Mitch Albom

Well may we say…

I’m feeling quite emotional today. I’m thousands of kilometres from my darling wife who is juggling work, the house, the kids and a severe illness in her family.

And today as I sat on the exercise bike in the hotel gym (you the know, the ones with a TV built in so you can torture your mind while you torture your body), I saw the ‘breaking news’ headline that former Australian Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam, had died.

For those of you unlucky enough not to be Australian (sorry, the only time you’ll catch me being patriotic), Gough is probably the most iconic Australian politician in our country’s relative short history.  The title of this post references his most famous speech after being controversially dismissed from office.

While his government will be remembered for many mistakes, especially economic, in three short reformist years in the early ’70s as Prime Minister he: eliminated military conscription; got Australia out of the Vietnam War; abolished the death penalty; implemented universal health care and free university education; began the process of recognising Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander peoples as the traditional owners of the land; enacted the Racial Discrimination Act; made legislative changes to ensure equal pay for women; and refocused Australia as part of the world and part of Asia, not an outpost of a long-dead colonial European empire.

I have a lump in my throat just writing about it.

It is because of him and a few rare politicians like him in my lifetime that I became politically aware, studied politics at school and involved myself in student politics while at university.

This then got me thinking about how books can so easily tap in to the deepest recesses of our emotions and not only trigger powerful emotional responses, but also inspire us to act; to make a change in our lives or those around us.

Tuesday’s with Morrie by Mitch Albom was an example for me as I read it when my son was very young and it laid out what is important in life in a way that inspired me to want to teach to my children. Other books ring like poetry sending our emotions soaring; perhaps bizarrely, one book that did this for me was a graphic novel called Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, by Chris Ware … truly extraordinary.

Other books tap in to darker emotions that make us: frustrated, angry or confused (The Magus, John Fowles), titillated (Money, Martin Amis; The Dice Man, Luke Rhinehart); deeply, deeply depressed (The Tartar Steppe, Dino Buzzati) or just shocked (Legend of a Suicide, David Vann).

The one author who has tapped in to my deep primal beliefs more than any other is GK Chesterton, through his essays, philosophical writing (Orthodoxy), criticism (What’s Wrong With the World).

It is obviously different for everyone, but what is it about these books that trigger such strong emotions?

On one level you could argue it is an author’s cynicism. There are some clever tricks they can use to trigger emotional responses, and they cynically deliberately employ these to masterful effect. Perhaps I am being too cynical.

It could be that we intuitively choose books because we know they will trigger a response, a response we’re craving. On the other-hand some writers, like song writers, painters, choreographers and dancers have a talent for writing stories that engage us so deeply we lay ourselves open to experiencing emotions we usually tuck away from the world as part of our normal daily lives.

So here’s to the memory of an optimistic leader and the memories of books that let us experience life more fully.

Non-fiction is a fiction

Something has happened in the 40 odd years of my life that only struck me this evening as I was trying to come up with something for this blog.

In that time I have seen a revolution in the popularity of non-fiction in two waves. The first was the rise of the self-help book and the second was the rise of the Internet.

Self help books have been around since the earliest days of written wisdom (probably the Greeks, but I’m no classical historian). However until the 20th Century they were pretty much exclusively for the elite i.e. those who could read.

The 1980s saw a massive increase in the focus on material wealth and the need for self-improvement. What then followed was a succession of self professed experts claiming to hold the key to everything from health and wealth to spiritual awakening and sexual prowess. Tony Robbins and his contemporaries became the new spiritual leaders in Western society.

In contrast, when I was a boy, we watched in awe as the full set of Encyclopaedia Brittanica was delivered to our home, which my dad then read cover to cover. That was his self-help. Wisdom came not through the opinion of a guru, but through the collection of knowledge and personal experience.

Then, when I was at university in the early ’90s, I saw the birth of the internet. It was amazing how we gravitated towards Bulletin Board Systems to share information or, more often, flame each other.

The rise of the internet that followed these early days saw people start to rely on Usenet, then Internet forums, then Excite and Alta Vista and finally Yahoo and the all conquering Google, for all the information they needed; people stopped reading books.

The problem with the rise of the self-help book and its gurus and the “all-knowing” interweb is that they present themselves as authorities of knowledge. While not necessarily claiming explicitly, they imply complete objectivity. We get sucked in to believing the information to be objectively and self-evidently true.

Fiction on the other hand claims nothing of the sort; it isn’t pretending to be anything other than subjective.

A novelist writes from personal experience, but not as themselves and never claiming expertise.

The truth is many are more expert than the most prolific self-help guru or Internet wiki-hero.

Take for example Hilary Mantel’s historical novels of Thomas Cromwell; pure fiction but ridiculously well researched giving insights in to a time and people that triggered earth-shattering changes in Western society. Mantel doesn’t pretend to be anything other than subjective but helps us understand some of how we came to be where we are now not through a profession of factual expertise, but through pure fantasy.

Extensive historical research aside, novelists also use allegory through their fiction to impart more compelling lessons than non-fiction writers. The Bible is an early example and more recently consider the novels of Mitch Albom and Paulo Coehlo.

When a friend in London, Donna Wright, told me about the impact Coelho’s The Alchemist had on her and a friend of hers I took notice. Donna is an intelligent, generous, hilarious woman, who doesn’t suffer fools and is not readily impressionable. It was a novel she described as something that could change your life, not through expert opinion but though a fable and pure allegory.

Albom has the same gift. If you can put aside the “preachy” nature of the parables, his books are infinitely more powerful than any non-fiction book or Google search result.

Don’t get me wrong, I love reading well informed research and commentary. But I read with a skeptical eye aware it is a reflection of the author’s bias (unconscious or not) and will always avoid popular non-fiction pretending to be something it’s not.

Give me a little fantasy any day for an insight in to the truth.