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