Copyright © Carmel Bird 2002. All rights reserved.
PAPERS FROM BYRON BAY
One......CHARACTER
After
watching the poignant miniseries of The Lost Prince – where the
central character is Prince John, one of the uncles of the present
Queen, I went to my bookshelf to look for information on this
tragic boy, and I found there a memoir by the Duke of Windsor, one
of John’s brothers. John gets but two passing mentions in the
text which is a book I bought at a fete. On the flyleaf the price
– twenty cents – is written in pencil. But the thing that drew
my eye was the handwriting and the name of the original owner. In
a fat and fluent uncontrolled almost-copperplate she has written
her name in dark blue biro – Valda Goldbloom. I lost interest in
poor little Prince John and went off on a search for Valda. In the
I
think it is so important to realise that the characters are part
of the fabric of the fiction. Sometimes writers speak of
characters who have arrived all by themselves in the narrative,
and have proceeded to take over, leaving the writer wondering and
marvelling and following as if from a distance. That does happen,
it happens often, and it is truly one of the joys of writing
fiction. You think you are writing such and such a story with such
and such a set of characters, and then suddenly you find yourself
typing something that is said or done by a character you had not
thought of, and all at once that character starts to speak and act
and change the direction of things. This is part of the glorious
magic of writing fiction.
Actually,
I sometimes think at this point, of the legal questions of the
algebra of a baby’s genetic heritage.
Let
X equal a baby
Let A equal a woman
Let B equal a man
Let C equal a woman
Let D equal a man
Let the egg of C and the sperm of D be hatched in the uterus of A
to form X
Let X be fed and clothed by B
What is the value of X?
So
who owns that story?
**************************************************
Stories
must of their nature deal with those things that matter to the
very stuff of life, they must deal with life and love and death,
they must take the listener through the exercises of every journey
that the soul makes. And the really hard journey is the one that
takes the hero, the character, the human being into the space, or
the land, or the void, or the time – or whatever it might be –
beyond the life of breathing everyday reality. These are the
stories where the large central telling and leading event is
death.
Stories
of love and sex fascinate, but if you want to, you can atually get
involved in love and sex, and go on to live another day. But death
is the great mystery, and it is the ultimate location of
narrative. Of course many great love stories end in death, but I
am looking at stories where the death is really the focus of the
tale, the broad genre known as crime writing, in particular crime
fiction. Stories where the nub of the thing is the murder, the
death imposed upon one human being by another human being. And
traditionally much of the tension and thrill and interest of the
tale come from the gradual revelation of the reasons for the
murder, and from the revelation of the identity of perpetrator.
The
murders of crime fiction and true crime have fascinated me for a
long time, as they fascinate so many readers. And all my novels
are centrally concerned with murder. However there are only two
– Unholy Writ and Open For Inspection – that are formally
classified in the genre of crime fiction. This is because these
two are very strictly structured around the central murder and
have a character single-mindedly devoted to the discovery of the
perpetrator. The murders in my other novels are part of the fabric
of a wider context of criminal behaviour – for example
The
Unholy
Writ
The
shafts and drives which honeycomb the mountainside are the lost
remains of the Long Tunnel mine at Ginnungagap in
On
a clear winter afternoon, two boys exploring the historic town,
climbed the hillside. The mouths of many of the shafts had been
obliterated, choked with blackberries. When the children came upon
openings, they would toss down stones and stand still and listen
as the stones hit the water below. One place appeared to be an
open shaft, but it was stuffed with dead, torn foliage. The boys
threw in a rock, it disappeared through the leaves, but there was
no sound to tell them it had gone into the water. They threw
another rock. It fell on something solid. They peered down between
the leaves and small branches that blocked the opening, and what
they saw just below ground level was old and mangled meat. It was
the remains of Brooke Ferguson, the parts that the animals had
left. It explained the awful smell in that area of the bush, and
the boys could see that it was human.
Brooke
had been killed by two shots to the head, then stabbed in the
belly twenty-six times with a short-bladed knife. Her hands had
been smashed to pieces, her wrists bound to her ankles, and her
body pushed into the top of the mine shaft. Her killer hoped that
she would just disappear into the mountain, but she had caught on
fallen branches within the opening and had snagged, resting just
below the surface of the earth. The killer had then covered her,
hastily, inadequately, with more broken branches and bracken,
screening her from view, incidentally making it difficult for wild
animals to get free access. A dentist from Ballarat identified her
by her teeth. Seven of her eight little earrings were there, as
was her bracelet made from a silver table fork, hammered to fit
round her wrist. Tufts of her bright scarlet hair still stuck to
her skull. She was three months pregnant.
The
dead woman was Vickie Field. She lay sprawled across the steps to
the
Open
For Inspection
A
stench. The light from the open doorway illuminates a collection
of dusty objects. A rack of old clothes, cupboards and chests of
drawers, a TV. An old leather armchair in which is tied the gagged
body of the woman who is completely covered in blood. The light
blinks on the smooth silver bracelet that circles her dangling
left wrist. Around her a cloud of
flies, flies that hover and stick and crawl in a steady
buzz of life-in-death. The body in the chair is facing the TV, up
close, as if watching intently, yet her head is lowered because of
the wound to her throat. Her eyes are wide in horror, terror,
death. A seething cluster of flies stirs at her throat; her
clothes which have been shredded are the busy merry zig zag
pathways for hordes of tiny brown ants.
Now
you can ask the question – this panel does ask that question –
why am I doing this, why am I setting up these narratives around
the sudden and violent deaths of beautiful young women.
Well,
I go back to what I said before about the fascination of dread
that draws human beings to such scenarios. They are a source of
endless fascination to writers and to readers. Recently the girl
next door got married. There was a flurry of white cars in the
street, and a joyful crowd of neighbours hanging about to catch a
glimpse of the lovely young bride as she set off on her day of
days. Here is fascination – beauty, romance, sex, joy, flowers
and music – and so on. And we wish her well, and we still think
of her, but we don’t obsess about her really. However, the next
thing that happened was that a man in a nearby street murdered his
wife. Do we obsess? You bet we do. The wedding was a bright key
event in the normal course of events, a
I
am interested in the how and the why of the things people do. How
did he kill her and why did he kill her. What was it about her,
and about him, that brought it to this?
My
next novel – which is more like The White Garden than like
Unholy Writ – asks the question of what it is that causes a
religious leader to gather his flock in a hall and incinerate
them. The title is
I
also think that part of the fascination with violent death and the
detection and punishment of the killer – witness the immmense
popularity of shows such as Law
and Order lies in a widespread sense that there is something
terribly wrong with the world, and people keep looking and looking
in an attempt to try do discover what it is. It can be traced
back, in the end, I think, to the questions of what is evil and
why is it here and what can be done about it.
Perhaps
the principal thing that crime fiction does is – it says –
well, here is evil, this is what it looks like, this is how it
works. And everybody knows, by the way, deep down, that evil is
not only out there, but it is in here. And that, I suppose, in the
end, is the scary thing.
When
the tale is well told, the listener becomes the teller – and
becomes also the tale.
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