Collateral damage

Despite or maybe because of his self-centered ways, an Irish poet attracts female fans in The Wren, The Wren by Anne Enright. After the wife falls ill, Phil McDaragh leaves home and two daughters who are left wondering what they did wrong. Pain, distance and a tolerance for abuse reverberate through three generations. The poet leaves the country, conceding his writing is nostalgic. He writes only about Ireland because “You can’t leave a place like that,” Phil said. “It’s always with you.” He travels to Italy, where it’s claimed he abused another poet, and to the United States, where he marries a student. 

Phil disappoints any who admire and support him. His daughter, Carmel, and his only granddaughter, Nell – conceived by a mother with no husband as a means to defeat loneliness – narrate most of the story, with Phil’s poetry scattered in between. Midway in the novel, Phil describes a childhood that includes animal cruelty, an abusive brother, rejection of a neighbor girl whom he once adored and a mentor’s disappointment with his decision to become a poet rather than join the priesthood. “I thought, at twelve years old, that I would never forget the look on the old priest’s face, that I would set my course by it. Now, I now the indelible thing was the glance I exchanged with the badger pup, as he waited for the fatal blow to fall. Nothing in my life, before or since, has matched that connection. It was a peak of understanding from which my whole existence, with its loves and false joys and tedious losses, has slowly fallen away.” Only Phil’s feelings matter, nothing else. Beautiful words cannot compensate for brutal ways.

Despite irregular correspondence with his family, the daughter and his only granddaughter ponder the man's legacy and words, often troubled by sweet words and descriptions of nature masking the lies and suffering of a restrictive community. “Phil's hands shaped the air in front of his rotting chest as he talked of the little Irish wren, and there as just a whisper of alcohol there, softening his tongue and wetting those mischievous, fond eyes. It was so easy to hate this man - the facts spoke for themselves - but it was still hard to dislike him. And it was devastatingly easy to love him. To flock around and keen when he died, because all the words died with him.”

The internet exposes bad behaviors that are far less tolerated decades later. Carmel searches online for an interview with her father broadcast in the early 1980s and discovers the hypocrisies of another era. The interviewer fawns, suggesting that Phil has a great understanding of women and Phil agrees. Laughing, Carmel decides that her father is "slightly creepy” and perhaps she was better off with him removed for so long from her life. Such observations contribute to breaking the family's cycle of adoration and self-abuse. 

Letting go of the past, Carmel welcomes her free-spirited daughter while acknowledging that “She had not been a good mother…. All the love in the world would not make her a good mother. It was always such a wrangle. She could not hold her daughter, and she could not let her go.”  The two women move on from past quarrels and contradictions, misunderstandings and painful memories to regard each other’s emotions and work a bit harder at getting along. 

Loss

With aging comes loss, and for Tom Kettle the protagonist of Old God's Time by Sebastian Barry, life is essentially over. Retired as a policeman, he lives alone. His wife and two adult children are dead. Friends are few, though on good days, he has visions old friends, acquaintances and maybe even some ghosts. 

Both he and his wife grew up with abuse from priests, notorious in Ireland’s Catholic orphanages. With his memory slipping, Kettle is an unreliable narrator both for himself and others. Pleasant memories, vague and dreamy like fog forming over the sea, are difficult to retain; negative ones prick deep and mean like sharp ice. The stories he recalls often seem incomplete, with additional circumstances and context shared later. He recalls his past with any activity, any trip: “Every single place… a peg with a memory hanging from it.” And when he returns to the city, “memories are lying in ambush everywhere.” 

Like memories, his surroundings serve as both reminders and distractions. “If he were looking for citizenship, it might be of this miraculous bay. Child of nowhere, he could claim rights over this, this vast vacancy queerly filled, both empty and full. He was just an old policeman with a buckled heart, but if he had known how, he would have sucked the whole vista into himself, every grain of salt and sand and sea, swallowed it whole… All this blue and different blue and greens and acres of blown white, and the mysterious golds and silvers of after-rain. He knew he knew he was in trouble, he could sense the trouble with his copper’s instinct and didn’t yet know its shape, but the bay also released him somehow, let him go for a blessed minute into some wild freedom, so that his heart and soul were both shaken and renewed, in the same moment, in the same breath.” 

After being away from the job, two colleagues from his station visit, claiming to need his help on an old case involving “the priests in the sixties.” Kettle, old and vulnerable, responds spontaneously: “The absolute suffering. There was no one to help me.” He immediately regrets using the word “me” rather than “them.” The old policeman cares about the child victims of the abusive priests, not quite realizing that the others regard him as suspect. 

The investigators seek his DNA, intent on resolving an old case, the murder of a priest known to both Kettle and his wife. But Kettle had long been part of a system that masked scandals, covered evidence, to protect reputations.     

Kettle varies between wanting to be useful and left alone, between companionship and solitude. Once the two leave, he misses his inquisitors: “he was stunned to discover, missed them like his own children, a huge ache of loss, which was not logical at all. They had a nice time together, despite everything, but that was all. But he felt it like a bereavement. He had enjoyed the talk. He had. A mystery. Their warmth and kindness. He wondered should he do more of it. Human contact. He wasn’t sure. It was a disturbing thought somehow, like he was betraying a secret, but whose?” Before long, he comes to realize that “He was less confused even if he was confused.” 

The old policeman knows who killed the priest, but divulges nothing without manipulation or lies. Instead, he drifts among multiple tragic memories, some of the experiences surely instigated and compounded by his family's history of abuse. That a murder of a priest could take precedence over the systemic abuse of dozens or hundreds of children, by “a murderer of children’s hearts,” is deplorable. And that may partly explain why, besides his loneliness and dementia, Kettle initially fails to realize the purpose behind the visits from investigators. 

The man could suffer no greater loss than that of his wife and children, and a sort of weightlessness accompanies such knowledge. “There was a fire of freedom in it. There was a curious wash of something freely called happiness.”

Memories

In Lessons, Roland Baines regards an abusive relationship from when he was 11 years old as the source of his many desires and failures. A piano teacher at his private boarding school pinches his inner thigh, hard, after he repeatedly makes a mistake during their music drills. He has fantasies about her, and she invites him to her home for lunch. Months later, Roland shows up at the cottage, and the two have intercourse. Memories of the strange teacher haunt him years later in this novel about parenting, abuse, ambition and lost potential. 

From the start, the novel analyzes how memories repeatedly shape our choices, serving as lessons in guiding one's life.    

As an adult, Roland determines that nobody escapes making their own self-made hell “at least one, in a lifetime.” She controls him: “He never had a choice. He didn’t want a choice.” 

Roland’s grades suffer and he leaves school early, avoiding the piano teacher and her attempts to trap him in marriage. That decision frees him in a way while also eliminating his chance to attend college. He decides he can be self-taught while earning an income by writing, teaching tennis and playing in piano bars. Roland travels and dates freely, and his twenties slip by. “He assured himself that he had his freedom and he was having fun. He could control his occasional anxieties about the aimlessness of his existence. But they swelled and finally broke through and could no longer be resisted. He was twenty-eight and not living a useful life…. Many people wasted their twenties or their whole lives in offices, on factory floors and in pubs…. So it had been worthwhile to be carefree, live hand to mouth and not be like everyone else. The very point of being young. Whenever he caught himself thinking or saying things like that, he knew it was himself he needed to convince.”

In West Germany, he studies German and befriends a family in East Berlin. The mother explains to him how children bind them to the communist system: “A bad step by the parents, a moment of unguarded criticism and the children might find the path to university or a decent career barred.”

Over the course of his life, friendships form and break over politics, whether Nazi cruelties or Brexit falsehoods and foolishness. 

A few years later Roland runs into his German teacher, Alissa, who yearns to be a writer, and they marry impulsively: “They decided they must have fallen in love from the start without recognizing the fact.” 

Both Roland and Alissa have jagged relations with their own parents. Her mother, Jane, traveled to Germany just after World War II, keeping a journal to write about the White Rose resistance. Her article is never published after Jane marries Heinrich, who had only a peripheral role in the movement. The general attitude about German citizens during that period – “Unless they took action no one could be exonerated, because every man is ‘guilty, guilty, guilty.’” Roland thinks of Heinrich having a good heart. “So when Heinrich spoke of national redemption by way of constructing a history of anti-Nazi sabotage, his prospective son-in-law did not say what he thought, nothing, not a score of White Rose movements, a million saboteurs… could redeem the industrialized savagery of the Third Reich and the tens of millions of citizens who knew and looked away.” 

Later, Alissa comments, “It’s so easy to forgive other people’s parents.” Of course, that is because troubling childhood memories do not intrude.

Roland confides in Alissa about the abusive piano teacher: “How driven he was, obsessed, and how it seemed an entire lifetime to him then. It took almost an hour to describe the affair, if that was what it was, and the school, the cottage, the two rivers. How strangely it ended. How it never crossed his mind that her behavior was depraved, despicable. Even for years afterwards. He had nothing to judge her by, no scale of values.” 

The couple has a son, Lawrence. His wife, Alissa, abruptly leaves Roland and her son, writing “I’ve been living the wrong life.” Roland is angry at first, investigated by the police for murder, but his emotions later transform into grieving and admiration. “Goethe, Schiller, Aristotle, Lao-Tzu. She understood how a close acquaintance with writers like these could extend and enrich a love of freedom.” 

Roland, listless and somewhat narcissistic, remains determined to give his child a secure home. He holds and comforts Lawrence after Alissa leaves while confronting their future: “Their pulses fell in and out of phase, but one day they would be always out. They would never be this close. He would know him less well, then even less. Others would know Lawrence better than he did, where he was, what he was doing and saying, growing closer to this friend, then this lover…. From his father, occasional visits, a sincere hug, catch up on work, family, some politics, then goodbye…. The long letting go could be the essence of parenthood and from here was impossible to conceive.”

Recognizing the power of childhood memories, Roland ponders the mysteries passing through the mind of the seven-month-old and experiences that may shape the rest of his life: “A shaded emptiness, a grey winter sky against which impressions – sounds, sights, touch – burst like fireworks in arcs and cones of primary colour, instantly forgotten, instantly replaced and forgotten again. Or a deep pool into which everything fell and disappeared but remained, irretrievably present, dark shapes in deep water, exercising their gravitational pull even eighty years later, on deathbeds, in last confessions, in final cries for lost love.” 

After a few years, Alissa publishes her first novel to great acclaim and Roland “saw the beauty of it. On a windy sunlit midweek morning she cleanly transformed her existence as she packed a small suitcase, and leaving her keys behind, walked out the front door, consumed by an ambition for which she was ready to suffer and make others suffer too.” Despite success or maybe because of it, Alissa refuses to connect with her son.

Meanwhile Roland drifts through what he calls “an unchosen life, in a succession of reactions to events. He had never made an important decision. Except to leave school. No, that too was a reaction.” He makes friends easily and views the world as “agreeably diffuse” while anticipating that “in the new millennium, only eleven years away, humankind would have reached a new level of maturity and happiness.” Of course, that period of mature happiness is brief because the world does not heed history.  

Father and son live comfortably with Roland’s best friend and her children for many years, and the end is bittersweet as Roland determines that life – or the ability to create enduring and influential memories – was “pouring away from him. Events of three weeks ago were already receding or lost completely in a haze. He had to make himself catch some of it, just a little, or it would have been hardly worth living through.”  He keeps journals, one for each passing year, and sorts through his many photos, selecting 100 that represent his life: “there was that essence everyone forgets when a love recedes into the past – how it was, how it felt and tasted to be together through the seconds, minutes, and days, before everything that was taken for granted was discarded then overwritten by the tale of how it all ended, and then by the shaming inadequacies of memory. Paradise or the inferno, no one remembers anything much. Affairs and marriages ended long ago come to resemble postcards from the past. … First to go… was the elusive self, precisely how you were yourself, how you appeared to others.” 

Consider the patterns of memories. How do memories of the well-adjusted, secure person balance one’s self versus others?  

Lawrence follows some of father’s drifting patterns, also marrying a German woman, albeit enjoying a happier relationship that include grandchildren for Roland. The older man flounders yet does not resent his famous wife, counted among Germany’s greatest living writers. If anything, he pities her. “She had no one, no family, no close friends. Time had degraded him too but by all conventional measures, he was the happier. No books though, no paintings, nothing invented that would survive him. Would he swap his family for her yard of books? He gazed at her now familiar face and shook his head for an answer.”

Publishers Weekly quotes McEwan's agent Georges Borschadt as saying, "Acts of creation are the only things that matter." 

But no, that is not the lesson of this novel. Everyday life, family, love, joys and experiences are all that matter, and old memories need not dictate our future, and new relationships can over-ride the pain. As McEwan concludes, “A shame to ruin a good tale by turning it into a lesson.” 

Intrusive memories can be tamed. 

Self-deception

 

The novel Where the Truth Lies from British author Anna Bailey demonstrates how a community or individual can use religion as a weapon to control or belittle others. The book is set in small rural Colorado town, where a father regularly abuses his three children, insisting that God made him the way he is and God “understands why I’ve done the things I’ve done.” Of course, that argument does not apply to others who may choose to live differently, whether that might be homosexuality or immigration. 

For the fundamentalist father, his way is God’s way, the only way, and a cycle of cruelty, humiliation, guilt, anger and shame ensues. Expectations of rote forgiveness mock Christian principles. Teenagers observing and subjected to such abuse lash out against the unreasonable controls and expectations with self-abuse – shutting down with self-loathing, substance abuse, sexual debasement. Hurting one’s own body “feels like power, the way a mad king might slaughter his people, just to prove he can.” Resorting to extreme behavior is perhaps a last-ditch effort for finding someone who might care. If that savior does not emerge, then a life with so much anger and control is not worth living anyway. 

Children trapped in such situations, expected to honor insane parents, cannot help but question whether God even exists. In this book, young Jude protests that "God wouldn’t –" and his brother Noah responds: “This has nothing to do with God, you idiot. God doesn’t do anything, He just whispers in people’s ears that they’re worth jack shit, and they pray and pray hoping He’ll stop, but He doesn’t, and in the end they just go crazy. That’s all God does, He makes people go crazy, so get that into your head and grow up!”

Most adults in the small town express sympathy but then shrug and look the other way. The worst of it is when family members turn on one another, pointing out transgressions, some true and others false, finding scapegoats for the tyrant to attack. The goal is to deflect attention away from their own wrongdoings or create horrific chaos so that others outside the family might intercede. 

The book's title, Where the Truth Lies, reflects the multiple meanings of the verb “to lie” as detailed by Merriam-Wesbster: to engage in falsehoods, to sleep or remain motionless, to remain inactive or in hiding, to bed with, to have an effect, to remain still, to belong or to be neglected. Of course, there is but one meaning for truth - what happened to Abigail Blake and why.

Bailey’s novel supports the notion that an outsider can sort through carefully crafted myths, history and expectations and reveal our true natures. 

Self-deception, the embracing of false beliefs despite evidence to the contrary, leads to horrific behaviors and crimes. Self-deception is both morally wrong and morally dangerous, individually and collectively. Those who engage in self-deception, evading evidence to avoid knowledge and truth about real problems swirling in their midst, cannot be trusted on any topic. 

Collective self-deception is especially dangerous, and yet the growing trend, fueled by the internet and social media, “has received scant direct philosophical attention as compared with its individual counterpart,” notes the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. The self-deceived turn to groups who reinforce their beliefs and most frightening: “Compared to its solitary counterpart, self-deception within a collective is both easier to foster and more difficult to escape, being abetted by the self-deceptive efforts of others within the group.”