Facts in Fiction -- MARI HOWARD

 

Sociology in story form, Victorian style...

I’ve become a regular Archers fan. I’ve always known The Archers were there, and sometimes listened to the episodes. What made me a regular fan was when, four years ago, I spent 6 weeks in hospital: I’d been lent a tiny device, with earphones, and one 15-minute broadcast of The Archers caught me up out of that grim and peculiar place, where everyone was either ill or caring for the suffering, and there was no escape from the long dreary days and the impossible, noisy nights, into ‘real life’. The Archers back then led a bit more of a charmed life than they do now, and their antics, indoors, outdoors, in and out of relationships, pottering along with family and village crises which always seemed to resolve (bar Helen’s abusive relationship) lifted me right out of all that for 15 minutes twice a day.

Then I kind stuck with them: since when The Archers have continued to move further into a greater ‘real life’ and are battling cars more in tandem with life as it is lived in today’s Britain… Jobs are at risk, couples are fighting, misdemeanours have complicated outcomes, people may lose not only their own farm, or their cosy flat over the village shop - they may actually lose their wonderful close knit village community… just like the rest of us, time doesn’t stand still, and deeply traumatising things do happen, knock-on effects come down from government activities… So what am I writing about here?

In my books, I’ve been inspired by social issues, and their consequences. Because of my curiosity, in the Mullins Family Saga, I’ve created a family dynasty of life scientists, and with that goes along the necessary objectivity of the character of the medical researcher. And at the same time, the story examines the ‘Romeo and Juliet’ romance theme: family and home culture clash, as the characters consider committing to this very ‘other’ person. When this happens within the apparently safe space of a community of your own ethnicity, language, and apparent culture, and you find the other person’s home background is radically different, radically disapproving, radically closed.

Okay - nothing too wrong there?  Good drama for new fiction?

 I've recently published a short volume of stories I wrote ‘way back’ before Brexit, the Pandemic, the internet and social media, and the growing threat of and interest in, the climate crisis. These stories of ‘what was it like when things were normal?’ actually show us the mistakes we make as we long for ‘normal life’ post all the world drama of this spring.  Being a writer and a sociologist, I’ve set before the reader, back then,  a puzzle of problems relating to the concerns of their time. Mainly written during the 1990s, they’re concerned with such subjects as AIDS/HIV, same-sex couples seeking fertility solutions, GP fundholding (remember that?) and the possible consequences of GPs totally running their own business - as private practices, charging for services. And, with deceitful or forbidden relationships, hopes, longings, sadness and magical happenings. 

Perhaps, in fact, dealing with these so-called ‘facts’ the danger here might be that a writer is ‘cancelled’ for writing what we know but don’t know: we know part of it, we have facts (and facts are good), but we know as academics, from studies we’ve done. Without living these facts, how can we know?

 

I wonder if the writers of The Archers think of this, as they set up scenes of dramatic events, some which might be ‘triggers’ to the sensitivities of the unseen listeners out beyond the ether?  The Archers is maybe becoming closer to EastEnders – and in some ways that makes it more, rather than less, disturbing?  (A word I personally dislike, because of the violence implied - but I suppose the violence suits the feeling so we’ll let that go…) 

 

The Archers have gone from being ‘an everyday story of countryfolk’ (yes really - when I was a child that was the strap line), to a kind of ‘Everyman’ of the 21st century - whereas EastEnders has always been a bit more violent (or urban!) The Archers is no longer a ‘cosy’, Miss-Marple-type, programme.

Thinking about this recently, as a reader drew my attention to that odd occurrence: a story mirroring a very painful experience they'd had some years ago, I realised that although my books aren’t meaning to upset, to present trauma for its own sake, to those who’ve lived though some startling time that matches the story, the pictures in their minds are all too real. And that would be true for me in other circumstances. And this by a writer who has not set out to shock, but has intended to encourage looking at different sides of difficult issues, and how ideas and ways of life are changing.

So, don’t we all discover unpleasant sides of life, even as children, from reading novels? Dickens may be off the syllabus today, but it was very much there for decades, and I remember being totally put off all things French by A Tale of Two Cities, and the pathetic morbid feeling of encountering Miss Haversham’s self-inflicted isolation along with her crumbling wedding cake, or that horrific figure who leaps out from behind a gravestone, earlier in Great Expectations.

 

I found what I thought incredible, weird, distorted belief and practice of Christianity by Mr Murdstone (Dickens' David Copperfield), Maggie Tulliver’s aunts and uncles (George Eliot's Mill on the Floss) and Catholic schools (James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist). In an area that’d been safe for me, I had to learn and accept that deviance, cruelty, and distortion was not confined to ‘Godless’ people and places. Was that worse, or better, than hearing it on the News, or reading it in a newspaper?

 

In History we aren’t taught these things, which we could’ve been had History covered ordinary lives rather than only politics and wars… And possibly no pre-teens or young adolescents have to read Dickens and Eliot now - though cruelty and distortion continue, and in fiction (Dickens's novels replaced by Lord of the Flies comes to mind). The difference, of course, is whether we have encountered the events within our own experiences. 

Thinking all this through, I understand, maybe for the first time, why some people will prefer to read about the sleuthing done by Lord Peter Wimsey, or the antics of Bertie Wooster, rather than engage with my novels…

And my present reading?… Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, where are You? Contemporary life, thought-provoking fiction...