Chess, Sex and a Good Car Chase
By Matthew Reilly
It is a very strange thing, when you’ve written a dozen bestselling
action novels to walk into your publisher’s office and say, “I’ve
written a new novel set during a chess tournament.”
A few years ago, I did just that.
That novel is The
Tournament. To give you a brief idea what it’s about: it
is set in the 1500s and is told from the point of view of the then 13-year-old
Princess Bess, later Queen Elizabeth I. In it, Bess describes attending
a fabled chess tournament in Constantinople in 1546. On the first night
of the tournament, however, a visiting dignitary is brutally murdered and
as the tournament is staged, Bess’ real-life teacher, Roger Ascham,
is called on to solve the ever-growing series of murders. The novel is populated
with other real-life characters including Michelangelo, Ignatius Loyola,
Suleiman the Magnificent, a 15-year-old Ivan the Terrible and Henry VIII.
My books are known for their outrageous action scenes: wild car chases,
furious gunfire and the occasional detonation of a nuclear weapon. High-tech
weaponry and gadgets abound. And here I was writing a historical novel featuring
chess. What gives?
When I was 19, just out of school and enthusiastic about everything, I
saw a very enjoyable film called Searching
for Bobby Fischer. The film is not well known outside the chess
world and, indeed, it did not do very well at the box office when it was
released in 1993. However, seeing the film inspired me to read the book
upon which it was based. It was written by Fred Waitzkin and it detailed
the trials and tribulations he encountered watching his son, Josh, a gifted
young chess player, play in junior chess championships in the United States.
Years later, I read another book written by Josh Waitzkin himself, now
an adult, called The
Art of Learning. In it, Waitzkin (who sounds like a remarkably
well-adjusted young man) gave his own views on the events described in his
father’s book and the rather unpleasant attention he received at chess
tournaments following the release of the movie version of it.
I loved reading about competitive chess. I would go on to read Bobby
Fischer Goes to War by David Edmunds and John Eidinow. (Don’t
worry, despite the preponderance of his name in these titles, I am not a
Fischer groupie. There is much more to chess than Bobby Fischer.) And at
some point I sat back and asked myself: ‘When was the world’s
first chess tournament?’
I looked it up and discovered the event staged in London in 1851. This
was okay, but, dramatically, I wanted something further back in history.
And so I hit upon the idea of describing a chess tournament that, for some
reason, had been lost to history.
I settled on the mid-1500s, a time when the world was balanced on a hinge
point. The most powerful ruler in the world, Suleiman the Magnificent, sultan
of the Islamic empire in Constantinople and arch-rival of the western European
kings, would invite every king to send his best player at chess to compete
in a tournament to determine the champion of the known world. Michelangelo
would be commissioned to build the chess pieces on which the tournament
would be played. Sex and murder would ensue. And the players, in this simpler
time, would be superstars. Thus The Tournament was born.
For readers of this magazine, the actual chess play described in the book
will appear rather basic. There are reasons for this.
i. I write for a mass audience, many of whom are intimidated by chess.
ii. My publishers, no doubt, swallowed hard when they heard me say I’d
written a novel set during a chess tournament. But as I stressed to them,
while the story is set during a chess tournament, it is not about chess:
it is about a little girl who will become a great queen. The tournament
is simply a dramatic tool to bring together a group of interesting historical
figures.
iii. I couldn’t alienate regular readers by describing technical
chess tactics when many of those readers wouldn’t even know how a
knight moves.
But then, by setting my story in the 1500s, I had predated modern chess
strategies by several hundred years, so I also freed myself from describing
Sicilian Defences and Queen’s Gambits (I did not, however, free myself
from puns in newspaper reviews of the novel: my favourite headline was ‘All
the Pieces Fit in Reilly’s New Gambit’ in The Sydney Morning
Herald).
Having said that, I quite liked challenging myself to write about chess
in such a way that the mass reading audience would find it not only accessible
but also thrilling. The chess matches in my book, I like to think, are riveting
contests. I was also pleasantly surprised when, during my recent Australian
book tour, many readers told me that after reading the book they had started
playing chess again, often for the first time since childhood.
To me, there is something intrinsically pure about chess. It is the ultimate
battle of wits. Each player begins a game with the same pieces capable of
the same moves. And there is no element of luck. This is important for me.
I should state very clearly at this point that I am not a great chess player.
I do not know the various openings or defences, but I delight in the fact
that they exist. Chess has a wonderful history.
And it was the history behind chess that drew me to write about it in The
Tournament. As I delved into the history of chess, I saw how, as it
crossed into Europe from Persia, the nature of the pieces on the board changed
to reflect the hierarchy of medieval European society. Take, for example,
the rook. We see rooks depicted as castles, but the word rook actually
derives from the Persian word ruhk, which means chariot. In the
first forms of chess, rooks were chariots that raced down entire ranks in
powerful, sweeping moves.
Likewise, the queen was not always a queen. Initially she was the king’s
minister. But somewhere along the way, he became a she, and suddenly the
most powerful piece on a chessboard was the only female one. This interested
me. I could go on: bishops can move only diagonally. Is this a metaphor
for the circuitous moves made by wily cardinals in European courts?
And what about pawns? They are lowly foot soldiers brought from their farms
to fight and die for a wealthy landlord. Although, as I say in the book,
we love pawns; we love their smallness and their never-say-die loyalty;
how often, in a tight endgame, is our king left to fight with only a few
loyal pawns by his side?
There is a story in the very pieces on the chessboard, and I love that.
And so now I watch with baited breath as The Tournament is released
in the UK. I am an Australian who has dared to write about England’s
greatest monarch and I hope British readers enjoy my interpretation.
Having said that, I am quietly hopeful, for the book was released in Australia
in late 2013, and it was wildly successful. Indeed, it was the biggest-selling
adult fiction title in Australia for the whole of 2013 – with not
a single car chase to be seen!
That’s right. The biggest-selling novel for the entire year was a
book set during a chess tournament. And that cannot be a bad thing.
The Tournament is published by Orion Books
on 30th January.
Copies will be available from Chess
& Bridge for £16.99.
CHESS Magazine was established in 1935 by B.H. Wood who ran it for over
fifty years. It is published each month by the London
Chess Centre and is edited by IM Richard Palliser. The Executive Editor
is Malcolm Pein, who organised the London Chess Classic.
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