Novels use lies to tell the truth

“The uninterrupted rain of news - forces citizens into a sort of chaos, a condition in which the more informed you are, the more confused you are.“  Elena Ferrante.

  Amen to that in a week when media noise reached deafening and discombobulating levels with the yay-sayers and nay-sayers battling it out for supremacy. The great silent majority reach for the only weapon they possess and switch off. The tendency to decide early on which policy-pusher or news purveyor to back and then block out any inconvenient contradictions is understandable.   

The alternative, an open-mind willingness to judge every situation on its merits, is exhausting and ultimately futile. Facts are difficult to establish and have a disconcerting habit of shape-shifting when put into a broader or historical context. And since most are used as ammunition for predictions and propaganda, their value is tainted by association. Short of time-travelling no one knows. 

   The human psyche has method in staving off the madness of chaos. It shuts down and/or diverts attention elsewhere.  What cut through the trash clatter of politicians’ ego-strife this week was the Thai cave rescue.  That was a situation to unite people round the globe, arousing fear and desperate hope for the children and their rescuers. It was a mission beyond impossible and against all the odds, with international co-operation, it succeeded. There was something almost magical about it, an act of grace, even more so in the aftermath when the stories of how close to total disaster it could have been. 

   Sport was also a highlight. It isn’t my thing but there is vicarious enjoyment to be had from watching fans in delirium about their team’s progress. Even when they lose, there’s still excitement about the final contestants. 

   My impression is that people in general are moving away from their leaders’ obsessions. They’re satiated, bored, disgruntled and don’t think their input will make any difference. In the past watching the carnage in war zones – Northern Ireland, Gaza, Iraq, Syria – I’ve thought they were fought to feed the megalomania of the few. The priorities for the great majority are enough to eat, clean drinking water, medical care, education for their kids and being able to do the Saturday shopping without being bombed. Politics, ideology, religion aren’t what feed their deeper human needs. They’ll co-exist contentedly with neighbours of other beliefs as long as everyone tolerates difference. 

    Elena Ferrante’s turmoil about ‘Where is the good, where is the evil? Who is the just, who the unjust?’ prompted her to say that reading fiction was one answer.

  “Novels, when they work, use lies to tell the truth.” 

   Which struck a chord since what impinged on my week in any meaningful way apart from Thailand was reading Henry Porter’s Firefly and Philip Kerr’s Greeks Bearing Gifts. Firefly dramatises and humanises the migrant crisis in a way that makes more impact than yards of newsprint and TV footage. It brings home the suffering, fear and superhuman effort made by a Syrian boy escaping the brutality of ISIS and carrying the responsibility for his family on his slight shoulders. A pacey, spook thriller, it doesn’t preach or proselytise but it gets a few home truths across.  

   Greek’s Bearing Gifts has a different tale to tell as it examines the moral torment (and lack of it) amongst post-WW11-war Germans as they struggle to come to terms with and bury their Nazi past, whether as bystanders or main actors. Set largely in Greece where the resentment about the brutality of the occupation still runs deep, it’s a Bernie Gunther murder mystery but set in a historical context, with several real-life villains. What shocked me at the end was how political ‘pragmatism’ in the German Konrad Adenauer government with the aid of the USA provided camouflage and get-out-of-jail-free cards to many war criminals. Somewhere I knew it before. Now it has registered. 

   Novels speak to the heart of the truth; where the news acts as a head-filler, jumbling together a motley array of facts, opinions and comments at conveyor-belt speed. Fiction writers do have an important role to play in slowing the pace, narrowing the focus onto a human face and getting to the core of complex dilemmas.

Follow me on:

Facebook:

Twitter:

BUY my new crime thriller BY the LIGHT of a LIE at: www.marjorieorr.com

  

Memories are made of ice-cream and flowers

“Memory is the diary we all carry about with us.”  Oscar Wilde

 

  Mine is packed with food and nature; the disappointments, losses and failures, even the successes, drift in a hazy mist over the far horizon. On holiday aged four paddling in a seaside pool, pail in hand, collecting tiny crabs; watching in awe at the farm horse’s new foal, the baffling afterbirth gleaming and gory in the stable drain. Slabs of butter cut like cheese on homemade bread with double cream from the Jersey cow next door dolloped on apple tart.  Sitting be-rugged with a hot water bottle for comfort in my father’s ancient Prefect stuck in a snowdrift or holding my nose as he collected cow manure in pails for his roses. 

   Even in adult life, the pictures that come first to mind aren’t of sweating and panicking over University degrees or even newspaper and television work. Mucking out and feeding horses, in between endless meals, all magicked up by the local farmer’s wife, who seemed to spend all day reading but still managed breakfast, scones and pancakes for mid-morning snacks, lunch, high-tea with stew and cakes and late supper. Her first husband dead after a bull-goring, her second terminally depressed, but she floated through in a cloud of good-humour.

   My first ever proposal from a drop-dead gorgeous Rhodesian, standing on the lip of a dam hearing the lions roaring below. That was a moment to savour. Then a visit to a game reserve in Mozambique. My naivety that this was a glorified zoo was rapidly dispelled by the sight of two bull elephants fighting only yards away, both the size of bungalows. Next day being charged by a mother elephant whose calf was near the track. Her trunk was up and she screamed as her massive feet crushed small trees to the ground and she roared towards us. After that I decided warthogs were my animals of choice, mini-cutesies who ambled along, pa in front, then ma and descending siblings tailing along behind. 

   There were times when betrayals ground deep, unfairnesses anchored themselves obsessively in my head. But eventually they slid into the archive folder and if not gone, they no longer have the charge they once did.  

“Let us not burthen our remembrance with a heaviness that's gone.” Shakespeare.

 

   Creating a Catalan garden out of unforgiving vineyard dust, rubble and mountain rock for a decade swept away a good deal of angst after a dark 1990s. It also gave me a project into which I could channel volcanic anger at an accountancy screw- up, which had me teetering me on the brink of a financial and emotional meltdown.

  But I clambered out of that hole, somehow and don’t ask me how, and it no longer features as a Tier One memory. 

  What lingers are the cats, the exotic Mediterranean flowers, the sea view – and the food. The world’s best fish market at Port Vendres, the next village, imported Madagascar prawns and every kind of sea food imaginable making entertaining a dawdle. The local aioli, garlic mayonnaise, was of a potency that made opening the fridge an experience; and for winter, their scallops in saffron still makes me salivate. 

“Of all the words of mice and men, the saddest are, "It might have been.” Kurt Vonnegut

 

   Regret is what seems to hold many people in the past - of things done or not done. But I’m not good at hypotheticals. Sure I might have acted differently if I’d been a different person. But how can I imagine not being me? Good, bad and indifferent, an identity comes as a total package and all actions and inactions spring from that. That sounds as if I believe there are no choices. Freewill a knotty dilemma since I fervently believe there are alternatives and yet I also believe the pattern of a life springs from the individual temperament which is part nature part nurture. So the answer is yes and no. 

  The old poem about living life differently - ‘eating more ice cream and less bran or beans’ - definitely doesn’t apply. I’ve slurped enough vanilla glace down over the decades to keep the dairy industry afloat.  

Follow me on:

Facebook:

Twitter:

BUY my new crime thriller BY the LIGHT of a LIE at: www.marjorieorr.com