What do I really know?

I had a very enjoyable evening with friends on Saturday night, which consisted of an anticipated film on a gigantic television the size of a small cinema screen, red wine, and with me dozing off halfway through. Sleeping in company is a faux pas, I know, but it was more to do with the week I had than the quality of the film. My wife assured me that all of it was good, even the parts that I missed.

My host is a very knowledgeable film and television enthusiast, and the conversation during the evening roamed over wide, open acres of what for me is unexplored celluloid. I am not embarrassed to admit that vast amounts of what most people regard as essential film are unknown to me. I have never seen a Woody Allen film. When talk turns to his films I nod sagely and hope that no specifics are mentioned. I have seen about ten minutes of one Hitchcock film and thought it was dreadful. I am ignorant.

Even my television knowledge has shrunk to pathetic little nuggets of information since the dawn of the new century. I watch ‘Pointless’, and some live sport… and that’s about it. I apologise. If you want to assemble at the coffee machine and talk about last night’s televisual excitements, I am certainly not your man.

What I found impressive on Saturday evening, though, was not the sheer number of hours that my friends and my wife have clocked up in front of flickering screens, but the knowledge that they have assimilated in the process. My learnèd friend has accumulated a sound knowledge of the geography of Vietnam from Kubrick, and how American hospitals work after decades of ER, and inter-war society from Downton Abbey.

I have been thinking about the nature of this knowledge, and how it has largely been acquired through entertainment media, and if that actually matters in our current situation. I used to be quite prickly about this and have a sort of league table of knowledge in my head. Facts gleaned from the tabloids were to be ignored. Facts from the telly were to be sniffed at. Facts from films might merit the raising of an eyebrow. Real facts, however, came from books.

Real facts can be relied upon because they have come from the heads of long-dead writers like Aldous Huxley, George Orwell and DH Lawrence.

I have realised that I may need to revise my prejudices. The world changes so quickly that the life and experiences of even the most gifted and perceptive of writers from the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Century are as remote to us as the Middle Ages were to them. How can any writer of one hundred and fifty years ago have written anything that is relevant today?

Enter, stage left, the howls of protest from lovers of The Great Novels. The Great Novels, they say, are full of observations about human relationships, and these never change.

That may be the case. If it is, then surely every kind of fiction that attempts to dissect the mysteries of life is just as important, and just as good at educating us. The knowledge we need to survive and become rounded individuals can come from Ally McBeal or Jane Austen. Del Boy or Dickens. Woody Allen or Turgenev. Does it matter where we learn our life lessons?

What that got me thinking about is how close to reality we currently are, how close we were in the past, and when the last time was that people were genuinely linked to the world around them by direct experience. I’d like to suggest that human beings living in Western Europe now can live and thrive without actually having to actually experience anything real, other than the supermarket. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing. I am saying that it is an amazing and interesting thing, and something we don’t think about too much. Do we actually need to go out and experience anything, given the vast accumulated wisdom of one hundred and twenty years of cinema (or eighty of you just count from the talkies) and sixty years of television?

When was the last time we were properly connected to the world around us, before the links became tenuous? Perhaps a hundred years ago. In the UK then, people washed their own clothes with their hands, and cooked their own food, and acquired knowledge of how things worked by talking to the people around them. If you wanted to know what the King sounded like, you had to go to the palace, wait outside, and hope he shouted at you. If you wanted a fried egg, you started at the hen coop and not the supermarket aisle.

The conclusion that I have come to is that I need to be less snooty about the things that I know. Unless I have come by an interesting thing by actual observation, and not through the wonder of Stephen Fry, I cannot be judgemental about where other people get their facts from. The world is a very, very complicated place. Much of the important stuff we really need to think about can be explored on E4 rather than Penguin Classics.

What do I really know?

'Human Traces' by Sebastian Faulks

I read 'Birdsong' by Sebastian Faulks when it was published, and it was a life-changing book. I had never read a modern novel before that was so meticulously researched that it seemed to have been contemporaneous with the era in which it was set, which was the First World War.
I was so in awe of Faulks' skill that I shied away from his later books as I did not want to break the magic. Just like we have favourite albums, a favourite novel can be a bit of an elephant in the room. I was scared to read anything new by Faulks in case it somehow tarnished the magic of 'Birdsong'.
This summer I decided that an acceptable length of time had passed (nearly twenty years, I note with alarm) that I could read some of his more ambitious recent books. I had read 'The Fatal Englishman' last summer. I first read 'A Week In December' It was OK - a bit to much of a gimmick, and the characters who were spot on for 2009 have already dated because the world moves on so quickly.
'Human Traces' has sat on my bookshelf in hardback since I bought it in 2005, tempting me to launch into it. It is 600 pages long, so I had the excuse that a short holiday was not long enough to read it completely.
I started it at the start of September and it took me a month to read. It will take a lot longer to sink into my bones.
What Sebastian Faulks has done, in a very long and rich book, is to examine the meaning of families. The plot, which centres on the life stories of two aspiring 'alien doctors' (psychiatrists), is incidental. I thought I was reading a great double-life story. The twist comes in the final quarter of the book when it becomes clear that what the author is actually doing is showing how strong the power of human love can be. The central relationship is one of mother to son, and the bitter, devastating grief of loss.
It is a book for parents to read. Had I read it in my twenties before I became a father, I doubt if it would have had such a profound effect on me.
For all the parents out there: can you remember how your world-view changed forever when you first held your child? In this book, right at the end, Faulks encapsulates that feeling.
It is devastating and brilliant.