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The Works of Melmont: Sourcing the Media Mogul Magic
Like Alexander the Great’s conquest of India, the world is remade by conquerors whose
greatness seems to derive from how great a slice they have of the globe. Robert Maxwell
or Rupert Murdoch, media moguls are heroic colossal figures who appear to dwarf all round
them. But on examination they stand revealed as no more than human, magnificently daft in
their outward urges.
I wrote ‘The Works of Melmont’, inspired by Robert Maxwell’s life, with his bankruptcy and watery death dramatically halting the tycoon’s attempt to outgrow his rival Murdoch’s empire. Just as the real castaway Alexander Selkirk was transfigured into Robinson Crusoe, the story of Maxwell became The Works of Melmont, an attempt to create Melmont’s strange, rare and often voluptuous story from the inside. Philip Pullman has written about the care and respect that a writer has to exercise for his materials when actualising the structure of a story. The endless ramifications of Maxwell’s hall-of-mirrors existence, his unexplained changes of religion, his real-life tergiversarial secretiveness; none of it would leave me alone. What was he hiding, behind that portentously vast exterior, that delicious, artificial stage-villain delivery? Surely the secret, the thing that drove him on, was more than the theatrical: it had to be something special. The mysterious death he underwent allows a fictive ‘truth’ about the Mighty Deceiver to emerge without restraint or writ, from the wordprocessor. At last, it can be told. One of the characters in the book is Dominic, an idealistic youth who finds his life’s vocation when he is employed to write the great man’s rags to riches story. Dominic finds out the truth behind Melmont’s facade, and pens not the commissioned hagiography but a detailed documentary exposé; The Book of Melmont, which the great man almost succeeds in destroying, and with it the truth about himself. Did Maxwell trade in nuclear warheads? No-one today would be surprised to discover that he had. In life, Maxwell was a past-master of the cheque-book powered writ, suppressing all criticism. Now the man who came on as Falstaff crossed with Billy Bunter and Hermann Goering is gone, leaving pensioners burgled and his companies gutted. Can he ever be forgiven for leading the world such a dangerous dance? I love the fat villain for his very excesses, and for the fact that his path had mystery at its end and its beginning. I love the way Melmont arrives in a war-torn, scruffy, exhausted England, the distant one I grew up in. This vanished England seemed always on the cusp of annihilation in the cold war, so its survival and present prosperity is a kind of miracle which has inspired me, as remembrancer, to paint where we stood and tand; on a precious, fragile and fortunate island of the mind. With Melmont’s arrival the country’s preoccupations and beliefs change radically. Its wealth grows with his girth. And then, as the century expires, the last big lie cannot sustain, the bubble bursts, and the big man falls off his yacht. 
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