Book Club Guide

An Officer and a Spy

by Robert Harris · 2013 · Literary Fiction

Key themes

The Dreyfus Affair as a lesson in institutional dishonesty
The whistleblower inside the institution — and what loyalty costs
French society and the anti-semitism at its centre

About this book

The Dreyfus Affair — the wrongful conviction and imprisonment of Jewish French army officer Alfred Dreyfus for treason in 1894 — is told from the perspective of Colonel Georges Picquart, who discovers the cover-up and tries to expose it from within a hostile institution. Harris's Walter Scott Prize-winning novel is both a spy thriller and a study in institutional injustice.

Published in 2013, An Officer and a Spy won the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction. Harris researched the Dreyfus case extensively and has described it as one of the great miscarriages of justice in modern history.

Discussion questions

Picquart discovers that Dreyfus is innocent and that his own colleagues fabricated the evidence. How does Harris develop his moral crisis — the soldier who must choose between loyalty to the institution and justice?
The Dreyfus Affair divided France along deep cultural fault lines — church/state, nationalist/republican, antisemitic/Jewish. How does Harris develop this context — is it essential or can the novel be read without it?
The novel is written as a spy thriller with all the genre's pleasures. Does this thriller form serve the moral argument — or does it sometimes simplify the complexity of what actually happened?
Harris uses first person for Picquart throughout. What does this restricted perspective achieve — and what does it withhold?
The Dreyfus Affair was eventually resolved, but the institutional resistance to justice was almost total. What is Harris saying about institutions and their capacity for self-correction?