Walkiing Away

An article on the front page of the SMH, 20170703, describes the evolving re-segregation and stratification of Australia's education system as being driven by a feedback loop based on the growing income and wealth inequality in our country.

Somehow, this took me away on this ramble, to mention an old book, and a newly published one.  One was buried for a while by social and legal dissaproval - the other would have been ridiculed, and even prosecuted, if published then, but seems so pertinent now that would be a shame not to read it.

The egalitarianism that served our society so well, that was begun by World War I and developed further by World War II, is being eroded.  In Australia, the two Wars, with their attendant slaughter of adult males, and the necessary breaking of class and gender stratification so that food and industrial production could be maintained and improved, helped break down the British style of class structure that had arrived here with the First Fleet.

The Great Depression that brought so many of the wealthy down into poverty, and forced so many families and individuals onto the road in search of work and sustenance, also helped to build the foundations of a genuinely egalitarian society.

The foundations, but not the whole edifice; even while the struggle to complete the structure continued, other forces - political, social, and religious - fought, and still fight (Tony Abbott being a good example) to thwart the progress made thus far, and to take us back to some mythical "Golden Age"

For some reason, I was put in mind of the enormous uproar amongst the "upper classes" when Lady Chatterley's Lover came to their notice.  Although it was several times and in a number of places the subject of bans and obscenity prosecutions, it seems more likely that the real fear was the breach it made in the walls the kept the "lower classes" in their place.

Obscene and erotic books, visual art, and poetry, were quite common, and rarely drew the ire of the establishment (who were often avid purchasers or collectors), but a book that transgressed class barriers in such a way drew immediate and ferocious condemnation.  There was plenty written, even at the time, that acknowledged the often quite promiscuous and decadant life-styles of the upper classes, even though that clashed directly with the morality that the long rule of Queen Victoria had worked deep into the grain of the middle and lower classes of British society - so it seems unlikely that the mere mention of bawdy goings on, or the use of explicit language was, of itself, the primary sin committed by the writer and the publishers.

Lawrence had touched a sore spot in the psyche of the nobility similar to the one that drove so many lynchings in the USA, where white men seemed to live in constant fear that the black men would be"too attractive" to white women.  Even today, in so many places and cultures, there can be found strong sanctions against what is considered, locally, to be miscegenation - it is not the exclusive prerogative of Anglo or Western European societies.  Similarly, at a family level, parents can often be found trying to impose a degree of class or cultural selectivity on the mating or marital choices of their progeny.

In both Britain and the USA, a part of the population was enjoying a great degree of power over another part, based on custom and often arbitrary distinctions.  In Britain, the clothing worn, the dialect or accent spoken, and a knowledge of complex and arcane rules of social behaviour, would mark a man or a woman as being of a certain class.

In the USA, skin colour seemed a more certain indicator of the treatment an individual would receive from society, the legal system, and the economic system, though the ruling classes still tried to enforce a societal structure that ran contrary to the widely held belief that unrestricted social mobility was available to any citizen willing to try and better himself.

Herself was a different matter, much of the time - much of the advice given in books and periodicals of the 19th and early 20th centuries suggested ways in which women could make themselves interesting enough to be able to hitch themselves to some upwardly mobile man's wagon.  There are still plenty of books, periodicals, and tv shows promoting that theme.

Australia had inherited the British class system, but promptly set about subverting it by promoting freed convicts to positions of wealth and power - of course, we had the Aboriginal Australians to look down upon, as well as immigrants of "non-white" background, so there was always a "lower class" above which the rest of society could complacently sit.

So, here we are, well through the second decade of the 21st century, over 7 decades on from the end of WW II, and half a century on from the hopeful blossoming of egalitarian movements that some called "the dawning of the age of Aquarius" - and the battle of the forces of hope and generosity versus the forces of greed and regressions continues as fiercely as ever.

For a long time, we told stories about the good guys winning, and setting the world on a course to becoming a better place for all its occupants, but while we were patting ourselves on the back and celebrating the inevitability of progress, the counter attack was already under way.  The Science Fiction shelves blossomed with futuristic hopes and utopian scenarios - though a darker under-current always lurked.  That current seems to have swirled to the surface - even the newest movies in the Star Wars franchise are so much grittier and darker than the first three.  You never saw an Imperial Trooper with dirt or blood on his uniform in those days.

Is that why so much of the storytelling of the late 20th and early 21st Centuries is dystopian?  The YA shelves in our libraries, once full of hopeful adventure and heroes journies, now drip with dark tales of dire worlds, fractured societies, and desperate quests for safety and survival.

Nowhere have I encountered writing that more thoroughly works through this whirlpool of hope and nihilism, greed and generosity, love and hatred, that fills our bookshelves, and our daily newsfeeds and tv screens, than Cory Doctorow's Walkaway.

It is a big read, and an intense one - every word carries meaning.  It is one book where the discussion of the politics and science of what the human race is doing to itself, the planet, and each other, is essential not only to the story but to the development of the characters.  The emotional ride is like a BMX heading off the top of Mount Kosciuszko with no brakes.  Give it a go - like any work of such intensity, the journey won't kill you, but you won't finish it unscathed.

Conflicting Stories

Conflicting Stories:

In Communal Writing, I told a story of the OON - how it brought people together, and how it served the needs of a small community that was often under pressure from outside.

Of course, that's just one story about the OON, and others might remember other versions, or at least, other facets of the life of the newspaper and The Valley.  Was it always rosey and harmonious?

Of course not.  The Valley as a whole, and its various interest groups, had enough conflict and diversity - personal, age, gender, political, cultural, ethnic, and religious - to keep a posse of professional mediators in full time work.  In fact, most of the mediators were amateurs, and were often deeply enmeshed in the conflicts they were supposedly settling.  Everyone had their own story to tell and to weave into the larger story of life in the Valley, as well as a story of where that community sat in the world at large.

It seemed, from my vantage point behind the bars and counter-tops of the two wateringholes in The Valley, that there were more stories than there were people to tell them, and even such a small community would have furnished more than enough material to keep a Tolstoy or a Dostoyevsky happily employed for a lifetime or two.  Thurber would have recognised many of the characters there, too.

Often I would be privileged to witness the birth of a new story.  Some evenings, such a story would grow from an acorn to an oak tree within a dozen retellings, gaining weight and breadth with each new influx of willing listeners, and I could detect no crack in the sincerity of the author's voice, no matter how different the latest edition was from the first.

I have, too, heard stories about incidents that I was myself present at - versions so opposite in their tone and content that it would be hard to reconcile either with my own memories.  Each contained some truth about the original, but it was a truth that was filtered by, and made to fit, the story that the particular narrator lived within.  For we, and all the characters we write about, live within a story of our devising - one that charts and explains the journey so far, and dictates the course we choose into the future.  One man's hero can all too easily be another man's fool.

Was Prometheus, as Hesiod portrayed him, a liar and a thief who brought suffering down upon the heads of mankind?  Or, were Shelley and Aeschylus correct in painting him as a hero and saviour who was unjustly punished by a jealous Zeus?  Did Oliver Mellors save Constance, or she him?  Or did they both drag each other into darkness?  Was the felling of the Tower of Babel an act of righteousness, or fear?  Is there ever a simple answer?

Is not every story, no matter how complex, still merely a version of a larger truth, trimmed and simplified to fit within our limited understanding of the infinite?  How do we write stories to convey the truth that we think important?  How much fact is lurking within every act of fiction?  From my own experience, quite a bit.

Do I have to "stick to the facts"?  Or change them so as to "protect the innocent"?  I am struck by that meme that occasionaly surfaces on the internet - the one along the lines of "never upset a writer, lest he puts you in his next book, and kills you"

Why should I be nice to the people who have wronged me in the past?  What awful demise can I devise for them - and could it become a best seller?  That meme led to those thoughts, and onwards, page by page, along a road I had never thought to travel - crime writing.  And what an interesting journey it is turning into - a few strokes of the pen have despatched an old foe to an ending I cannot yet reveal (you'll have to buy the book, when it comes out). A few pen-strokes more have revealed some of the motivated, and their motives, and the road promises to have some interesting curves, bends and crests, before the body is found and the truth surfaces.

And yet, truth is stranger than fiction, and the journey through a fictional crime will be more believable, and safer, than revealing all the truths I learned in that Valley.