• faint aversion to pending violent action
• faint desire for pending violent action
• resultant scrunched up, induced anxiety
• foreknowledge that psychotic killer will kill woman -
• slightly stronger aversion to seeing that
• no other interest whatsoever in who kills who or how or who gets the money.

So I went forth into the daylight and bought a book for my son.

I browsed some reviews that night: Good and evil are tackled with a rigorous fix on the complexity involved. This is P. Travers in Rolling Stone who thinks that we would all have taken the money (and left the wounded man to die of thirst). I conclude that his fix on the people who share the planet with him is something less than rigorous.

There’s plenty more profundity-mongering around, but luckily you don’t have to go past Google’s first ten hits to find a drily unimpressed Stephanie Zacharek in Salon

Against this backdrop of ruthless killings and overall creepiness, Sheriff Bell ponders the meaning of existence and other stuff, which would be pretty boring if not for the occasional distraction of human life being snuffed out by cattle-slaughter devices.

For those who like camera angles, there are lots of camera angles.

A MAN and a Lion traveled together through the forest. They soon began to boast of their respective superiority to each other in strength and prowess. As they were disputing, they passed a statue carved in stone, which represented “a Lion strangled by a Man.” The traveler pointed to it and said: “See there! How strong we are, and how we prevail over even the king of beasts.” The Lion replied: “This statue was made by one of you men. If we Lions knew how to erect statues, you would see the Man placed under the paw of the Lion.” One story is good, till another is told.

The cinema in Teneriffe was showing a film which had been adapted from one of my own novels. It had been an instructive and rather painful experience to see it shown. The direction was incompetent, the photography undistinguished, the story sentimental. If there was any truth in the original it had been carefully altered, if anything was left unchanged it was because it was because it was untrue. By what was unchanged I could judge and condemn my own novel: I could see clearly what was cheap and banal enough to fit the cheap and banal film.

Graham Greene, Journey without Maps, 1936. The film must have been Stamboul Train, 1932.

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.