Show, Don’t tell is the constant admonition from creative
writing tutors. Fair enough. No one wants to read a ranting polemic about the
author’s pet gripe, no matter how cathartic it is to let it all out.
But no one is
better placed – and, even better, protected - to be a whistleblower than a
fiction writer. A wise physician much
involved in community child abuse cases, once said: ‘It takes an eccentric,
potentially alienated personality style to over-ride the shared reassurances of
more comfortably socialized peers’ and speak out. In real life, such
whistleblowers are easy to pick off, trash and destroy.
Novelists most often share that sense of being outsiders, as they sit huddled over their laptop in preference to being out glad-handing their fellow humans. The occasional foray onto the party scene, finds them standing in corners to observe, analyse and record mental images of their more extraverted friends, all useful fodder for the next story. Feeling all the while, they don’t quite fit.
Not being one of
the merry gang, has its benefits. In order to maintain social glue, insiders
have to suppress unpleasant truths. ‘I can’t say that or I’ll be excluded, so I
won’t even think it.’ Whereas the writer spots the dissonances and evasions of
normal living all too clearly and doesn’t care about inclusion. Also fiction is
slippery, well-designed to duck the attacks that assault the few who put their
head above the parapet in real life to point the finger at wrongdoing. [I just
looked up whistleblower on thesaurus. In my book, all power to them. Thes.com
clearly loathes them – big mouth, busybody, scandal monger, snitch,
troublemaker.] 
And that would
include Charles Dickens, would it on Britain’s social ills? Margaret Atwood in
the Handmaid’s Tale? Etc, etc. To a degree all fiction is whistleblowing,
casting a light on what others don’t want to see. The fantasy version is a
digestible way of dramatizing truths which have yet to be absorbed into public
consciousness. A step along the way.
Some like the 1960s TV drama Cathy Go Home on homelessness and poverty made an
immediate impact. Others went big on industry corruption, racism and other ignored
injustices adding to the critical mass which will, one day, lead to progress.
Two stray examples
come to mind of novels that focused me on subjects I had never been much
bothered about. Henry Porter’s 2010 thriller Bell Ringers, about government
surveillance in a top-secret data-mining system, made me reconsider my former
view that if anyone wanted to bore themselves silly reading my emails they were
welcome. ‘Anti-government’ has a broad interpretation that can extend into
almost any activism that doesn’t suit the leaders of the day. 
Marc Elsberg’s extensively-researched Blackout paints a
frightening scenario of what happens when the interlinked power grids across
Europe are hacked. Living as I do in the country, an electricity blackout even
for several days isn’t a total disaster – wood fires, candles, gas bottles for
cooking and blessed quiet from temporary cessation of all internet, music and
TV. For cities and for major industries especially in food and farming, it is a
cataclysm. No petrol so no transport, food supplies run out, factory-housed
dairy cows die since they can’t be milked with automated systems down. Elsberg has been in constant demand since
publication in Germany to advise industry specialists. Not much the public can
do but he’s making a difference.
Fiction can lead the
way.
Read my other blogs: on Fictional characters who live on;
Memory; Books better comforters than parents; Choosing character names; How to
cook up a successful novel - joke.
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