Today's guest blog is by Joan Brady who was the first woman to win the Whitbread Book of
the Year Award (now Costa) with Theory of
War. It also won the
prestigious French Prize called the Prix
du Meilleur Livre Étranger. She
lives in Oxford but was born in California and danced with the New York City
Ballet in her twenties and also the San Francisco Ballet. Her novel Death
Comes for Peter Pan was short-listed for the Orange Prize. Her latest novel The Blue Death is out now.
I’ve been afraid all my life. Death, things that go thump in the night,
performances on stages: that’s only the beginning. You name it, I’m scared of it. People like me learn to control their faces
and keep the shameful secret hidden. So
when the Chief Enforcement Officer of the Devon’s South Hams District Council
started in on the police caution – ‘You do not have to say anything, but it may
harm your defence…’ – he was annoyed at how calm I seemed.
My crime doesn’t matter.
I had a brilliant lawyer; he forced a very determined Council to drop
the charges, but they sure as hell taught me some lessons before they did. Fifteen times those bastards summoned me to
Magistrates court in Totnes. The first
time I showed up – suit, high heels, a neat and tidy lady – I remember looking
at my ill-clad fellow felons and thinking, ‘Well, they’re all guilty, look at them, slouching against the walls and
glowering.’ Then I presented myself to
the court.
And then I
understood.
You want to know why villains don’t repent? Courts are about humiliation, that’s
why. Forget pretty sentiments: you’re
guilty until proven innocent, and it takes less than five minutes to realize
that. If you have any spirit, you end up
full of hate. By the time I got home
from that very first appearance, all I wanted to do was kill people.
But I don’t know how to do that; don’t really want to do it
either – not with my own hands. So I
started writing thrillers instead. My
hero? A glowering felon full of hate,
but big, strong, young, male: all the things I’m not. Here was somebody who could do my killing for
me. I called him David Marion – my David – and I sent him against my Goliaths, the courts, the town
worthies, the local politicians, anybody in power. I never cared much about politics before
this, but the way I figure it now, it’s the school playground all over
again. The big kids beat up the little
kids. The skinny kids torment the fat
kids. The prettiest kid gets to run the
show. The only immune one is the tough
kid, who slouches against the wall and can beat the shit out of any of them.
When the big kids, the skinny kids and the pretty kid grow
up, they’re the ones who have the deciding say on real issues just as they did
when we were six years old, and the rest of us playground riffraff itch to show
them a thing or two. No wonder Christ
reserved revenge for himself. It’s
fun. In The Blue Death I take a whack at a representative clutch of bullies
living in a town called Springfield.
It’s a real place. My husband grew
up there; he said Springfield killed people if they had talent. He got out, made a success of his life and
should never have ended up dying there: a cruel death, very much in tune with a
place that kills its gifted. I see it as
one of those cold, provincial boroughs, buried deep in Middle Western corn
fields, surrounded by great swoops of highways, desperate to make to the gossip
columns in St. Louis and Chicago. I know
I’ve got all kinds of things wrong, but years ago I asked thriller writer
Desmond Bagley how he could write about exotic cities in Asia and Africa when
he’d never been to them. He shrugged and
said, ‘Most towns are alike.’
So I’ve taken Bagley at his word and fleshed out my
half-imaginary Springfield with the jealous and creaking social structure of
all the other provincial towns I’ve run across.
Springfield is the capital of Illinois, and the bullies who
inhabit it are politicians and powerbrokers gathered from hundreds of miles
around to wheel and deal. Huge washes of
money disappear under tables in every restaurant and get hung out to dry in
every law firm.
In The Blue Death,
the big money has its eyes fixed on Springfield’s public water supply. Most of the rest of us don’t think about
water much, except to gripe about cost and the occasional summer shortage. Serious water problems belong in TV newscasts
about third-world poor, who’ve been at war over it for centuries. My Springfield learns the hard way that any
people, anywhere in the world, can find themselves facing the threat at its
most desperate level.
This isn’t just a writer’s fancy. When I arrived in England 40 years ago, it
was the green and pleasant land right out of poetry. Now it’s almost as brown as California, where
I was born. There just isn’t enough
water anymore, and multinational corporations based all over the world are
trembling with anticipation of the billions of dollars, pounds, euros, and yen
to be made. These days, I live in Oxford
where the supplier is Thames Water. Once
upon a time Thames water belonged to the people who used it, to you and
me. Twenty years ago, private business
stole it right out from under our noses.
They kept the name Thames Water to make us feel comfortable, but ten
years later, they sold this most British-sounding of companies to a German
conglomerate called RWE. A few years
after that, the Germans sold it to an Australian multinational. The Spanish bought a chunk from the
Australians, and now the Chinese have signed a cheque for £500 million of it. Who knows where decisions are made about
water purity, to say nothing of supplies?
Even the profit goes
offshore.
In The Blue Death,
this theft from citizens is about to happen in Springfield, Illinois. The mayor is doing his damnedest to sell out
to a multinational shark, and to his surprise he meets resistance. The fight gets dirty. The weather behaves badly, and Springfield’s
citizens find themselves facing not just real drought – standing in lines to collect water from tankers like poor Somalis
on TV – but plague and military
occupation as well.
It’s the plague that gives me my title. Water-borne diseases cause severe
dehydration; the blood literally congeals in the veins and turns white-skinned
people blue. Cholera is one such disease
– though not the disease of my title – and on the net you’ll find drawings of
Victorian victims in London whose bodies are daintily water-coloured in
blue. The blue doesn’t show on dark
skinned people like the victims of the recent epidemic in Haiti; that’s the
only reason we’re not familiar with it.
As for the people I’m subjecting to these disasters, most of
them are pure imagination. The hard bit
is finding the key to each. There’s a
story about Laurence Olivier, trying to catch hold of some role – I can’t
remember what – and having a hard time of it.
Then he picked up a moustache, put it on his upper lip and, lo, he knew
who his character was. For my hero
David, it’s the powerful shoulder muscles, the boxer’s slight slouch. The Springfield mayor? Something to do with his hair; it doesn’t lie
flat on the back of his neck.
The exception is the ancient matriarch of the Freyl
clan. She’s modelled on my sister-in-law
who arrived in Springfield, the fresh young bride of its most eligible
bachelor, to find a wasteland where the men boozed and the women
despaired. She set out to change
things. When she died, the town had a
University and practically every other cultural nicety a capital should have. That takes somebody tough as nails, but there
was humour and compassion as well as evangelism. When doctors prescribed antidepressants for
me, she said – and this despite her many accomplishments – ‘Never mind, Joanie,
I’ve spent my life taking antidepressants and looking for a parking space.’
But going back to school bullies – and she was one of them –
what about the tough kid slouching against the wall of the playground? Kids like that usually end up in prison. That’s where David Marion went when he was only
15 years old and where he stayed for nearly 2 decades. More writer’s revenge: I named that prison in
honour of the South Hams District Council.
I put it south of Chicago, Illinois, once known as the ‘hog capital of
the world’. People all over America send
out Christmas hams from there.
The concept of a prison is a centuries-old nightmare
reaching its apotheosis in America, where many prisons are privately
owned. Many British prisons are private
enterprises now too. When I first heard
about this, I thought it sounded like a lousy way to make money, but the
profits turn out to be very promising.
In both countries the state pays a fee per prisoner. A slice off the top has to go in bribes for
the inspectors. After that, money heads
right for the bank. Feed prisoners for
less than you feed the dogs that guard them.
Break guards’ unions and pay the scabs badly. Hire as few of them as you can get away
with. Minimal maintenance. Minimal medical care. Minimal everything that can be made
minimal. And then just think, you have
all these functional men and women: why waste the labour? Get government contracts to build more
prisons, and use the prisoners to build them.
If they refuse to work, increase their sentences, put them in solitary,
deny canteen privileges. Profit upon
profit, this time from old-fashioned slavery and slave quarters to go with
it. When they’ve finished building the
prisons that will hold them, hire them out to private enterprise. There are shoes, jeans, computer parts to
make, streets to clean, telemarketing to do.
Learning skills? Forget it. Outside, these jobs go to immigrant women.
So in The Blue Death,
prison labour builds a vast canal to line corporate pockets by shipping water
all the way down from Canada.
This kind of exploitation is a logical follow-up of what
began in the courtroom and what continues in the prison block. A slave is a piece of property like a cow or
a dishwasher, something to be worked for a slave owner’s profit and for no
other reason on earth. The debauched
pleasure of forcing such absolute depersonalization on another human being
who’s fallen into your power: this is what spirited defendants see in the faces
of the court.
No wonder they hate.
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