[This was posted to my blog on 12th February 2020 when we were only just beginning to hear about Coronavirus - just in case you wonder why some of it sounds a little weird now...]
First an apology. I’m a rubbish blogger. This is my first
post since my sixtieth birthday blog, and that was, ahem, five and a bit years
ago. My blog history has skipped right past my third novel, ‘Not Forgetting the Whale,’ as if it
never happened, and I probably ought to be thinking about blogging ahead of my
next book, ‘The Many Lives of Heloise
Starchild.’ But events of recent weeks (I’m thinking now about the Covid-19
Corona Virus) have reminded me of Not
Forgetting the Whale, so maybe it is time, at last, for a blog.
Not Forgetting the Whale (if you haven’t
read it) is a whimsical and slightly allegorical tale about the collapse of civilisation
following a worldwide flu pandemic. If that sounds a little heavy, it might
help to add that the story is told almost entirely from the perspective of a tiny
Cornish fishing community. The fictional village of St Piran was a familiar
environment for me to write about. I was seventeen when my family left Nairobi and
reinvented themselves as shopkeepers in Mevagissey, a village on the Cornish
coast. My mother had grown up there, and she longed to go back. My parents
bought a general store in the square, right by the harbour, and I worked there,
during school and university holidays, stacking shelves, slicing bacon, and
delivering groceries to houses around the village. One of my regular deliveries
was to the writer Colin Wilson who lived a short way out of town in a rambling old
farmhouse. It was a real writer’s home – filled with books. ‘I should love to
be a writer,’ I told him once, after I had carried a box of groceries into his
kitchen. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘if you want to be a writer, then you will be. You
won’t have any choice.’
I
thought, at first, I would hate Mevagissey. My friends were far away, and this
little town (especially in winter) was desperately quiet and remote. But, like
Joe, the protagonist of Whale, I discovered
instead a most extraordinary community. Within weeks I had learned the names
and faces of dozens of villagers, I had made new friends, and I had started to
understand the support network that every villager seemed to be part of. It was
unexpected. It was a joy.
I wanted to write about this for a long time. What I needed
was a story. On a train from London to Liverpool I found myself reading a magazine
article by the science writer Debora Mackenzie. The title of the article was, ‘Could
a Pandemic bring down Western Civilisation?’ The idea was simple, yet
terrifying. Complexity theory suggests that once a society develops beyond a
certain level, it becomes dangerously fragile. It reaches a point where even a minor
disturbance can bring everything crashing down. A pandemic flu – for example. I
had my story. I became fascinated by arcane things like … supply chains.
The whole way our
civilisation works – even the systems involved in putting food onto our tables -
has become labyrinthine in its complexity, involving high-tech farm machinery,
refrigerated warehouses, networks of specialist distributors, and complicated
packaging. It relies on the availability of fuel, spare parts for all the
machines, the health and reliability of drivers and packers and dozens of other
trades, the electronic exchange of currency, good road, rail, and other transport
networks, and who knows how easy it would be for any one of these systems to
fail. The fact that it all works amazingly well means we don’t tend to think of
it as a risky process. And yet it is. A small disruption could grind the whole
machine to a halt.
This is the central thesis behind Not Forgetting the Whale. A pandemic flu, originating in the Far
East, is brought unwittingly to Britain by passengers on a long distance
flight, and after that, public fear takes over. Oil imports stop. Key workers
stay home. Power stations grind to a halt. Shops are raided and shelves are emptied
of produce. I had a quotation in my mind, ‘Civilisation is only three square
meals away from anarchy.’ This quotation (from the TV Series Red Dwarf) drove the story.
And now, here we are facing Covid-19. It’s a flu-like virus from China that
threatens to explode into a pandemic. Could
it lead to the same situation that faces St Piran in The Whale?
And I suppose the answer has to be … yes.
But there is a glimmer of hope. In Not
Forgetting the Whale the forecast for humanity is grim. But humankind (in
general) and St Piran (in particular) defy the pundits and bounce back. They do
this by, well, … pulling together and sharing things, and generally being nice
to one another. They overturn all the assumptions of apocalyptic fiction that
see us hunkering down with shotguns and fighting over the last scrap of bread.
The flu virus, far from destroying us, ends up bringing us closer together.
Maybe that should give us hope.
Although the villagers of St Piran do have the help of a whale, of course.
Let’s not forget that.
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