Is the story all there is?

James Mossman

James Mossman, Rebels in Paradise, 1961
Nicholas Wright, The Reporter, 2007

A former MI6 agent becomes a brilliant journalist and film maker, famed for his aggressive interviewing style on Panorama, the BBC current affairs program. In mid-career he kills himself, leaving a note: ‘I can’t bear it any more, though I don’t know what “it” is.’

I discovered James Mossman while researching Indonesia’s civil war (1958 to 1961). Mossman covered the conflict, and wrote a book about it: Rebels in Paradise. He wasn’t content to stay in Jakarta attending Sukarno’s press conferences. Instead he made his way through Sumatra to link up with the rebel forces and report on the government’s invasion of rebel territory. The book is lively, insightful and often funny.

He also reported from Saigon, and was deeply affected by what he saw there. Later, in a Panorama interview, he attacked British Prime Minister Harold Wilson for supporting America on Vietnam. This, plus another interview in which he questioned the Prime Minister of Singapore about human rights abuses, resulted in his transfer to arts programs. Listen to his Vladimir Nabokov interview here – the meeting of two remarkable minds.

Mossman was a handsome, charismatic man who made a deep impression on those who knew him. When Nicholas Wright was writing The Reporter, a play about Mossman, he spoke to Mossman’s friends and colleagues: “Many described his passion for truth, but he also emerged as a raconteur whose stories were packed with exaggerations.” Young researchers at the BBC “couldn’t talk highly enough of the way he brought them on.” But the most common factor, according to Wright, was a sense of distance. “He was different from the rest of us … There was a shell that one couldn’t penetrate.”

Nicholas Wright’s play is a detective story that asks, “What is ‘it’ in the suicide note?” The play begins with Mossman in his house in Norfolk in 1971, holding the note, wondering what “it” is. We then travel back: the trauma of Saigon; Mossman’s lover Louis Hanssen, who died in 1968 of an accidental overdose; the Panorama interviews; film-making in San Francisco; and his intense friendship with the novelist Rosamond Lehmann.

[Spoiler alert!] In the end the search for “it” is abandoned by the fictionalised Mossman. “Was this just another spy story, one where layer after layer is stripped away in search of the truth, only to reveal a question that can never be answered? … Or are the layers the true reality? Is the centre empty? Is the story all there is?”

In his Seymour Biography Lecture, Robert Dessaix (see previous post – link here) reaches a similar conclusion: “A well-told story of a life spirals like coils of smoke around an emptiness, giving shape to that void.” Story-telling is a way to “stave off nothingness.”

Is the story all there is?

[Note: I purchased the text of The Reporter through Abebooks, and have not seen the play itself. Rebels in Paradise is also available through Abebooks.]

Pushing Against the Dark

As a nobody, Robert Dessaix says, the facts about his life “were hardly worth chronicling for their own sake. The public would have to be seduced into reading about my life by something else.” To be worth reading, a memoir or biography of a person who is not a celebrity or historical figure must be a work of art, in which the reader is coaxed inside another’s realm, and kept there, by artful storytelling, by something that seems like magic but is really sleight of hand.

In his Seymour Biography Lecture Dessaix is at his bewitching best, weaving the stories behind his books with insights into what makes a memoir or biography compelling. A well-told story of a life spirals like coils of smoke around an emptiness, giving shape to that void. As he writes, Dessaix sees himself as “pushing against the dark” (E M Forster’s phrase about Virginia Woolf’s language), “not just the dark that certain hidden selves [are] crouched in, but a more powerful dark  … [that] my gleaming spirals circle around. The act of writing is an act of resistance against the mortal condition … in the sense of deepening and magnifying the lived moment while writing. … I write to stave off time, to stave off nothingness.”

The lecture is reprinted in the April 2012 edition of Australian Book Review. Don’t miss it.

I’m also looking forward to reading Dessaix’s new Book, As I Was Saying, reviewed by Jane Goodall in the March edition of Australian Book Review.

The Dangerous Power of Stories

Paul Torday, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, 2007. The film based on the novel, directed by Lasse Hallström, is currently in cinemas.

I was hooked by the first chapter of Salmon Fishing in the Yemen. I felt an immediate affection for Fred, a fisheries scientist who is portrayed with gentle humour, and I laughed at the satire aimed at the politicians and bureaucrats who are about to liven up Fred’s dull life. The humour and satire is cleverly conveyed using only emails between the main characters.

But as I read on the hook worked loose. The novel consists solely of documents, collected as part of an investigation: emails, reports, Fred’s diary, transcripts of interrogations, extracts from Hansard, even old-fashioned letters. This sometimes works well, as in the emails, but in order to tell the story Torday includes information in other documents in such a contrived way that it was impossible to suspend my disbelief.

But that’s a minor problem. What I found most disturbing were the premises underlying the book. It’s a comic novel, goodies versus baddies. The goodies are Sheikh Muhammad, a wealthy Yemeni who has a vision of bringing salmon fishing to his country; Harriet, the Sheikh’s London agent; and Fred. The baddies are the politicians, bureaucrats, and al-Qaeda operatives, with the main villain being the PM’s press secretary, male in the book, but female in the film, brilliantly portrayed by Kristin Scott Thomas.

The baddies are figures of fun (incompetent or cynical members of a Tony Blair style government, or bumbling terrorists), but the three goodies are likeable, well drawn characters whom we are expected to take seriously. The Sheikh is a charismatic wise man from the East, who tells Fred: “You need to learn to have faith, Dr Alfred. We believe that faith is the cure that heals all troubles … Faith comes before hope, and before love.”

Later, as the project approaches its conclusion, Fred has a key epiphany, and understands that the Sheikh was telling him to believe in belief itself. “I did not know, or for the moment care, what exactly it was I had to believe in. I only knew that belief in something was the first step away from believing in nothing.”

One might expect such inane clichés to be as much subject to satire as are the spin doctor and the Blairite government, but not at all – Paul Torday means it. He makes the need for belief the “message” of the book, by portraying it as the force that transforms Fred. Yet it is also a force that can transform people into fundamentalists and terrorists.

The old city district of Sana'a (capital of Yemen) is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Photo by Ammar Abd Rabbo via Flickr.

More disturbing still is the way the country of Yemen has been used – reduced to the figure of a lovable Sheikh of such enormous wealth that he can spend untold millions remodelling the landscape to achieve a dream everyone agrees is impossible. In one of the poorest countries of the world, how did the Sheikh come by his wealth? In creating this character so that we love him, the novelist makes us accessories to injustice.

For all that, it’s a good story, told better in the film than in the book. The screenwriter did not need to jump the hurdle the novelist erected for himself by solely using documents to tell the tale. The film is also more satisfying because of several major changes to the story. But the Sheikh remains a charismatic wise man talking about faith, and there is still the sense that the people of Yemen have been shabbily used.

It is not that writers should ethics check their work. Literature cannot be used to promote a moral purpose. But good stories told well can be so powerful that we may not notice when they excuse injustice, peddle shallow sentiment and glib platitudes, or even caricature a whole country.

How to Solve the World’s Trickiest Problems

Climate change is not about the weather - it's about climate. Photo: Ann Alcock

Eric Knight, Reframe: How to Solve the World’s Trickiest Problems

We look at the world through blinkers, says Eric Knight. We see only what attracts our attention, the bright, shiny objects. To solve complex political or economic problems we need to reframe, to bring more of the world into focus.

Thus the Global Financial Crisis happened because traders and analysts focussed on the immediate past rather than long term data. The invasion of Iraq was a disaster because the US goal was to kill terrorists rather than to tackle the networks, grievances or insurgencies that give rise to terrorism.

The hardest problems to resolve are multidimensional and Knight devotes most of the book to one such issue: climate change. As a Rhodes scholar at Oxford he studied the economics of climate change for his doctorate. He considers three dimensions:

Dimension 1: The debate between believers and sceptics often focusses on what the weather is doing, with both sides pointing to weather events to support their arguments. This is wrong and counterproductive, says Knight. Climate change is not about the weather, it’s about climate, and changes in climate are barely perceptible over a decade. If you point to a heat wave, sooner or later the other side will trump you with a cold snap. We should reframe the problem from weather to climate.

Dimension 2: As long as the issue is framed as a choice between belief and scepticism, it cannot be solved.  Instead we should look at who has expertise or authority in the spheres of science and politics. Scientists are qualified to speak about the world, but not to tell us how to respond to their findings. The rest of us do not have the skills to judge the science, but we have the authority, through the democratic process, to decide what to do about it.

The vast majority of climate scientists have concluded that, with a high level of probability, human-made carbon emissions are contributing to climate change. But no scientific conclusion ever reaches certainty, and this is no exception. It is beyond reasonable doubt, but not certain. Thus when the head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says there is no more room for doubt on climate change, when Obama’s science advisor calls sceptics “heretics”, and when scientists dictate what should be done about their findings, they politicise the science. The democratic process is also distorted from the other side by concentrations of corporate power such as the fossil-fuel industry.

Framing climate change as a Hollywood-style battle between belief and scepticism misuses science. We need to reframe the problem to respect both science and democracy, and seek “the right balance between delegating power to scientists who understand the meaning of carbon emissions and giving the wider public the freedom to form their own judgement on how best to deal with climate change” – even if that wider public freely chooses to live in a more dangerous world.

Dimension 3: If the scientific findings are accepted, what is the best way forward? Here the problem is often framed as a choice between the environment and the economy. This leads some to focus on the greed and waste of material consumption, “the tyranny of unnecessary things in our lives”, and to advocate reversing economic growth. Knight presents an alternative view: cutting consumption may be a good thing to do for social and moral reasons, but this is a different issue from climate change. Instead we should reframe to focus on innovation and entrepreneurship. It could then be seen as a technical rather than a moral issue, similar to challenges we’ve successfully managed in the past.

The Hedgehog and the Fox. Drawing by JoyceCL via Flickr

In Prosperity Without Growth (my review here), Tim Jackson argues that a continually expanding economy that depends on carbon emissions collides with the limits of a finite planet, causing climate change, and that this cannot be solved by technological innovation because such innovation would need to occur many times faster than it has in the past. Eric Knight examines this argument, and says that by using global averages Jackson misses the complexity of the world energy sector, thus understating the technological transition towards lower carbon intensity, just as earlier prophets of doom missed the demographic transition.

While there is little new in Reframe, the book is well written, an easy, quick and enjoyable read with all concepts clearly explained. My only criticism is that Knight sometimes over-elaborates, as he does in a longwinded section on the history of experts who wrongly predicted eco-catastrophe, beginning with Malthus.

In the book’s conclusion, Knight uses Isaiah Berlin’s description of hedgehogs and foxes (the origin of this blog’s name) to illustrate his approach. Hedgehogs use a single, unifying idea, focus their magnifying glass on one part of the world only, and believe they are right. Foxes continually shift their perspective, seeing many different ways to solve a problem, never certain they have the right answer, always searching for a better one. Knight runs with the foxes.

The Don Chee (White-robe Nuns) of Cambodia

The Khmer Rouge forbade Buddhism, defrocked monks and destroyed pagodas or used them as granaries, prisons or execution sites. After the regime was overthrown, women who had lost their husbands and sons began the revival of Buddhism by cleaning the temples. They took on the white robes of Don Chee, Buddhist nuns. Photographer Danielle Lancaster of Bluedog Photography has created a beautiful and moving photo essay on the Don Chee:

[Note: If the above video doesn't load properly, try going directly to YouTube here.]

Over at A Word in Your Ear, skinnywench has several good posts on her travels in Cambodia, illustrated by excellent photographs,  including Just Another Temple in Cambodia – But Oh Wat a Temple! This temple in the centre of Phnom Penh looks to be full of character, and I regret walking past it and not wandering in, like skinnywench did.

Supporting Cambodian Children

Launch of 'Cambodia - Our Vision', a book of photographs taken by the children of Anjali House

“In July 2007, you would have found 11 year old V. under the glare of the neon street lights selling postcards to tourists in Siem Reap to support his family. He never attended public school. His father and step-mother, both suffering from HIV, have difficulty working and feeding the whole family. The father, handicapped in one leg, (a result of stepping on a landmine) begs or collects rubbish every day only to come home with less than 1 dollar a day. Today, V. is more likely to be found at home in the evenings, tired after a long day of public school, English class … and workshops.”

This is a case study from Anjali House, an NGO in Siem Reap. In tourist towns many children do not go to school, instead earning money for their family by selling craft, postcards, books or begging in the street. Anjali House assists such families with food support, micro-loans and health care to reduce the pressure for their children to work. Anjali enrols the children in public school, providing uniforms, books, bags, stationary and covering all fees and costs. The kids also get lunch and clean water, personal hygiene, medical and dental care, English and IT classes, art activities and physical education.

This non-residential care is an alternative approach to that of orphanages. Orphanages can give children the education and opportunities that their families are unable to provide (most children in residential care are not orphans), but NGOs like Save the Children and Friends-International question this approach, because of what they see as the needless break up of poor families. They are also concerned about orphanage tourism. “Children are not tourist attractions,” says Friends on their ChildSafe Traveler Tips website. “Think twice before visiting an orphanage.”

Tuk tuk drivers can be trained in child safety and then join the ChildSafe Network

ConCERT, the NGO that guides people who want to help (see previous post), says: “The best long term solution is to work with the communities, helping them to better take care of their children. In the shorter term, and for extreme cases where there are limited options, a residential centre may be the only choice.” This page from the ConCERT website argues that, while orphanages were needed in the aftermath of the Khmer Rouge years, they are no longer the solution. Other pages on the site link to organisations providing non-residential care and education for children and support for their families, such as Anjali House.

Children who live or work on the streets are at high risk of being abused. Travellers can support hotels, restaurants and tour operators who collaborate with the ChildSafe Network, managed by Friends-International. Visit the site for a list of ChildSafe members.

The plight of children stirs our emotions, and we want to do something immediately. But we should investigate carefully before acting, and make sure that our “helping” does no harm.

Cambodia: Can We Help?

Friends Restaurant, Phnom Penh

Cambodians are rebuilding after years of war and genocide. Can we help?

In his book Reframe, Eric Knight tells of his time as a twenty-year-old volunteer aid worker in a small village in Costa Rica. He and his fellow volunteers were to build a community hall for the village.

At first it seemed that the villagers had an idyllic life in the jungle, and only needed a few basic amenities, such as the hall, to make it perfect. But as he got to know the villagers, he learnt that they didn’t want the hall. They wanted better education, they wanted people to help mentor their kids: “The world was changing and these kids were missing out on the benefits of economic progress.” He was shocked when the kids told him they wanted to be accountants, businessmen or lawyers.

“I began to realise that [they] didn’t want the life I had imagined for them … In projecting my own dreams for them, I was robbing them of the freedom to have their own.”

Knight’s story is a warning for those who want to help other people, especially in another country. We should always question what we are doing to make sure we are not imposing our own agenda, creating more problems or fostering dependence on outside help.

The first step is to educate ourselves about what needs to be done and the best way to help. In Siem Reap I visited the office of ConCERT, an NGO whose mission is to advise visitors so as to maximise the benefits for Cambodians who are most vulnerable. Check out their website here for information on donating, sponsoring and responsible volunteering.

Students at Romdeng, another Friends restaurant in Phnom Penh

Most travellers are not in Cambodia long enough to volunteer, but there are many other ways to help. In Siem Reap, Sala Bai Hotel and Restaurant School trains, free of charge, about 100 disadvantaged young people per year for the hospitality industry. Preference is given to females to overcome their higher vulnerability and lower access to education. Travellers can help simply by having lunch there – I enjoyed delicious fish amok in a relaxing atmosphere. I learnt to make the same dish in a cooking class at Le Tigre de Papier restaurant. The profits from these classes are donated to Sala Bai.

In Phnom Penh, Friends-International runs restaurants that train street children for the hospitality industry: superb food, beautifully presented. Travellers can also visit Community Based Ecotourism projects such as Chi Phat, or use responsible ecotour operators such as the Sam Veasna Center.

Tourists in Siem Reap may be disturbed (or charmed) by children selling souvenirs or begging in the streets. Can we help these children? This will be the subject of the next post.