Fiction: What Gets Left Behind

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(Originally published here)

It was a hard thing, being dead.

Watching the rise and fall of the seasons without the heat of the sun on your face or the chill of a winter storm. Seeing the world change in flashes and cutscenes but with time standing still. Growing attached to the people living in your house (he always thought of them as lodgers) only to find them suddenly grown or gone.

Most of all, Art just felt so very, very tired. Whenever he manifested, it was with a feeling of immense sadness, and with the basement door at his back. He could go anywhere in the house but not beyond the garden. He never went into the basement.

He didn’t think he’d be tired. Weren’t you supposed to sleep when you’re dead? Instead he found himself roaming at all hours, and after all these years he could still never get used to the sensation of knowing his feet were walking without being able to feel wood or carpet underneath him.

He’d love to just stub his toe. Or bang his head on a doorway. That would be amazing. Because he was dead, but didn’t feel dead.

If he concentrated hard enough, really put a lot of effort in, he could move things. More than once his frustrations had boiled into a blind rage and he had lost awareness for a few moments only to find he was standing in a room full of thrown furniture, or next to a chandelier that had been pulled from the ceiling. But he could never remember doing this, despite knowing that he had.

Those days tended to scare the lodgers. Some had walked around burning sage, or brought in priests to sprinkle holy water. That tended to sting for a long time, but he came back eventually, usually with the sense that something was incomplete. It was a very old house, though whether it was old when he was alive he couldn’t say. He could remember nothing from the Time Before.

He didn’t mean to scare people, most of the time. He felt he had been a good person when he was alive, and generally let people be themselves, but he could not abide the slightest injustice toward women.

Once, a very elegant couple and their two children had lived in his house. Avena was tall, with a carefree laugh that reminded him of somebody. She had some business that she ran from home.

Alexei was shorter, well-built, and worked outside the house. He sounded educated, but often reduced his wife to tears with demeaning vulgarity and cruel insults.

Then one evening in summer, he crashed a fist into her stomach. Once. Twice. A third time. As she collapsed, gasping for air as he draped himself on the leather couch, Art was overcome with a bitter flash of memory. It laid itself over the scene as if then and now existed at once. The oak and white furniture of now phased into heavier, darker cabinets and hard chairs. A man in a waistcoat, face crimson with rage (father?) standing over a woman (mother?) who was pleading for her life. “Please,” she said over and over again. “He’s yours, I swear it.”

“You’d say anything, though, wouldn’t ya? I married you when ya had nothing, nothing, took ya outta the gutter where I shoulda left you. And all the while ya’d betrayed me with him, a damned foreigner, like I’m not good enough for ya.”

He punctuated each sentence with a slap of his leather belt and the woman threw her hands up to protect her face. He leaned in close. “I’ll teach ya a lesson, and that little bastard of yours upstairs then.” Faster than Art thought possible, the man wrapped the belt around her throat. She kicked and slashed his face to ribbons but he was fierce and implacable.

With her last breath she reached out, toward Art, her eyes wider with panic. As she slumped to the floor the man stood up and looked where she had been reaching. “There ya are, ya little bastard. I’ll show you and all.”

The man, his face twisted with blind rage, thump thump thumped across the floorboards and swept the boy off the floor and held him before the brass mirror in the hallway. “Look at ya, ya little pup,” the man said in a frenzy, as he throttled a boy no more than twelve years old until his eyes bled. The room spun and Art found himself back where he had been, standing in a doorway watching the two newest lodgers.

He raised his hands in front of where his face should be. He had always fancied that his hands were large, callused and rough, the hands of a man. Now they were slight and bony, the hands of a child with a lot of growing ahead of him. The two visions of himself sat one on top of the other, with the deep sense that had to act, for the sake of the woman who must have been his mother, murdered just a few feet away.

Alexei got up and walked through Art. As Art turned around he saw the man briefly take on the hulking rage of his father before reverting to his normal, well-built shape. That morphing, and seeing his own hands transition from child to man to child again, put the kernel of an idea in Art’s mind, though he wasn’t sure he had the strength to accomplish it.

He crept toward where the woman had pulled herself up by using a side table for support. She could not have been much older than his mother, and though they looked nothing alike Art realised he knew this all along. Drawn by long dormant instinct, he tried to hold his hand out to her, but all that happened was the lamp on the table started to flicker and pulse. The woman saw it, and looked around her. “If somebody is there,” she whispered, “please help me.” She limped off toward the small room he knew she used as an office.

From upstairs came the sound of the shower, and Art’s half-idea blossomed into something fully formed. As he made his way up the stairs, each lightbulb he passed flickering for a moment or two, he wondered how he could feel so much older than a lad of twelve. Had it been the years of watching people come and go? Had he been an old soul even in youth? He knew there was an answer, could feel it rolling around the edges of his consciousness, but it was just out of reach.

No matter. He had a job to do now, and he intended to do it well.

Alexei came out of the shower and wrapped himself in a towel before going to the sink to brush his teeth. He slicked his hair back with his hand, then realised he couldn’t see himself in the steamed mirror, and Art knew his opportunity had arrived. He moved quickly behind Alexei, and as the man wiped the mirror clean Art came  forward.

Alexei wasn’t looking as he wiped the glass but then screamed in transfixed horror as he saw not his own face, but a dripping decayed mass of a thing, green in places with decay and mottled with neglect. It was a ruined mockery of a human being, mostly bleached white as if it hadn’t seen the sun in a generation. Its eyes were gouged out and its lower lip missing. The creature laughed at him, a rattling hollow laugh that Alexei could feel right down his breastbone.

“Look upon your sins,” the cadaver said. “Or next time you’ll be joining me in hell.”

Alexei screamed and screamed and screamed and when Avena came up eventually, having enjoyed hearing his terror for over an hour, his hair had gone bone white and he had slashed his eyeballs with his nails. She held him by the jaw, this once supremely confident brute now blinded and hoarse, and laughed. Not a malevolent laugh, but the relieved laugh of one who has had long prayed-for justice. “My guardian angel must have been looking out for me,” she said, mostly to herself as she tapped on her breastbone three times. “Thank you.”

Art, exhausted by concentrating so much on his apparition, faded out to the sound of her whispering “thank you, thank you, thank you”.

Do you dream when you’re dead, he found himself wondering in the void. Or are you remembering? He was not asleep, he could never truly sleep, but he was being overrun by emotions that felt almost ancient. It was like old muscles awakening after being long out of use. Flashes of faces, of darkness, of hands scratching in the dark and crawling through perpetual night. He felt the march of time, felt it flowing through him, and then past him. He saw new faces, families, felt their growth and traces of their memories. He saw lights turning on and off, heard soft steps on the landing, curtains rustling without wind.

When he became fully aware of himself, he was again standing with his back to the basement door. Yet things were different this time. It wasn’t just sadness that he felt. It was tempered now with resolve, determination. He was, he realised, ready to go down there – but he didn’t want to go alone.

Avena, he realised, was not in the house. He could sense her absence, but felt also that the place had not been lived in for some time. How much time has passed, he asked himself. And yet, as he drifted through silent rooms and past covered furniture, it had not changed much. He knew without remembering that he had been here many times since that night, but only as a shadow of himself. He also knew that he had been welcomed.

There was a jangle of keys and the front door opened stiffly. Two women came in confidently, as if it was a long familiar place. The bright winter sunlight obscured their faces until they shut the door behind them, and he found, happily, that one of the women was Avena. She was older, the passage of time marked in crows’ feet and silver streaks in her hair, but she was no less herself. She carried herself with the contentment of a life well lived. The other woman was shorter, with sandy rather than auburn hair, but the resemblance was remarkable. Her daughter, no doubt, and eventually he remembered her name had been Rebecca. No, Becky. She hated Rebecca.

The two took a few steps in and Avena held her hand up to stop Becky. “There,” she whispered, with the hint of a smile. “He’s here.”

“Are you sure you want to do this mom? I mean, it’s his house. It wouldn’t be fair to hurt him.”

“He did something incredible for me, once. He gave me my life back. I want to return the favour Becky. I’ve been waiting years, it’s why I’ve kept this place for so long and why I keep coming back. You know, you thought I was mad when I told you, but   then you felt him yourself, that time when your brother had a seizure in the bathtub.”

The daughter nodded. “I remember,” she said gently. “He said he went under and then something pulled him out of the water and just held him up.”

“So now we owe our guardian angel two favours. You know something has trapped him here. That’s what all the books say, isn’t it? Unfinished business? He deserves as much peace as anybody.”

“But we can’t force him out.”

“We won’t. We’ll just give him a way, if he wants it.”

Without thinking, Art made the crystals on a dusty Tiffany lamp jingle. “There!” said Avena. “He’s listening.”

“Can you tap something,” said Becky. “Once for no, twice for yes?”

With amusement, Art tapped twice on the sideboard.

“Do you want us to do something?” Two taps. He knew what he wanted, but how to tell them? They were looking at each other, trying to answer the same question. He moved down the hallway toward the kitchene, then tapped twice on the solid wood doorframe.

“Let’s follow him,” Avena whispered.

“I’m nervous,” said Becky. “What if…?”

“Don’t worry. If we were supposed to be scared of him we would have known that years ago.”

“That’s not what I’m worried about,” said Becky as they walked toward the back of the house. “I’m worried about scaring him.”

Art was confused, as if he should know what they were talking about but couldn’t call it to mind. Having brought them this far, he drifted to the basement door. But it was hard. Part of him absolutely did not want to go down there. The rest of him knew it was time. He tapped twice on the door. Avena and Becky exchanged another look, and Avena unlocked it.

The door swung out into pitch darkness, and Art was overcome with fear. There was pain in the darkness.

“Do you want to go on?” asked Becky. One tap… then a hesitant second. “Do you want us to come?” Two taps.

Avena flicked a switch but the ancient yellow bulb barely threw back the blackness. “I think I only came down here two or three times,” she told Becky. “I never liked it.”

Art had already begun down the stairs, almost cringingly slow as he fought a rising panic and despair. It was pressing on him from the air itself.

“You’re not alone,” said Avena, and he knew she was talking to him. “But it’s the only way we can find out how to help you be at peace.”

The light grew gently brighter, then changed colour, and Art felt himself abruptly shift between then and now. There was a thumping, raging charge down the stairs, right through him and the others. Though they couldn’t see anything, both shivered. The cruelly contorted man was dragging a barely conscious child down the stairs, not caring if his legs clattered and stumbled.

“You’re scum and you’ll stay here,” he roared at the child, before returning back up the stairs and turning the light out, locking the door behind him.

Art felt the sensations of scrabbling around on a dirt floor, inching one direction and then the other in the hope of finding something, anything. His legs weren’t working. It felt like it was going on for hours, before the door was flung open briefly and a heavy thing wrapped in carpet crashed down the steps, knocking the child over. The light lasted just long enough for him to see his mother’s dead face.

Snapshots and sensations washed over him. Lights flicking on and off to taunt him with his mother’s putrifying face while he ate scraps; the sound, not the sight but the sound of rats eating at her eyes and lips in the abyss despite his efforts to fight them off; the hands of a child growing steadily to be the hands of a man, worn and callused from attempts to climb the stairs and pry the door open until his strength grew almost to nothing. And every day, the corpse of his mother kept watch over him.

Sometimes his father, spoke to him; other times, out of guilt or boredom perhaps, he left the light on and threw Art books. But mostly there was just the dark, and silence, and starvation.

The flight through memories slowed, then stopped. His father was sitting by the end of the staircase. He had set a bright flashlight on the step next to him, the intense white casting shadows over every crag of his own decaying face. His great strength had turned to flab, and his breathing was loud and ragged. He had something wrapped in a thick tarpaulin at his feet. Art, having spent half a lifetime in the dark, could barely look in the man’s direction.

“There comes a time,” his father wheezed, “when all accounts … are settled.”

He was staring at the floor as Art lay a few feet away, weak and feverish. His legs had never truly recovered.

“I don’t have much time … left. Maybe your mother … cursed me. Maybe … I am your father … isn’t life a blast? But no more of that.”

“What do you mean?” Art was struggling to think, and was increasingly ill on the floor in the cold.

“I mean … no more of that.” And with a rush of speed belying his decrepit state, from the tarpaulin he dragged a hefty pickaxe, and crashed it down on Art’s stunned face.

Floating outside of themselves, now-Art sharing the space and feelings of then-Art, newly freed from his mortal shell. His father was digging a pit, pausing frequently to rest, and when it was deep enough he used the pickaxe to shove Art’s broken body into it, along with the carpet and what remained of Art’s mother. Art watched the man begin to fill it in and drifted up and out of himself, losing contact with the world and disappearing into the void … before appearing for the first time outside the basement door, ignorant of everything that had come before.

Now-Art walked down the steps, tapping as he went so Avena and Becky would follow. In the centre of the room was a rough, discoloured patch, wide and irregular. He slammed his foot down on it three times, they looked at one another, and then dug at the packed earth with their hands in a flurry.

It was nearly an hour before they found the first shreds of carpet, and another fifteen minutes before they uncovered the skull of a young man. Both of them heard a gasp of pure relief and a whispered “thank you”. And then, for the first time in the longest time, Art slept.

Fiction: Life for a Life

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(Originally published here)

Conway stood with the other parishioners, a thick crowd pressing in on each other and reeking of ostentatious piety and desperation.

The decrepit church wasn’t the biggest, but droves forced their way in from Carey’s Lane every Sunday. A man six feet away was coughing as if his life depended on it, and maybe it did. Cholera had ripped through Cork a little more than ten years ago, carrying away thousands, including three of Conway’s children. Now famine stalked the countryside, and scores of skeletal people draped in rags crammed the quaysides and back streets either looking for work or somewhere to die.

The damned crammed into any church they could find, searching for something. Maybe salvation,  maybe just a moment’s respite from the fear of imminent death. He knew they wouldn’t find anything here. He hadn’t. And surely, if ever God was going to reach out his hand it was going to be when his little Isobel lay dying of fever, a whisper of the vibrant two-year-old she used to be. First Martha, then Danny, then Isobel, all gone in just weeks.  What a glorious reign Queen Victoria had brought them.

His wife, Matilde, barely left their rooms. She spent hours kneeling in front of two red candles and a portrait of Saint Monica, who was supposed to bring solace to grieving parents. But if she did, she was ignoring the Conways. Their last surviving child, Hanora, now sixteen, had gone to England with her husband and her mother had barely noticed. Hanora had worked small jobs here and there, helping on clothing stalls at St Peter’s Market on Cornmarket Street, and made sure her mother was fed while her father was at sea. Now they relied on friends, relatives to look in on her. He helped haul grain, butter, and timber to England and bring coal back on one of the steam packets. He had been missing when Isobel passed. They couldn’t afford to lose the work, he kept telling himself, even though he knew it was a lie. Now his wife was a ghost and guilt and grief were eating him from the core out.

The priest droned on in the gloom ahead. Conway understood almost none of the Latin, but they all understood the rhythm of the ritual. He could just about see the priest’s head bobbing up on a step as they all faced the altar, which was clothed in shadow and candlelight, the sun outside blotted out by clouds and the high windows filthy inside and out. Who is this man to turn his back on us, Conway growled to himself, even though he knew it was just the way things were. But when the priest turned to deliver his sermon, some tirade about God leaving bellies empty as punishment for the emptiness of souls, Conway realised he had had enough. Enough of going along with the pantomime, of worshipping a God that had abandoned him and ruined his beloved.

And standing there, desperate to leave and ready to explode with rage, he had an epiphany. If God won’t answer me, maybe the other fella will. What have I got to lose? And so he prayed with a fervour he hadn’t felt in a decade of half-life. Over and over he chanted, in his head first and then under his breath, “The devil is in me, the devil is in me”. And if the men on either side of him started to back away, what of it? Fools, he said. Idiots with heads full of muck and hearts as dull as old knives. Something welled up inside of him, an emotion he couldn’t name which made him puff out his chest, and for the first time in a long time he felt calm within himself.

The Mass finished, and the congregation spilled onto the street. Legions of the dead walked around him, braying to each other with news of the day or pleading with passersby to throw a few coins their way for charity or whatever goods they’d dredged up.

Behind him he heard a tap, tap, tap of metal on cobblestones. Conway looked left and right. The crowds had vanished, along with the hawkers trying to flog their wares. The street had gone utterly silent, but the tapping echoed off the buildings, until it seemed to be coming from everywhere at once.

Conway turned around and less than a foot away from him was a leering, decimated face. It was bloated and bleached white, and half the skin on its jaw was missing. Something had been gnawing on it, but the wounds hadn’t bled. They had just torn. The man’s clothes were drenched and his hair seemed to drift in the air as if he was underwater. Conway screamed as the drowned remains of his father chuckled at him, rapping a blackthorn walking stick on the ground.

“This? This is how you see me? I won’t lie, I was rather hoping for a well-cut suit, one of those uptight educated voices that drives you crazy, but this… well, this will do. That scream, oh that scream was pure fear. It was intoxicating. Do it again.” His speech was clear but damp, as if it was full of phlegm.

Conway’s mouth opened and closed but nothing came out.

“No? Cat got your tongue? A pity, that. But such is life. And, indeed, death.” And the revenant laughed again, a mawing sound that made Conway sick to his stomach.

“What… what do you want?” he finally stammered out.

“‘What… what do you want’,” the creature mocked. “You summoned me. ‘The devil is inside me’, you said. Not the most eloquent prayer but I saw in your heart that you meant every word. ‘What do you want’. Do not insult me.”

“I wasn’t sure … I didn’t think what I’d say exactly.”

“No time like the present, lad. But tempus fugit, hora volant. Time flees, hours fly. I already know what you want to ask me. I just need you to say it.”

“I want them back.”

“Who? Come on, be specific.”

“My little ones. Isobel, Martha, Danny.”

“Ah, of course, Danny like his father. And his father’s father. Such a warped mind you have, lad, naming your son after the person you feared the most.” And he threw his head back with another vile, hacking laugh, threw it back so far it looked as if his neck was broken. “And what makes you think I have that sort of power?”

“I thought you’d do anything for a man’s soul, you wretch.”

“Oh look at that, he’s found a bit of fight in him. You’re an interesting one, Danny Conway. I get these prayers all the time, so so many, but they’re always the same. Boring. Thing. ‘Gimme money, gimme fancy clothes, gimme gimme gimme stuff‘.”

“I wanta go back to the way things were.”

“Truly? Look around you,” and the revenant gestured to the church steps, where a family in rags sat huddled. “You would bring your children into this filth, this degradation? A world of poverty and starvation? Sorrow and pain?”

“They’re mine.”

“So that’s your final answer?”

“I can’t go on,” said Conway,  his voice catching. “I put three babies in the dirt, just saw them thrown in pits with strangers like they were nothing. Nothing! I can’t fill that hole in my heart without them. Bring them back. What more do you want from me?”

“Oh, Danny my boy,” said the revenant, leaning in close to whisper in Conway’s ear. “I want everything.”

“What do I have to do so?”

“Why, earn it of course.”

“What?”

“‘What’?” the creature said, mockingly. “God makes you earn his grace and favour, doesn’t he? Why should I be any different? When your soul is polished up all nice then,” he clicked two bloated, fleshy fingers, “our deal will be complete.”

“But what do I have to do?”

“It’s so dull to have to spell it out. A life for a life. And when you die you come to me. Though I know you knew that part.”

“A life for a life? That’s… in the name of Christ–”

“A little late to invoke him now. So. Do we have a bargain?”

“You’ll bring my children back?”

The revenant nodded, its head bobbing back and forth on a broken neck.

“And everything will be the way it was?”

“That’s up to you. So, agreed?”

“… a life for a life. Why not?”

“I’ll only give you two rules. Make ’em count, and do it fast, before sunset. Before I change my mind. Make ’em count.”

The revenant screamed then, a scream that shook Conway to the roots of his soul, and the sounds of the street roared back and he was on his knees in the gutter with the rats. For a few minutes he wasn’t sure if he had been dreaming, or if this was the dream. Did it matter? Life was a waking nightmare. But for the first time in a long time he felt some semblance of hope. Being a good man had got him nowhere. Maybe breaking all the rules would.

A balding man in a cassock was coming down the steps of the church, stepping over the huddled family which had now fallen silent and deathly still. He held his head high with the arrogance of one who would never have to bury a child of his own but would judge you for not having more of them. He was being followed by a younger fellow, the curate, who carried himself more eagerly but with no less pride. A sudden rush of inspiration hit Conway.

“Fathers,” he said, slouching over and limping with his hand out like a beggar, exaggerating his accent. “Fathers, would ye have a second for a good Catholic?” The curate looked at Conway with genuine pity and began to rifle in his pockets until the priest stopped him with an imperious hand. He was trying to look away from Conway with such disdain that he didn’t see the punch coming. A hard one to the face and he was down. The younger man tried to run but Conway caught him by the collar and kicked the legs out from under him. One solid kick to the stomach and he was winded.

He didn’t kill them right away. Make ’em count. With a strength he scarcely recognised, as if he was being carried along by the spirit of vengeance, he dragged both men back into the church. He stripped them and lashed them to a pillar. “You’re going straight to hell for this, you little shit,” said the priest, spitting blood at Conway’s feet.

“You can keep me company,” said Conway, kicking the man squarely in the testicles. “Look around you. Who’s stopping me?” He crouched down and spat at the sobbing priest. A decade of rage poured out of him as he squeezed the man’s throat. The priest thrashed as best he could, but Conway was younger, stronger, angrier. The curate cried out but Conway cut him short with a stamp to the head, then another and another until he heard bone crack and the man slumped, lifeless.

It was exhilarating, this rebellion. His skin tingled and he felt alive, truly alive. He found himself walking the streets laughing at the idea that he was punishing God. Surely those were two noteworthy deaths. He felt good about it, that he was doing something worthwhile because the return of his children was nearer. He didn’t care where he went when died, as long as he had them with him while he lived.

It was raining, he realised eventually. He was sweating and panting on the wharves near the custom house. When did he get here? The place was thronged with dock workers hauling, beggars and starving families keening, well to do men milling about, the masters of all they surveyed. He leaned against a wall, letting the drizzle run over his face. A woman no older than himself was trying to keep a gaggle of youngsters in line. Three seemed to be her own, judging by the way she harangued them and they hung on her every word. Two girls and a boy, the eldest no older than about six. Conway’s breath caught and his heart skipped a beat as she turned around and he saw the vibrant, electrified face of his wife as she stewarded their three children and friends through the crowds. But he blinked and she was gone, replaced by a younger woman.

“Everything will be as it was,” he muttered under his breath, and she looked at him queerly from the side of her eye as she heard him, then hurried the children up until they were swallowed by the crowd. “Everything will be as it was,” he said more emphatically.

The three children would be back, but they couldn’t exist without their mother. She was practically a ghost herself, but he clung to the sudden idea that there was a way to bring her back too. The sun began to set behind the clouds. Time was running out, but he had an idea. One swift, brutal act, and he could have his whole family back together. It could work. It had to.

Matilde was kneeling at her makeshift shrine, as usual. Her hair was matted and unkempt, and the plate of food Conway had left next to her when he left had been mostly eaten, but left to go stale. Her pewter tankard of water was empty. It felt like an age since he had seen her, and in truth it had been an age since he had seen the real her. It’s not really her, he told himself. It’s just a shell.

“Matilde,” he whispered. “Did you get some rest?”

Her eyes flicked toward him and then back to the candles, which stood in hills of melted wax. “Oh. I don’t know. I don’t remember.”

“I’ve found a way to bring them back.”

“What? I don’t understand, Danny.” Her voice was small and weak, and so, so tired.

“Danny, Martha, Isobel. I can get them back. But I need you to do something for me.”

Something like life sparked in her eyes. “Anything,” she said vehemently.

“It’ll hurt, but then everything will be back the way it was. Just think of that. Everything will be back the way it was. And that means me, you, and the three little ones. It just really has to matter.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Do you trust me though?”

“I do, but I don’t understand.”

“You don’t need to understand,” he said softly. “You just need to die.”

She fought, feebly, as he covered her face. He couldn’t look at her. She twitched and pitched. He couldn’t look at her. She went still and silent. He couldn’t look at her.

As he lay her body on the bed, looking everywhere but at her face, the room filled with the stink of fetid seawater and a phlegmy, caustic laugh filled the room, followed by slopping, mocking applause.

The revenant was standing by the door. “Spectacular,” it said.

“It’s done. A life for a life. I gave you three, now you give me everything back in return.”

“I’m afraid not, Danny boy.”

Conway thundered toward the rotting creature, but was floored by a blow he didn’t see coming from a force powerful beyond belief.

“Lie down, and know your place,” said the revenant, in a voice crueller than ever.

“I can get dirty souls, and I mean proper, greasy things that drip and sizzle anywhere, anytime I want. The kinda scuffed ones,” the revenant shrugged. “I’ll take ’em, but they’re not so juicy. But a good, righteous man, well that’s something different entirely. That’d keep the flames burning bright for a thousand years. All you are, Danny, is a disappointment. And you had so much potential.”

“Potential? What’re you on about?”

“All you had to do was be good to your wife. Oh her suffering was delicious, but she didn’t deserve it. And if you had been just a bit more here for her, you could have given her a nudge back toward her old self. One day and it would have counted. And so many suffering in the city. A few acts of charity hide a multitude of sins. Instead you went and did what you thought I’d like, instead of what I needed.”

“So, what’re you saying? Killing isn’t good enough for the likes of you?”

“Killing? Oh yes, it is. But you didn’t truly give yourself into it. You never mentioned her as part of the bargain. Grief made you mad, and proud. You thought she’d just be coming back too, because a child needs their mother. Thought you were smarter than me. ‘But because you are neither hot nor cold, but lukewarm, I shall vomit you from my mouth.’ And if Jesus can have standards, so can I. But I’ll find a place for you in my kingdom.”

“Don’t toy with me. Do what you promised. The children if nothing else.” His mind was reeling and his stomach fit to explode with pain.

“Oh dear. Oh Danny. You haven’t been paying attention. You failed to deliver your end of the bargain. I told you to get your soul all polished up and nice. That’s what I meant.”

“This isn’t what you promised. You said a life for a life, to make them count.”

“I never said to take any. Changing a life is pure divine magic. And winning a pure soul is one in the eye for the Almighty. You’ve robbed me of that prize.”

“I want my children.”

“You’ll see them. I can promise that, for sure. You’ll see them every day… just out of reach. Now,” and the creature stretched out a rotting hand and placed it over Conway’s face, “good night, sleep tight, and I’ll see you in hell when you wake up.”

DeSantis oped in the Irish Examiner

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The website has been quiet but I have not (yet) dropped off the face of the Earth. I’m currently 15,500 words into a novel having another 25,000 words or so of unfinished projects on the back burner.

This is an oped I wrote for the Irish Examiner recently on Ron DeSantis and the abuse of history in the Florida school curriculum – it was written in the aftermath of the decision to start teaching so-called positives about slavery and, politics being politics, the situation has only gotten worse since.

What DeSantis and his administration (a group of academics wrote up the curriculum, not him personally) are doing is very different from a conservative reading of a historical document, which would be, for example, arguing that a particular tone or phraseology supported a conservative interpretation of the text.

Using history to teach context and ways of avoiding past mistakes and horrors is one thing. But this is a blatant abuse of history for political ends.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: An appreciation

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Rothwell, Richard; Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley; National Portrait Gallery, London; http://www.artuk.org/artworks/mary-wollstonecraft-shelley-157761

Mary Shelley, or Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, aka Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, will forever be among the stars in my library simply through the writing of Frankenstein, one of the first science fiction novels and the themes of which I’m going to explore a bit here.

Bear in mind that she was 19 when she began writing it, and that it was published in 1818 when she was 21. While she is certainly respected, I, like this Guardian writer a few years ago, don’t feel she gets the level of respect she deserves. While responses were generally positive, one editor in the 1880s wrote in the preface – the preface! – that the book represents “the first of a class of fiction – not of a very high order” that was also explored by Poe (who, like Mary Shelley, used electricity and the galvanic battery as a plot device).

What had I accomplished by the age of 19? Certainly not pioneering a genre, although she wrote other novels and works which are also very good but which I’ve only come to recently, most notably the novella Matilda which her father, the perpetually in debt political radical William Godwin, refused to publish in his lifetime because it deals with incestuous love of a father for his daughter. She also wrote a post-apocalyptic novel called The Last Man where humanity has been wiped out by a virus, but I haven’t been able to get a copy of that yet.

There are several editions of Frankenstein, with the 1818 one closer to her original vision and the 1831 one influenced by the death of Percy Shelley and of her own children. I have both, but anything referenced here comes from the 1818 version which I have as a Norton Critical Edition.

I’m going to assume you know the general plotline, but here it is in summary all the same: Man learns science, creates monster, monster exacts extensive revenge, nobody survives. That’s a grossly simplified summary, true, but “and then they all died” seems to be a common enough solution to 18th and 19th-century novels.

The creature, referred to in the text as a daemon, is really an extended metaphor for the thin line between civility and brutality, and most importantly what can happen when the marginalised and powerless are oppressed savagely and given no chance for justice.

This theme of power and oppression, of gentry and those without property or means, is a major theme in the works of her father and mother. Godwin’s Caleb Williams, for example, is a novel that explores the crushing use of power and prison in a rigidly class-based society. Mary Shelley’s mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, drew on her own life in two novellas that pick up on the general theme, Mary and Maria: The Wrongs of Woman, with the latter (and Godwin himself) influenced by how power can become misused by those who previously didn’t have it. Both were writing in the aftermath of the French Revolution, which Wollstonecraft had seen.

Frankenstein is an allegory of what happens when a cruel, harsh world tramples on innocence of the Other – much as Victor makes the creature physically, the world makes him morally (initially he thinks that just be engaging in conversation he can overcome any revulsion). Unable to make a real connection with humans, and seeing his creator experience some real happiness and family life having spurned him, the creature kills Victor’s baby brother, and having had his pleas for a mate ultimately rejected he kills Victor’s best friend and later his new bride. He tells Victor that he often experienced regret at what he had done, but he was given no kindness or affection that might have tempered his rage, or what he calls “eternal hatred and vengeance to all mankind”.

“You are my creator but I am your monster.” There is a parallel here with Lucifer in Paradise Lost, a parallel the creature acknowledges himself several times: “Many times I considered Satan the fitter emblem of my condition; for often, like him, when I viewed the bliss of my protectors [a family living in a house he was hiding next to], the bitter gall of envy rose within me.”

And yet the creature, Victor tells us, was designed to be beautiful. His skin barely contains his muscles, and he has long, lustrous hair that would not be out of place in a gentleman of the time. This is typically lost in any adaptation of the text as a film or otherwise, where the creature is generally made an obvious monster.

Victor, so engrossed in assembling and bringing life to his creation, only recoils from it once it comes to life (in a deliberately vague process because this narrative is told from Victor’s perspective and he doesn’t want people to follow his research). His reaction is so overblown and visceral that it’s an early example of what we would now call the Uncanny Valley, which is the theory that the closer something non-human gets to looking human the greater our instinctive hatred/disgust/fear (delete as applicable).

The reaction is not limited to Victor. Every time the creature encounters humans on his travels (he considers humans a different species to himself) he gets the same reaction: Fear, horror, violence, even being shot after rescuing a child from drowning. The creature frequently criticises the actions of humanity. He refers to the “barbarity” of mankind, and the “barbarous” nature of the villagers who expel him with violence.

The visible difference between the creature and humans is emphasised later in the text when his skin is described as being like that of a mummy, but it’s also described as yellow, so despite Victor’s best efforts he obviously stands out compared to the other inhabitants of Switzerland and Germany, even without factoring in his great height.

Unless told otherwise, I’d like to think of the creature as looking like a buff, hairy version of this

“I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel [Lucifer], whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed,” the creature tells Victor.

And later, he says: “Everywhere I see bliss, from which I am irrevocably excluded. I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend.” He shows some instinctive understanding of human emotions, such as when he realises that taking food from a homestead is harming its inhabitants (he does not understand speech at this stage).

The creature here is a commentary on human nature and the affect of external factors on one’s attitude and behaviour. He says he is “not even of the same nature as man”, and “Was I then a monster, a blot upon the earth from which all men fled, and whom all men disowned?”

The creature’s language about himself is full of pathos but is designed to heighten the sense of him as an Other, outside human society. He describes himself as deformed, as wretched, as loathsome. “Why did you form a monster so hideous that even you turned from me in disgust?” he asks his creator. Ultimately Victor starts describing himself in similar terms: “I, a miserable wretch, haunted by a curse that shut up every avenue to enjoyment”.

Fun fact: While it’s often said that Frankenstein is the creator and not the creature, the creature refers to Victor as “my father” which technically makes him a Frankenstein as well.

There is a naivete about the creature which Victor eventually realises. Having murdered several members of Victor’s family, the creature demands he be made a female counterpart, saying they will disappear into the rainforest and live together without harming anybody else. It does not occur to him, though it does to Victor, that the female counterpart may want nothing to do with him, although Victor goes off on a wild fear tangent of wondering if “she might become ten thousand times more malignant than her mate” and the two of them give rise to “a race of devils” opposed to mankind.

Overall the book is a brilliant example of not really science gone amok but the cautionary moral of “just because we can do a thing does not mean that we should do a thing”. While the idea of monsters and mad scientists is what cemented it in the popular imagination, the book itself deals with much bigger themes concerning power, class, and the outcomes of oppression. Quite the feat for a teenager.

Published Irish Examiner bylines

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Paddle Steamer Entering the Port of Cork, by George Mounsey Wheatley Atkinson

While the pace of publication here has slowed it’s not from lack of writing. Rather, some of the pieces that began life as potential posts here have ended up in the pages (print and digital) of the Irish Examiner.

I’m particularly proud of this one, written up to coincide with International Women’s Day. It was inspired by one of my female farming ancestors, my great grandmother Ellen Connolly, aka Ella Collins, aka “Granny Coll” to my mother and her siblings. Along the way it became a call to celebrate the legacy of women who worked the land.

Remembering Ireland’s forgotten farming women

My writing draws heavily on aspects of my own family’s history, which sort of parallels the history of many other Irish people. The furore over the ending of the eviction ban in Ireland brought up our angry, wounded association with the word “eviction” but to me also recalled a word that followed it, particularly in Famine time: workhouse. One of my ancestors was born there.

‘Eviction’ brings up other grim aspects of our history

Just last week I wrote a piece that was intended to fill in for one regular columnist, but ended up filling in for another on a different day (such is the way of the warrior). It focuses on Cork’s relationship with the water, which is as much one in its head as it is something tangible and real compared to how it used the water in previous years.

Back when the Lee was Cork’s life blood

I currently don’t have anything else in the pipeline for the Examiner but then again these weren’t planned long ahead so who knows what the future will bring? In the meantime I will work away on a piece about Frankenstein, one of my favourite books and one which I reread just a couple of weeks ago.

St Patrick: More man than myth

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Picture: https://www.flickr.com/photos/47422005@N04/13222409233

As we celebrate fifty shades of green and celebrate the most famous of Ireland’s patron saints, it seems only fitting to go back and look at what we know about Patrick himself.

Stripping away centuries of myth and miracle, shamrock teachings and banishings of snakes, we can look at him through the lens of his own writings. They are the earliest extant texts from Ireland and there are two: His Confession, and a letter he wrote excoriating the soldiers of a man called Coroticus after the soldiers killed people who had just been baptised.

Much of what is taught about Patrick came from a narrative driven by Armagh in a sort of ecclesiastical and propaganda coup, and is best articulated in Muirchu’s Life of Patrick which was written at least 200 years after Patrick had died. But even Muirchu says there are conflicting stories about the saint, and it should be read more about what people in his lifetime thought about Patrick than what actually happened.

Better, then, to go to the man’s own words. The Confession was written toward the end of his life (he is traditionally held to have died in about 461). This is not a confession in the sense we might understand – “forgive me father for I have sinned” – but a defence and justification of his evangelical mission to Ireland and his actions as a bishop. For Patrick, you see, had gone on something of a solo run.

There is no indication that he was given the nod by Rome, because surely he would have just said this rather than writing hundreds of words defending himself. That honour had gone to Palladius, sent by the pope in 431 “to the Irish who believe in Christ” and now mostly lost to history, eclipsed and probably absorbed into the Patrick mythos (and there may have been two Patricks anyway). Muirchu wrote that he ended up in northern Britain after encountering resistance in Ireland, but we may never know.

Patrick’s Confession, sometimes referred to as the Declaration, is a very personal document. He clearly misses his home in Britain (his Coroticus text says his family no longer recognises him), says he lives every day in danger, that he has been taken captive multiple times, and that he has evidently been accused of going to Ireland to enrich himself by accepting payments from people he baptised (he says anything given to him was returned). It is hard not to feel empathy for him when he writes about how some unexplained but apparently grievous sin that he had confessed to “a very dear friend” had been made public by that same friend.

Patrick writes that he is “a simple country person”, “unlearned”, “imperfect in many ways”, and that he had delayed writing this text “because I did not learn as others did, who drank in equally well both the law and sacred writings” even though his grandfather was a priest and his father a deacon.

While his lack of formal education or training is clearly an issue held against him, his use of modesty as a theme is subterfuge of a kind. The Confession is full of biblical quotations, both explicit and just as turns of phrase, while the form of the document would not look out of place in the scriptoria on the Continent or any other more staunchly Christian (and educated) regions. By incorporating so much of both the Bible and older literary forms, Patrick is able to piggyback on established literary genres and rhetorical methods to get his message across.

And it is, at its heart, a simple message: That he had returned to Ireland on a very personal preaching mission that he felt was inspired by God. There are no works of thaumaturgical power enacted by him, though he does recount visions sent to him both while a slave in his youth and in his later life. While the rationalist in me argues these were brought on by a combination of fasting and religious fervour, he is very clear that they were for him, not in front of witnesses to show him as being holy.

That said, this “simple country person” shows himself to be well versed in biblical analysis and deep theological teaching. He emphasises, for example, that he can “imitate somewhat those whom the Lord foretold would announce his gospel in witness to all nations before the end of the world. This is what we see has been fulfilled. Look at us: we are witnesses that the gospel has been preached right out to where there is nobody else there!”

He writes also that there are now clerics and believers “at the end of the earth”.

Don’t underestimate just how remote Ireland and Britain were in the late antique and medieval imagination. It was widely held that Ireland was the most westerly inhabited region, and that there was nothing habitable beyond it (Bede, in the 730s, describes it as a land of milk and honey). Some medieval maps, drawn in a sort of circle with Rome or Jerusalem at the centre like the Hereford mappa mundi, have Ireland and Britain almost off the edge of the margins. All that’s missing is a rubric saying “here be dragons”.

The Hereford map depicts Caesar Augustus as a composite emperor-pope and locates him next to Ireland and Britain at the north-western oceanic limits of the known world (via article linked above)

I wrote about the place of Ireland in the medieval idea of time and space extensively in my doctorate, drawing on the UCC (holy) trinity of Damian Bracken, Diarmuid Scully, and the late Jennifer O’Reilly. The islands are not just the physical ends of the earth. They are an allegorical one too.

In the Bible, Jesus prophecises that his gospel shall be preached  “in the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then shall the consummation come”. “Consummation”, as you might have guessed, here refers to the actual end of the world in all its second coming/last judgement sense.

In the medieval Christian interpretation of time and space, converting Ireland and Britain to Christianity mean the last judgement could now happen at any stage. Rejoice! It’s all over. This was considered a very good thing, by the way.

Relax, it’s only the end of the world Picture: https://www.flickr.com/photos/35409814@N00/5225326845

So by incorporating this whole theme into the Confession, and saying that he and his comrades are witnesses to this prophecy, Patrick actually telling his critics that he has the same sort of education as them and that he has the Bible on his side. They couldn’t really dispute biblical authority, so this is like an early Christian equivalent of flicking the V sign at his begrudgers.

Lewd rustic my eye.

While we may never know for certain all the details of Patrick’s life and times, we can at least appreciate that he was just a man living at the end of the world, doing his best despite seemingly endless opposition. And isn’t there something to be celebrated in that simple example?

Fiction: A scene

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[Every now and again scenes from stories pop into my head, though I have not written them up as I should have, convincing myself that I will eventually have time to flesh them out into something more solid. I’m getting over that, scribbling out scenes which may come to nothing but which need to get out of my head one way or the other. This was handwritten at about 4am one day, it is presented here unedited]

Isaac felt the thud of arrows in his back, felt them stagger him. But there was no pain, only a sense of creeping wonder at how the arrowheads drove deep and hung there. There was a sound then. It came from somewhere far, far away and yet very close. As his hands dropped and he fell to one knee, flashes of colourless light shot across the decrepit stone arch. Not enough. So close but not enough power.

His head dropped to his chest and the sound came again, again, and again. Hollow and ragged. Eventually he realised, dimly, that the sound was coming from his chest, and that he was laughing. That only made him laugh harder.

With one last effort he rose to his feet and turned back toward the forest trail. If I am going to die today, I will die standing and with my face to the enemy. Small men from the town. Even with their hoods up against the cold he could see their faces in the flickering light of the braziers. How triumphant they looked in the darkness, how proud of themselves for shooting a man in the back. How their triumph turned to confusion as the shot man laughed in their faces. How confusion turned to fear as Isaac caught the next arrow and turned it to ash.

The other two hit their target, one in the shoulder an done in the chest, missing his heart. With a flick of dying will Isaac burned off the arrows stuck in his chest, and set fire to those in the quivers too. But his legs were like water now, and his vision blurring. And yet the work was not done.

He stumbled more than walked toward the small, rounded altar. He could feel the heat of flashing raw power behind him as the ruined portal stirred. He fancied he could hear someone, or something, calling his name. Calling him home.

Still laughing, he slumped over the altar. As his blood touched the stone and ran down the carvings of labyrinthine entities he felt a surge of energy behind him and heard the triumphant, joyous song of a thousand angels or devils. “It is done,” he whispered, as his heart gave out.

As Isaac died the ancient doorway opened in a blaze of glory. And hell followed.

Change through small simple steps

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Rome wasn’t built in a day. It’s a well-trotted out phrase at this stage, used in all sorts of contexts to illustrate that anything and everything takes time. You could apply the phrase to Rome the city or Rome the empire, it makes no difference.

In a world where we constantly need to have instant results it’s easy to forget the power of small changes and how they add up. It’s something I came across during lockdown, and it’s how I ended up in my 20 pages a day reading challenge (still haphazard, but it will overall hit the annual reading target).

I follow and learn from a wide variety of individuals representing a wide variety of backgrounds. One of these is the brain trainer and speed reading guru Jim Kwik. Kwik had a brain injury as a child and struggled with learning but has since retrained his brain to work efficiently and has a prodigious memory. Although he would complain that “prodigious” is the wrong word to use, arguing that there are only trained brains and untrained brains.

I recently watched an interview with him where he discussed limitations and how they are generally down to our own perceptions of ourselves. One quote stuck out for me: “If you fight for your limitations, you get to keep them”. Meaning, if you say to yourself “I can’t do this, I’ll never be able to do this”, then you won’t because you’re programming yourself to think that you can’t.

I took a number of online courses since the onset of covid, including several on leadership, organisational design, and management styles as part of a programme offered by Australia’s Macquarie University. Some of these courses were focused on how to be a better, more effective leader, but they also dealt with coaching and supporting employees. One approach that was discussed and which repeatedly pays dividends is, for want of a better name, the power of positive thinking. This is a growth mindset. Believing you can improve is key, much like what Kwik was talking about. And by telling employees they can improve or do new tasks, the research shows they are more likely to actually be able to do them. Provided you ensure they feel supported and that you genuinely believe in them.

But what if the task you need to accomplish is a big one? Well the tried and trusted way of taking it on is to break it into more manageable chunks. So, you want to read more? Do 20 pages a day, it adds up to 7,300 a year. Or read 20 minutes a day. Need to write that novel? Well try 500 words a day and build from there. Stephen King writes six manuscript pages a day, every day. Six. That works out as a book every two months (eg, 360 manuscript pages). A whole project management approach revolves around increments, particularly for software projects.

Kwik, in that interview I watched recently, which was part of an online festival so I can’t link out to, had a formula for progress in which he advocated a variation on this sort of thing: Short Simple Steps.

Like many useful ideas, the simplicity is what makes it works. Think along the lines of what I’ve said above about reading: You might want to kick off by reading, say, 20 books a year and then burn yourself out putting yourself under pressure. Instead, set a manageable target and chances are you’ll find yourself coasting past it because the pressure isn’t there.

I’ve written “Short Simple Steps” on the whiteboard in our kitchen so I can break it out the next time my son is tangling himself up in knots overthinking or telling us he can’t do something.

History repeating

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Picture: Suzy Hazelwood via Pexels

The humanities seem to always be under attack somewhere, whether through swingeing staff cutbacks in the UK or most emphatically now with Governor DeSantis’s “war on education” to enforce conformity of thinking across Florida universities that would actually reduce diversity and undermine academic freedoms.

It would be easy to simply state that both projects are driven by conservative authorities. It would be easy too to highlight that arts and humanities teach critical analytical and thinking skills that make for good dissidents, which historically, conservative authorities have not liked. So I won’t say that. I’ll say instead that the exposure to a wide range of philosophies (for want of a better word), critical approaches, and being trained in how to form arguments and spot bias are all huge and transferable assets that come with a humanities education.

Critical thinkers tend to suffer any time a government turns conservative and humanities subjects in universities take a hit if there’s a funding squeeze, as any academic working in a school of arts in this country can tell you from the last downturn.

I’m a historian, as well as a journalist and writer, and what’s happening in America alarms me greatly given how it is surely inevitable – particularly if DeSantis makes a serious run for the US presidency as anticipated – that a similar movement will bleed into Irish discourse,  One would like to think that it wouldn’t, but those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, as George Santayana said, sometimes misquoted as by Churchill as “those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it”.

History sometimes gets a bad rep as a subject that is difficult to study, full of dates and events. That’s an antiquated way of teaching and learning history. Dates are important, no doubt, but the emphasis long ago switched to how and why things happened more than simply when and who did them.

Some schools of thinking in history argue that the duty of a historian is to “tell it like it was”. EH Carr, back in the 1960s, argued that history (or history writing at least) was a sort of ongoing process between the events and the day of the historian. This is still an important point, because one’s understanding of and writing about the past can be shaped profoundly by one’s present, something which incidentally became a theme in my PhD. Other historians eschew that and focus on pure analysis. But there’s no point analysing something the reader (or listener) doesn’t know. Otherwise you’re just preaching to the converted and speaking into an echo chamber of perhaps a handful of people. Whatever the perspective, history is, rather than a dusty collection of ancient thoughts and events, a living, breathing thing that needs appreciation and even some nurturing.

Take a walk around and you’ll walk through history. If I walk through Cork city centre, for instance, I can see the house my philandering great great grandfather Michael Verling lived in with his first family, the quays where he loaded and unloaded cargo, the customs office where my (not philandering) great great grandfather Daniel Mahoney worked following his naval career. I can visit churches where my ancestors were baptised. For years I walked past all these things not knowing they were part of my own history. I’ve spent the last number of years reclaiming it, if that makes sense.

An extract from Daniel Mahoney’s naval record referring to his service in the coastguard from Hastings, England, after naval service in Crimea

They key point here is that, compared to four years ago, I actually know where my ancestors come from, and even that I have relatives hitherto unknown (and me to them) alive and well in Missouri. The analytical skills picked up from my training as a historian and journalist have helped me sift through the documentation. One might not immediately think of a genealogy project as history, but in this project alone I can show my family’s connection to the Crimean War, steam ferries up and down Cork Harbour, and the mining industry in Kansas and Missouri. These are parts of a wider story, a wider history, that of Ireland and its diaspora. Your family has its ties to history as well.

However, timelines and timespans can be lost on people (and to be fair it’s hard to visualise things). That said, a teacher of my acquaintance was recently tearing her hair out that so many of her students had no idea how long the human species had existed. The guesses ranged from 15,000 years to hundreds. Hundreds! It explains why my son, who is 9, asked me recently if we used horses to get around when I was a child. I’m not yet 40. I just feel old.

There isn’t a movement in history that hasn’t used, well, history to support itself one way or the other. There are sound reasons. Showing a tradition, for example. Drawing inspiration from the past is another. The problem is that a lack of historical literacy makes it difficult to understand when history is being co-opted for contemporary purposes – how some members of the current Sinn Féin lay claim to the anti-Treaty fighters who would not see them as successors? – and so don’t have the tools to challenge it. And it should be challenged as often as possible.

Column: Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451

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As those who follow me on Twitter may know, for the past year or so I have set myself an annual reading challenge. This was originally an attempt to read 20 pages every day, but it sort of morphed into trying to read the equivalent of 20 pages a day over the course of a year, which works out at 7,300. Last year I managed to beat it, this year I’m slightly behind schedule. Such is life.

That preamble out of the way, I want to talk a bit about dystopias. Specifically Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, one of the greatest works of science fiction. It seems apt that a book about a society that burns books floated into my reading at a time when there is a serious threat to books in parts of America.

I have always loved dystopic fiction, perhaps ultimately because it forces us to confront wholescale world changes and how we cope with them. I like apocalyptic movies as well, so it’s clearly a genre I find appealing (I wrote about medieval ideas of the apocalypse too, but they’re quite different). This is a classic work, extremely short but essential reading.

In the book, a fireman (who burns books), Guy Montag, starts to come to the realisation that the extreme censorship and what he does for a living is wrong, and that there are other ways of living. Ultimately he decides to spend his days preserving books. That is a very simple summary of a book that has plenty of nuances, but it does the trick.

Ray Bradbury‘s style and the liveliness of the prose – and perhaps that much of the then fantastical technology such as immersive television experiences is not that far ahead of us now – make it easy to forget that the book was written in the early 1950s, when there were book burnings in America, and that one of his concerns is effectively the dumbing down of a population by the growth of television. But he wrote amid real fears about nuclear war – Hiroshima and Nagasaki being recent memories – anti-communist paranoia in America, and mass purges of intelligentsia and dissidents in Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union.

Importantly, while it feels like a prophetic text, he himself would say it was about what might happen as opposed to what will happen. At its heart the book asks the question ‘what if people didn’t like books?’ and follows it through to its most extreme end to explore the sort of world that might result.

The most intriguing, and alarming, thing about Fahrenheit 451 is that the book-burning mandate didn’t come from the government or some autocracy. Rather, it grew organically because people felt they’d be better off. Montag is told, “Remember, the firemen are rarely necessary. The public itself stopped reading of its own accord.” That said, because this is relayed to the reader through dialogue it’s entirely possible that this is a story which was fed out as propaganda in favour of the changes, because it’s made obvious that the government is making what it deems best use of the situation.

News, for instance, is heavily sanitised at a time of nuclear war when bombers regularly fly over the homes of Montag and other characters. In fact the reader could ask if indeed cities across the United States (it’s only confirmed to by the US late on in the book) have been bombed already, given that it’s not clear if these are bombers returning from attacks or if they are attackers. Men are called up to the army, but none of their wives are particularly worried – they tell each other that it’s other women’s husbands who get killed.

Dissent exists, but it’s crushed. This dissent can be passive, such as through the mere existence of Montag’s neighbour Clarisse’s mere existence. She, free thinking and from a family that spends considerable time talking and interacting with one another as opposed to just existing, is in all her actions and force of personality the rank opposite of the sterile world that has been created, and while Montag is later told she was killed by a speeding car there is a strong inference that she was in fact killed by his captain. Thinking for oneself is a de facto crime.

The effects of not thinking for oneself are made clear by how Montag’s memory is in many cases weak: For instance, it is only toward the end of the novel that he can remember where he met his wife, and when he asks her this question earlier in the text she cannot remember either (though she places little importance on this).

Interestingly, there is the strong inference that people, at some level, realise that this is not how things need to be. Montag’s wife, who liberally takes sleeping pills, overdoses and he has to call medics to pump her stomach. The medics say they have multiple cases of this every night, suggesting that subconsciously even people who won’t question their reality openly are looking for an escape (a very final escape, but one all the same).

Sport, in this world, is the opiate of the masses (keep people occupied and makes them too tired to think really). But the key point about knowledge, and this is something I had in the back of my head when writing about the edits to Roald Dahl’s books (a decision now partially reversed), is that we need some sort of challenge if we are to evolve as individuals. As we are told in Fahrenheit 451: “We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real?”

This is not a new concept. In the sixth century, Gildas, who was a crusty old monk writing in post-Roman Britain, referred to how words, in his case vicious criticisms of power and hypocrisy, could be “darts” that lead to healing. He was writing about religious reform, but the point about using words to get under somebody’s skin (or simply into their heads) is the same.

This is Gildas. He is definitely judging you

It was, I’m sure, some subconscious filing quirk that had me put Fahrenheit 451 on top of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) on the shelves, given that my copies are not the same size (one of my usual filing systems). Both grim dystopias but in very different ways, with Orwell’s book putting more emphasis on the use of state surveillance and the abuse of overwhelming power, exemplified in particular by the re-editing of newspapers to match whatever current politics exists: “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

I will explore dystopian fiction more in the coming weeks and months as I shake this website into shape.