Writerly Dithering

I’ve been continuing to work on my stories regarding the further adventures of the criminals Malartic and Lampourde, liberated from the page of Theophile Gautier’s 1863 novel Captain Fracasse, and I’ve started to hit a slight stumbling block.

The thing is, I actually think they (and the ideas I have for stories not yet written) are fairly good.  Maybe even publishably good.  This has thrown me into a couple of dithers.

First off is the old question of perspective.  I’ve written before about my considerable personal preference for fiction written in the first person, but so far the stories I’ve written about Malartic and Lampourde have been written in the third person, following the style of Captain Fracasse.  I can’t help but wonder if they wouldn’t be better reworked into the first person, probably from the point of view of Lampourde, whose view point I lean towards even when writing in the third person.  I could couch them as stories being told by an elderly Lampourde, sitting in a tavern a la Brigadier Gerard, or as memoires written by (or for) him a la Flashman.  I’ve said in a previous post that I’d like to do for the two villains what George MacDonald Fraser did for Harry Flashman, but turning the stories into the recollections of one of the main characters seems an homage too far.

Next, although the stories are fairly good, do I really want to be recycling someone else’s pre-existing characters?  They’re long out of copyright, and MacDonald Fraser certainly had no problems recycling Harry Flashman in this way, but might it not be better to create my own, and maybe even shift the setting?  I once entertained some ideas of writing a novel about a pair of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser-esque criminals in an alternative history Georgian London (using my Anno Geometrica world, for those familiar with it), and what I’ve already written on Malartic and Lampourde could be quite easily converted to this.  The alternative historical timeline and existence of magic-like phenomena in the setting could also possibly make it more interesting (at least from a publishing viewpoint) than something merely historical.  I could also introduce plots and/or characters from the Nano novel I wrote based on this setting, about a pair of Bow Street Runners.  And of course, if I did convert the stories to these characters and setting, what perspective would I write them in?

The thing is, I really like the punctilious, verbose and quixotic swordmaster Jacquemin Lampourde, and his more cynical, cunning and bizarre-looking colleague the Chevalier Malartic.  I love the approach they take to their criminality.  Superficially, they’re similar to Arturo Perez Reverte’s Captain Alatriste, being hired blades in a crowded 17^th century city.  However, Perez Reverte’s noir-ish, gritty anti-hero is a soldier by profession, and his criminal activities are very much something he is forced to resort to due to circumstance.  There is no hint that Malartic and Lampourde’s criminal career is anything they resorted to.  Instead it is their calling and vocation.  Like Alatriste, they are upfront about the fact that they are murderers and footpads, but unlike Alatriste, they take a genuine pride in the fact. 

Alatriste is professional, but in a utilitarian, workman-like way, taking no joy in the violence that he inflicts.  He effectively prostitutes his blade, and knows that it’s beneath him to do so.  He does it because he’s good at it, and the alternative is to become a beggar.  Malartic and Lampourde on the other hand (the latter especially) are artists and craftsmen who take great satisfaction in their work, even when all they’re doing is running a man through in a darkened alleyway, but without any trace of brutality or sadism.  They do it because they consider it beneath them to do any kind of manual labour, or earn an honest living in any other way, while seeing violent crime as an honourable profession, as long as it is conducted within certain (very loose) bounds.

Writing them, with all of their pride, swagger and moral ambiguity, is considerable fun.  Added to this, I’ve discovered that the version of Captain Fracasse that I’ve read is actually (and to a great extent, thankfully) abridged, but it means that it left out quite a bit of description regarding Lampourde’s dwelling (which is much more squalid than I would have thought) and of the Crowned Radish tavern (which is just as squalid as I thought), as well as fuller physical descriptions of both Malartic and Lampourde, and accounts of conversations between them that were almost completely cut from the version I read.  Malartic is revealed to have had a considerable classical education, and his clothes are described as having once been incredibly elegant, both of which hint at a background which is not at all discussed, and leaves me considerable scope for exploration.  These have all led to slight revisions of the stories I’ve already posted here, and to what I’ve got down of another couple of stories.

I think that for the moment, I will continue writing about them, and see how it goes.  I have one particularly good idea that won’t work for any other setting, in which I will vaguely attempt to do to The Three Musketeers what Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead did to Hamlet, and hopefully it will be fairly entertaining.

Watch this space.

Am I Charlie?

For the past two weeks, most of my spare time has been taken up by the deeply unpleasant business of moving house.  We’ve only moved a few hundred yards, but nonetheless the process of packing, moving, unpacking and cleaning has been neither brief nor easy.  (And, indeed, we only got the internet back yesterday!)

This is all by way of an excuse for not having written a new blog post for a little while, especially given the events of the past couple of weeks.  Having pontificated previously on the question of free speech, offense, blasphemy and religious toleration, I thought I’d better weigh in on this one too, and let you all know the Important Thoughts I’ve had on the subject.

Firstly of course, I should restate my absolute belief that anyone should have the right to say anything to anyone, and not face violence, persecution or prosecution.  If we wish to have freedom of speech, we have to accept that people are free to speak, whether they are racists, fascists, lunatics or even people who disagree with me on any subject whatsoever.  People have the right to be as offensive, crude, vulgar, blasphemous or generally unpleasant as they can possibly be, and do so without fear of violent or legal reprisal.  Of course, they also have to accept that others can act in exactly the same way towards them.

However, as Chesterton once said, “To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.”  I believe absolutely that you should have the right to be offensive.  I would defend it to the death.  That does not mean that I think you actually should be offensive.  The cartoons published by the French magazine Charlie Hebdo were offensive, and deliberately so.  They have every right to publish them.  I just don’t think that they should have.  Not out of fear, you understand.  If there was any suggestion that someone was not saying or publishing a thing purely out of fear of attack, then I would strongly suggest that they say it or publish it, and I would be happy to publically support them, if only because the kind of people who resort to intimidation and threat are perhaps the only sort of people who actually do need belittling and insulting.

No, I think that they should have refrained from publishing those cartoons for the simple fact that they were insulting.  I do not like having my beliefs and opinions insulted.  Challenged, yes.  Having them challenged is absolutely vital, but insulted?  No.  It’s the issue I take with much of the aggressive, evangelical atheism I see online.  Much of it seems to be far more interested in insulting religious belief than in challenging it in a sensible, respectful (but nonetheless challenging) manner, and this is helpful to no-one whatsoever.  Satirise it by all means.  Make fun of it, laugh at it, but stop short of direct insult if you want the conversation to continue.  Charlie Hebdo might hold itself up as an icon of free speech, and in a faintly unpleasant, distinctly canary-like way I suppose it is, but to me it also represents the abuse of free speech to deliberately upset others in a way that is completely non-constructive.  If anything, it’s just entrenched people’s views, widened divisions, added grist to the extremist mill and generally made things worse. 

In a way, I actually think the cartoon of Mohammed printed in the first issue after the attack was more justified, since it acted as a signal that the magazine would not be swayed by violence or threats of violence, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t think the initial cartoon can be justified by a mere appeal to the principal of free speech.

The BBC (yeah, yeah, I know) ran an article about people getting fired for posting racist comments online.  Well, which are we going to have?  Do we want free speech, in which Charlie Hebdo can publish offensive cartoons, or do we want limits on what one can say, even as private individuals online?  Should people be racist?  Of course not.  Should they be ostracised or, preferably, reasoned with and educated?  Very much so.  Should they lose their job (assuming of course that they are not acting in an official manner, or on a company blog or twitter feed etc, or otherwise representing the company when they make the post) over their (unpleasant, offensive) personal opinions?  My opinion on holocaust denial is the same.  Historians who deny the holocaust should be publically identified as very poor historians, and their scholarship and credentials rightly scrutinised and doubted, but should it be illegal?  Should it be against the law to hold an erroneous opinion?  I believe not.  We cannot have it both ways, and only maintain the right to be offensive when it’s not us being offended.

If we actually believe in the principle of free speech, and we certainly claim to, then we have to accept that it applies to everybody equally, irrespective of their position or opinion. 

Am I Charlie?  No, I am not, nor do I want to be, thank you.  However, I will defend to the death your right to be Charlie if that’s what you think is right.

Natural Religion?

Just before Christmas, this article appeared on the BBC website, on the subject of whether or not religion will ever disappear, given the increasing number and proportion of atheists in the world.  Overall it’s a very interesting article, but perhaps inevitably I have a few problems with it.  The author is a dedicated science writer, and to me the whole article reads like it was written by a fairly committed atheist, or even anti-theist, who is trying very hard to write a fair-minded article, but not quite succeeding.

The article treats ‘religion’ purely from a utilitarian, evolutionary perspective.  It discusses religion as a source of comfort, especially in periods of crisis or hardship, and a device for ensuring social cohesion in low-resource societies.  That religion provides these things is entirely true, but at no point does she approach, or even refer to religion as an intellectual construct for attempting to make sense of our physical universe and the more ethereal philosophical questions of its existence.  Instead she describes it as a quirk of human psychological development an in-built tendency to assume agency and intention where none is present.

My main problem with the article though is the strong inference (unless I’m just being incredibly over-sensitive and inferring things that aren’t there) that religion is essentially intellectually lazy and cowardly.  Rather than quote large chunks of the article, you’ll find most of this under the section entitled ‘Hard habits to break’.  The writer claims that because humans have an in-built, evolved tendency towards religiosity, atheists have to consciously fight against this.  She quotes; “With education, exposure to science and critical thinking, people might stop trusting their intuitions.  But the intuitions are there.”

Unsurprisingly, the implication that education, science and critical thinking are anathema to religion is one that I have very little time for.  The article goes on to suggest that because religiosity is a natural tendency, it’s easy while science is more cognitively difficult, even noble to pursue in the face of ignorant but powerful instinct.  It describes religion as ’the path of least resistance’.  I’ve posted before about the intellectual snobbery found in some atheists, and the condescending, self-satisfied attitude of ‘Well, whatever you need to get you through the day I suppose, but obviously I don’t need any such psychological crutch to cling to.’  I wonder if we’re not encountering a self-perpetuating myth that properly educated, intelligent people aren’t religious, therefore people dismiss religious ideas because they want to be thought of as educated and intelligent, meaning that those people considered educated and intelligent are the ones that have echewed religion.

Believing, as I do, in evolution, I am very well prepared to believe that we have evolved in ourselves a natural tendency towards religiosity.  Where I stop though is at the assumption that therefore this must mean that religion is false.  Religion may be an artificial psychological construction, but then, so is absolutely everything else.  After all, philosophically there are no verifiable things at all, only sensations.  If we’re not careful, we can drift into the seas of ’if one hand claps in a forest, but no-one’s around to hear it, does it still kill two birds in the bush?’ but, for example, in reality nothing is ’hard’ or ’warm’ or ’yellow’.  They simply are, and it is only when aspects of them are sensed by receptor nerves and the impulses sent by these nerves are interpreted by a mind can they be described using artificial psychological constructs designed to allow that mind to make sense of its surroundings, such as ’hard’, ’warm’ or ’yellow’.  Does that mean that an object isn’t, within our psycho-sensual framework, hard or warm or yellow?  Of course not.

An even better example is that of hunger.  I can tell you that I am hungry right now.  My wife will tell you that I am hungry all the time, but as I have pointed out on numerous occasions, this isn’t true, since sometimes I’m asleep.  But this merely highlights my example.  After all, technically, I am never hungry.  It would be more accurate to say that I feel hungry.  Hunger isn’t a real thing, it is merely a sensation.  If I'm asleep, I can't feel hungry, therefore it would not be accurate to describe myself as hungry, even if, as is alleged, my stomach rumbles in my sleep.  Hunger’s a very useful sensation, and has very sensibly been evolved to persuade us that it would be an excellent idea to go and eat something to stop yourself from dying.

Hunger is a naturally evolved, technically artificial, neurological cattleprod that drives us into certain behaviour.  Religion is, to my mind at least, exactly the same.  And just because I know that really there’s no such thing as hunger, that it’s something that my ancestors developed to give me an excuse for having elevenses, doesn’t mean that I must assume that there’s no such thing as food.

We evolved eyes to receive light, and that was very useful indeed, but the light was there before we could see it, or even had a concept of it.  We evolved ears to receive sound, but the air was oscillating long before.  We evolved hunger, and there were already things to eat.  We evolved a pyschological tendency to religion, and God was already there, waiting for us to encounter Him.

I’ll finish, as is my wont, by quoting C.S. Lewis:  "If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world."

Of Sow’s Ears and Silk Purses Part 2: Through Heartbreak to Hope

This week has seen two high-profile, tragic incidents in the news.  First the hostage crisis and 16 hour siege in Sydney in which 2 people were killed, and then the attack on the school in Pakistan, in which 132 children and 9 teachers were killed, and 125 others were wounded.  Both of these were, at least ostensibly, religiously motivated actions, although I suspect that political motivations were just as significant, and it seems as though in the latter event, revenge played a greater part than either.

Both were carried out by Muslims, the first by a lone individual, the second by a group acting as part of the Pakistani branch of the Taliban.  There has been very little positive news regarding Muslims making headlines recently, and as a result it’s increasingly easy to immediately think of Muslims when one hears the word ‘terrorist’ or ‘extremist’.  As a result, the Muslim community, both here in the UK, and across the world hardly needs more bad publicity, and the vast moderate majority must be despairing, as well as shocked and outraged by what, certainly in the second case at least, can only be called atrocities.

But on top of this must be a great sense of apprehension, even fear.  After all, when Lee Rigby was murdered by Muslim fanatics in the UK, there was a surge of anti-Muslim feeling, with mosques vandalised and Muslims verbally abused in the streets.  It will be sad, but ultimately unsurprising if these recent events don’t cause similar reactions in various places.

It is incredibly heartening then to see that people have already taken steps to ensure that this doesn’t happen, or at least try and limit it as much as possible.  In Australia, #i’llridewithu trended on Twitter.  The idea was for people to offer to accompany visibly identifiable Muslims on public transport to help protect them from any abuse that might be triggered by the events in Sydney.  To what extent this has worked, or was even necessary I don’t know, but it shows a very encouraging response, a level of understanding rather than scapegoating or generalising.  It would have been good if such a thing had occurred here in the aftermath of the Lee Rigby murder.  I hope that next time, and I fear that there will be many next times, something similar will be seen.

In India, the traditional rival and foe of Pakistan, and between whom there is a large amount of very bad feeling which has festered for decades, #IndiawithPakistan began trending on Twitter, as people in India responded to the attack on the school with an outpouring of sympathy and compassion.  It is far too much to hope that this tragedy might lead to a greater reconciliation between the two countries, but it does at least emphasise the fact that people are not their governments, and that historical enemies can be united, albeit briefly, by grief.

These acts were acts of evil, but as is often the case, some good has come of them.  If it can be sustained and repeated, if forgiveness and understanding can replace bitterness and vengefulness, then much will have been achieved.  They may seem like small, insignificant things in the face of massacres and killings, but it is the many tiny, individually insignificant acts of kindness, forgiveness and love that counterbalance the monolithic evils of the world.  Better that they’d never happened at all, but if evil must occur, and I believe that in our world it must always be possible, then we must strive to ensure that at least as much good comes out of it too.

Last Sunday, before either of these events occurred, the church I attend printed the following prayer in its notices as the Prayer of the Week:

Through Heartbreak to Hope

The assignment is clear:

Bind up the broken, proclaim life restored.

Always be joyful!

Sing a song of hope;

Offer it to the world regardless of ears to hear it.

Lord, keep me fixed on the coming light,

Just visible through the haze of my tears.

Lord, clothe me in hope,

The garment of splendour for a heavy heart.

Amen.