An Interview With Damien Lewis About Cobra Gold - Page 2

Cobra Gold is your seventh book. Does it get easier? Or do you find that each book raises the bar a little?

It gets easier and it gets more difficult. It gets easier because each book is less daunting than the last, because you know you can do it – your past track record evidences so. It gets more difficult in that each book mines a reserve of energy and creativity within the author, and each time one risks those reserves getting more and more depleted. The antidote to this is those real life experiences I wrote about – whether reporting from Darfur or scaling Kilimanjaro, Africa’s highest mountain, as I did two years ago. In particular, Cobra Gold presented me with a significant new set of challenges, because it is my first full-length fiction. (I wrote 'Desert Claw' in 2006, a short story for the British Government World Book Day initiative, which is a fiction based upon the true story of a looted Van Gogh painting, in Iraq). Writing fiction is a very, very different ball game than non-fiction. To go into the reasons why is a whole separate interview. But in short, a true story has an internal, set narrative, time-line and collection of facts that informs it; a fiction has none of these, and the only constraints are those of the author’s imagination and creative input.

It has been my experience that authors tend to model their characters after real people, and there is usually one character, often the main character that is themselves. How much of Kilbride comes from Damien?

Good question! Well, the character of Kilbride -- that main protagonist in Cobra Gold -- is actually based upon a close friend of mine, who is British ex-Special Forces. He is one of the toughest soldiers I have ever met, and you would never want to cross him, but he is also something of a warrior-philosopher. This man does yoga on the battle field prior to each day’s fighting, and believes that no life should be taken without some sense of his being able to justify having done so.

In his youth, he was totally wild and self-destructive, and arguably it was only the British military and Special Forces training that sorted him out. That’s my basis for the main character – a man of the people, and a real leader of men, one who would never ask his men to do what he would not willingly do himself. But at the same time, there are elements of me in there also. I’ve worked all over Africa -- in that continent’s trouble spots, more than her beauty spots — and the African setting and flavour of Cobra Gold springs in part from my own experiences. And if I ask myself would I have carried out the bank raid, had I been in the protagonist’s position, I’d hazard that I would. In fact all the ex-military types with whom I’ve discussed Cobra Gold have said the same things about the bank raid: “you would, wouldn’t you, especially if you could get away with it.”

Article Author: Simon Barrett

Simon is an Educator in Calgary, Alberta. His own piece of idiocy is zzsimonb's rantings and he is also a contibuting editor for Blogger News Network.

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