Sharpe books.
Part of the key to his success lies in his unabashed delight in, and passion for, things Napoleonic. When Richard Sharpe was just a landlubbing Hornblower, fighting his way with Wellington's army through the Peninsula War, his adventures (and I've only read Sharpe's Eagle and Sharpe's Company) were always characterised by an attention to detail that in the hands of a writer less sure-footed than Cornwell would have made for the deadliest of reads. But passion tells.
Sharpe has now featured in some 17 adventures and in his latest, Sharpe's Trafalgar (HarperCollins £16.99, pp275), the old rogue not only manages to seduce the wife of Lord William Hale, a fellow voyager on a homebound ship of the line, but manages to get himself comprehensively mixed up in the Battle of Trafalgar.
Cornwell's narration of this epic sea-battle is quite masterly and supremely well-researched. When, at the very end, he tells us that Sharpe will be 'back on land soon, where he belongs, and will march again', you feel that here is one writer who has got that old sequel problem licked.
