Truth through fiction
A fellow member of our writers’ group, John Boyle, came out with a neat quip on Monday evening. Another member, John Hellon, who is writing a mémoire, had written a fascinating piece about bohemian London in the mid-1960s. John H. met all sorts of interesting characters and we were encouraging him to flesh them out. ‘But then I’d have to invent stuff,’ said John H. ‘Ah, yes,’ said John B., ‘but it would be invention in the service of truth.’ Earlier this year I finished reading two books. The first, Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy, is a mind-blowing literary tour de force. Its subject matter, the bloodily violent activities of a group of scalp-hunters in the US-Mexico borderlands in the 1850s, is appalling, and though McCarthy based his work on a gang member’s account, there was surely a lot of invention involved. I read the second book, Tiger Force, as research for my own work. It is an entirely factual account about the war crimes committed in a Vietnamese valley in 1967 by a platoon of US soldiers who just got completely out of control. It is a sort of chillingly true Lord of the Flies for grown-ups. It very strongly echoed Blood Meridian, even down to mass scalp-taking (together with other grisly trophies). And it was confirmation of McCarthy’s implicit argument that when men lose their moral compass they are capable of the worst acts of barbary. So, to echo John B., McCarthy did indeed invent in the service of an unpalatable truth. That truth was perhaps best summed up by the late, great Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in Cancer Ward; ‘The line separating good from evil runs not between states, not between classes – it runs through the heart of each and every one of us.’
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