A new obsession...

"Knowledge is an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty." Jacob Bronowski

I am still (very slowly) recovering from this major lupus flare up - but the good news is that Ryan is pretty much completely recovered from his surgery! I am extremely proud of him because after a lifetime of smoking (he started at fourteen) and then vaping (back in 2016) he gave up vaping six weeks before the surgery - after reluctantly listening to advice from the registrar - and he hasn’t been tempted back.

I am still not writing - I am far too tired - but after losing interest altogether, my troublesome mind is now starting to generate an unending supply of ideas - at least three non fiction projects are jostling for position, and four genre/maybe series crime novels, and maybe one more serious, grown up kind of novel.

I’m not really capable of writing yet - but I have done some scribbling in my notebook.

I am back to reading, though! I’ve been on a binge of Nicci French novels, which I love. The latest Harriet Tyce - A Lesson in Cruelty - was just brilliant - maybe even better than Blood Orange, her first.

But the new obsession - that was completely unexpected.

True Crime

I haven’t read much true crime. Years ago, I read the Ann Rule book about Ted Bundy - fascinated by the fact that she’d actually known the serial killer. I haven’t even watched very much. I think The Staircase is the one I was most interested by. There was a BBC version years ago, and then I watched the one on Netflix.

Someone on the prosecution team was talking about Peterson’s novels

"Are any of them factual?" someone asks.

"Unfortunately they are all fictional novels," she says...

"Any of them in the first person?"

"Oh yes..." and delighted she reads out some excerpts from the first person narrator about how killing someone and getting away with it is a thrilling feeling...

"There's no doubt about it," she says. "That's him."

I guess now's a good time to learn to write in the third person....

(my comment on Facebook, 22nd June 2018)

So really it was a bit out of character for me to buy Helen Garner’s book, This House of Grief. In my defence, it was on offer for a mere 99 pence, and I can never resist a bargain.

But it was so compelling, I started working my way backwards and moved on to Joe Cinque’s Consolation. There’s a film too, but I decided it couldn’t possibly be better than the book.

Then I went back to The First Stone - which I had to wait for as it was only available in paperback.

Just as an example of how tired I still am, at one point I just forgot I was reading a paperback and lay down in bed and then was enraged that I couldn't backlight it, and make the text just a tad bigger

Anyway, I am wondering about trying some of her novels next - although I am currently reading some old favourite crime novels.

What do I love about these Helen Garner books?

The House of Grief is a heartbreaking story about a divorced man - a pretty ordinary guy - who on Father’s Day drives his three young sons into a dam, and he manages to get out of the car and swim to safety, while the little boys all drown.

Joe Cinque’s Consolation tells a strange story about a a group of students who sort of know one of their number plans to murder her boyfriend. None of them warn him or make any real effort to intervene. The whole situation unfolds over a a week, with two dinner parties, trips out to acquire Rohypnol to sedate him and heroin to inject and kill. He takes a long time to die and by the time his killer phones for an ambulance it’s too late.

First Stone examines the case of two students who claim that the Master of Ormond College at Melbourne University indecently assaulted them. It’s really an exploration of sexual politics and power at a time of social change.

Garner’s approach to writing about true crime

In each case, Garner attends court cases and tries to talk to everyone involved. She talks to judges and lawyers, the accused, the families and friends - to everyone who will talk to her.

She also shares her thoughts and feelings, and is clear sighted and compassionate.

Her writing up of the court cases is simple and clear, and she makes even quite convoluted stories easy to understand.

But for me what is exceptional is that she is both rational and clear sighted about the issues in general - and about human nature and its imperfections (including her own), and also emotional and empathic. She doesn’t just record what happens, what people say, she records her own reactions. What she finds convincing and what she doubts. And how she feels. Knowing all that allows the reader space to make their own judgements - and to see where our views differ from hers.

It’s that balance between the rational and the emotional which seems to me to be what makes these books so fascinating. She made room for nuance and ambiguity and acknowledges how much doubt there always is - how often it comes down to questions of “he said, she said,” any why we believe some people’s stories and not others.

In The House of Grief she shows us how at first Robert Farquharson’s family and his ex wife support him, apparently unable to believe he killed the children deliberately. His story was that he passed out and had a coughing fit. But his behaviour afterwards - not diving or trying to save the children, but leaving the scene so he could tell his wife - seemed off kilter. As readers we get to see the cases unfold through Garner’s eyes and like her, we are trying to divine the truth of what actually happened. But we are also getting to know many of the people involved. After a trial, an appeal and a retrial he was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment.

The trials take place over such a long span of time that introduces more sources of doubt. We all know memory is a strange beast. That memory can’t always be trusted, and that later, we start to remember our stories, or our tellings of our memories as if they they are fixed.

At one point she quotes Janet Malcolm, the acclaimed author of The Journalist and the Murderer -

“Jurors sit there presumably weighing evidence but in actuality they are studying character.”

That’s not an altogether unreasonable approach, but by virtue of our own experience, there are some people we are less likely to understand than others… A jury helps to mitigate that, I suppose.

Which takes us to Joe Cinque’s Consolation where the case is decided by a Judge - because the young law student who killed her boyfriend, Anu Singh, doesn’t deny the facts of the case - that she killed her boyfriend, but her defence rested on diminished responsibility due to a mental illness.

There seems to be little doubt that Singh had some kind of personality disorder - her parents had attempted to have her committed long before she killed Joe. So it becomes a more interesting question of how much difference it makes, and whether or not she knew it was wrong to kill him.

The strangest and most fascinating aspect of all this were the whole group of students who knew of her plans. A couple made some desultory attempts to take action to protect Joe - though no one seemed to consider telling him!. But mostly they seemed to think of her as an attention seeking drama queen who wasn’t actually intending to kill.

There was one student who didn’t think to go the police for fear of looking stupid - I can imagine that, I’ve known people with similar attitudes though not in such serious situations. Another who allowed himself to be fobbed off with vague promises.

Perhaps the most fascinating and disturbing character was Singh’s best friend, Madhavi Rao. Another law student, Rao was initially charged with conspiracy, and later with murder - and was acquitted.

And yet, she was definitely involved and didn’t have a mental health defence. She acquired the Rohypnol for Anu Singh. She went along with her to a dealer and helped source the heroin that killed Joe. She went to the flat while Joe was dying, saw him on the bed, and did nothing. No - not quite nothing. She said she was calling an ambulance and didn’t - she just ran away.

For me, Rao’s behaviour is _almost_ worse. How could she have let that happen? Maybe she was somehow in thrall to her friend. I guess narcissists are very manipulative and know how to take advantage of people’s weaknesses.

We are back to the Janet Malcolm quotation again, and the question of character. It’s fascinating following Garner’s close analysis of the trials and the transcripts, and the impossibility of reaching any real understanding of what happened and why and - to put it plainly - what the fuck are people like?

I have long been fascinated by the human ability to look the other way - how easy it can be to be wilfully blind. But this takes it to the next level.

One of the more redemptive parts of this book is the way Garner becomes close to the Cinque family - to Joe’s parents, his brother, some of his friends. She gains some insight into who Joe was, and yet, as she says, at the end of all, Joe is still dead.

The First Stone, the earliest of these books, is different in several respects.

There’s no suspected murder - just accusations of relatively mild sexual harassment. One of the accusers has a known grudge against the Master - she had been disciplined for wrecking her room. In addition, one of her accusations seemed very unlikely to be true for ordinary, practical reasons. The other accuser was more credible, and on the whole, the accusations do seem very plausible.

However, it was life changing for the Master. The students took their complaints to the police, and initially he was found guilty in court though it was overturned later. But he lost his job and apparently found it impossible to find another.

However, the students who made the accusations and their supporters completely shun Garner. They have no interest at all in presenting their side of the story.. In part this is because she had written to and talked to the accused Master and was deemed to have taken sides. She perseveres in attempting to get them to talk - reassuring them she hasn’t made her mind up and that she really wants to hear and understand their story - but to no avail.

Not being able to persuade them to talk, Garner discusses the issues with other women she knows, and also contemplates her own memories of conflicts of sex and power when she was young. This was really fascinating, because she has a completely different view of it all to modern feminism. She wonders why they went to the police. She also puts forward the case that a slap would have sufficed - or that the students should have used other ways to manage the situation. She also goes (in my view at least) a bit too far towards sympathising with the urges of an old man surrounded by attractive young women.

She does have an interesting insight when talking to some of the men in the case, academics and lawyers, how far she sometimes goes to protect the male ego. One example she gives is that one man totally misunderstood her question, and she just let him talk over her, and gave up on asking the question altogether rather than hurt his feelings - even though he was quite rude to her about the question he imagined she asked! I wonder how many of us do that? I sometimes did when I was younger, but I suspect now there are a few men who wish I did. Our ex-business partner especially. (Do not get me started). I reckon I am generally quite fair, but if someone tries to lord it over me, the gloves are soon off!

The issue often is the power differential, which so often even now aligns with sex. Of course, if all the power in the institution is held by those older men, then where else can female students turn? They have to go outside.

It did prompt a lot of thought about how much society has changed. It would be unusual now to suggest a slap would be a better way of dealing with it than a formal procedure.

After finishing the book, I read up around the case and was surprised to discover that there were other accusations against the Master, that were dropped, and other aspect of the book were fictionalised - possibly because the accusers wouldn’t talk to her.

It is a fascinating read - even though flawed - but I can’t help thinking that it would have been much better had Garner been able to talk to them - not least, because they might have made her interrogate her own views more thoroughly.

I’m probably going to have to read The First Stone again, now I know a bit more of the original case.

A personal digression

On the slapping question…

My mother-in-law, long gone now, was a PE teacher at a large comprehensive school. The headmaster was a well known personage and was awarded an honour for his services to education.

Here she is, with the family dogs - soon after Ryan was born and lot earlier than her knock-out punch.

Her brother once told us that on one occasion, she had punched the said headmaster, and knocked him to the ground. She continued in the school as a teacher, and the headmaster never did anything about it…

No one knows exactly how she was provoked - apparently she would never say. I reckon we can all make a pretty good guess.

This is the most writing I’ve done in months! I hope I’ll be back to writing here regularly soon, and that maybe I’ll feel ready to start writing one of my half-imagined projects soon.

In the meantime, I will be doing more reading, and watching some crap TV (I’m not kidding - my last binge was Suits!)

Recommendations for good novels or non fiction would be very welcome. If you’ve read something brilliant or thought provoking recently, do let me know!

Ann

(Please forgive any typos - I’m always a bit prone but it’s much worse when the lupus is flaring. I’ve gone through it a couple of times, but there’s always something slips through. Any absolute atrocities, please tell me!)