The Australian over the weekend raised questions about inaccuracies in A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah. He’s the former child soldier whose account of his ordeal has sold over 600,000 copies. Seems the dates don’t work out. A small chorus led by Beah’s American guardian, his creative writing instructor and his publishers have defended the book: their defences are variations on ‘I’m nice, trust me’. (I predict they’ll soon be joined by literati in a splutter of inverted commas who will talk about The Australian’s naive obsession with truth – or ‘truth’.)
We’ve been here before (The Hand that Signed the Paper, The First Stone). The first line of defence is to deny the discrepancies; the second to call them trivial; the third, when the evidence mounts up, is to argue that factual accuracy itself is trivial, that the book captures the plight of X or the outrageous abuse of Y and is in that larger sense ‘true’. The Oz leader this morning kicks the legs from under this last argument.
He writes in his bestselling autobiography that he was 12 when his family were lost to him, when rebels destroyed the village where they were sheltering and 13 when, soon after, government troops conscripted him into their ranks. But the events he writes started in January 1993 in fact began two years later. Even though it seems certain that Beah was a teenage soldier as he claims, this fundamental error inevitably calls into question every other aspect of his book.
Some argue that the way to deal with an unreliable non-fiction is just to remove the non. Two groups make this argument, the ‘faction’ faction and the fiction faction. So-called faction is simply discourse without trust or communicative stability, a game of Gotcha, and if you like that sort of thing, go for it, but don’t give me your phone number.
The fiction faction argues that the narrative conveys the larger truths that we (allegedly) find in novels. This narrative they say, makes us understand child soldiers (or Ukrainians or whomever) and feel and sympathise and get indignant. Those who say this don’t understand the nature of reference in fiction. Non-fiction discourse is intended to check out: ‘Kevin Rudd is Prime Minister of Australia’ is true if and only if Kevin Rudd is Prime Minister of Australia.
But if that’s the opening sentence of a story, it gains its meaning and expressive power by reference first to the invented world of the fiction and only then to ‘the world’ – or the world, I don’t mind.
Compare these two bits of dialogue:
“Kevin Rudd is Prime Minister of Australia. Or should I say was. He was fished out of Sydney Harbour at 5am, carrying no marks of identification and three bullet holes. We need a new PM, fast.”
” You’ve come to the wrong guy, babe. I don’t do cabinet.”
With this:
“Kevin Rudd is Prime Minister of Australia. Bread is $5 a loaf. Madagascar is next to Mauritius or the other way round. Who cares I mean really, who cares? Wanna multiplay?”
In the first it might or not matter that ‘Kevin Rudd’ is the name of an actual PM and which way you take that will depend on when you do. In the second it probably doesn’t matter much: the point is the character’s state of mind. But whether the words refer to states of affairs and how they do so are not matters to be settled by fact-checking.
Those who appeal to fiction to save a dishonest book demean fiction.