In Search of Demons

In the Vincent Calvino series the private eye has a number of people watching his back: a Royal Thai police colonel, his secretary and a friend or two. The idea of watching each other’s back isn’t confined to crime fiction. It is the staple of most novels everywhere. And there is a reason for the pervasiveness of protecting each other, providing security and support to others. We can tell a great deal about a man or woman by knowing something about the people who watch their back.

We can also tell a lot about a novelist in the way he or she writes about human collaboration. Other species collaborate but no species other than ours has refined collaboration and scaled it beyond a handful of others. It is likely that the reason there are nearly 7 billions of us is a testament to our skill at collaboration on an epic scale.

There are a couple of ways of thinking about collaboration. There is the microscope and also there is the telescope. You choose one over the other because you wish to see a different scale of things. In this essay, I’d like to set out a few basic ideas I’ve taken away from studying collaboration under a microscope. I asked myself the questions: why do we need to have other’s watching our backs, and why do we collaborate to watch someone’s back?

When I look at the smallest level, I see that we are haunted by demons. There is something universal about this haunting. No tribe, ethnic group, race, nationality is spared because at the microscopic level none of those things matter. Demons live buried deep inside our minds and spring out like a jack-in-the-box when we least expect. In other words, they communicate through us in surprising, unpredictable ways that cause fear and loathing in others and trigger tripwires of anger, hatred, jealousy, and rage. Those demons fester inside each of us like an arsenal of emotional cluster bombs that no international agency has ever managed to regulate or control.

When I take out my telescope, I find in the vastness of our connected lives that what we call ‘demons’ are expressed differently depending on language, culture, and history. Every culture puts a stamp on demons to make them their own. Each culture prescribes rituals, holy men, shamans, priests, and monks to pacify the demon invasion. We have organized sports because teams are one of the best ways we have to demonstrate effective collaboration. We have international sporting events to prove that our collaboration and our athletes co-operate in a more effective and productive way than another team. We conduct war on a grand scale only because we’ve scaled collaboration to an industrial scale.

If our minds are from the beginning colonized by an innate fear—sudden sounds, movements, spiders, snakes, lions—our antidote has been the cultural colonization of our minds so that how we automatically assume the structure and order of things is the best (if not the only) way to battle the demons and keep them at arm’s length.

The same principle applies to the whole industrial/commercial complex. What started as having someone watch your back has been adapted to allow the most powerful and influential to define how we collaborate, what is our back, how we protect and advance in the face of obstacles.

Every language has its own vocabulary to call demons and the fear and terror they cause and promise redemption from their torture and pain. And every culture does this to create a framework for collaboration. Because it is in watching each other’s back that we feel protected from the invisible forces we demonize.

Writing crime fiction is a search for such demons that haunt the characters, driving them to do and say things that make them hand puppets for the demon inside the person. The best crime fiction is not so much a search and rescue mission, but a recovery mission. After one of those natural disasters that are played out somewhere in the world weekly, the authorities send in teams to rescue people. After a week, no one uses the word ‘rescue’ any longer. Rescue morphs into recovery mode. It is at that point the story is dropped from the newspapers, wires, and blogs.

Recovery isn’t all that interesting for most people.

That raises the larger question, whether we can be rescued from our demons or the best we can hope for is some recovery mission will find what is left of us once our demons have played out their little game with our psyche.

What demons have colonized you? I mean that as a generic ‘you’ because I believe none of us are spared their haunting. Part of the investigation into a character’s personal demons inevitably results in a drive-by through their childhood, early schoolyard slights, chance acts of cruelty or brutality, broken dreams and promises, and so on. At the same time, there is a deeper layer to explore. The cultural stories, which our parents told us, and their parents told them, the stories that give a face to our demons. The old moorings are being cut. Stories our parents told us are now in doubt. The stories our leaders tell us seem to be on the side of the demons. Social media opens up a new way that makes people wonder if the cultural way demons have been scaled in the past is relevant in the present.

Looking with that telescope, we can see everywhere that we have great uncertainty as to whom we trust to watch our back. The old consensus and stories are looking thread-bare. No one is sure what the new stories will be and whether they will work or not. Not enough attention is focused on what has happened to collaboration—has the world grown tired and cynical with the old demon stories and the old storytellers?

Novelists, at least some of them, are groping in the dark, trying to light a candle and tell this story.

In Thailand, we have the ever-present spirit house. When I first came to Thailand twenty-five years ago, it was common to see spirit houses. This is still true. What has changed is that fewer people perform the daily rituals. The modern middle-class office workers go along their way past a spirit house without much thought. Spirit Houses look like doll like temples. They vary in size. Some very grand and elaborate, and others basic and plain. Someone, usually a landowner, erects and tends the spirit house, placing small wooden or plastic figures such as elephants and nymphs, and also daily brings food, water, cola, and flowers, fruit and incense sticks. You see them kneeling in front of a spirit house, the smoke rising from incense sticks above their head. Thais have performed this ritual for centuries to appease demons. The cultural belief is that if no one bothered to leave elephants to ride and nymphs to frolic with and beautiful, lush flowers, food and drink, the demons would bring down misfortune on all who lived nearby. In Thai culture, you bribe the demons in order to earn their protection. A happy, content and well-bribed spirit is happy to see you have good fortune. What about a spirit that hasn’t received its daily bribe? That state of affairs can be leading to psychic disturbances.

For a traditional Thai, it would be a stretch to call the ‘spirit’ of the place a ‘demon’ but the way that spirit must be appeased and the fear of upsetting or causing the wrath of that spirit comes within the classic definition of demon-hood. An all powerful, invisible force that will turn on you in a moment, inflict misery, bad luck and pain unless appeased. When the spirit substitute becomes a visible human face, the same rules naturally apply. How we face our demons is the ultimate test of how we face one another.

This is one example of what Sir Francis Bacon called ‘idols of the mind.’ That is another way to illustrate how our particular tribe has used various images, objects and rituals to colonize our mind.

As the Thai spirit house shows, the colony inside our heads is not generic. The idols of a mind from another tribe often appear trivial, silly and old-fashioned while our own idols, well, those are ‘idols’ and we can’t been colonized, they are the real McCoy.

Sir Francis Bacon formulated the idea of “idols of the mind.” Bacon had four categories of false idols: the tribe, the cave, the marketplace, and the theatre. He thought of them as false. He would no doubt have used the example of Thai spirit houses as an example. Modern scholars wouldn’t use ‘idols of the mind’ they’d say we suffer from cognitive bias. We need to be careful about our characterizations. Our cognitive framework is, of course, biased. No one can stand above and beyond the built-in limitation.

What we can do, as readers and writers, is to identify those rituals, beliefs, stories and ideas, which are mutated collaboration devices and analysis whether they are being used by powerful elites for other purposes. It’s the mutation of these rituals, beliefs, stories and ideas, designed to protect our backs that is the ongoing story of our time. Some of the more recent digital collaborations such as computer gaming (e.g., FarmVille), Wikipedia, Twitter, and Facebook, suggests that we are at the beginning of a new and novel ways to co-operate, associate, share, protect, warn and inform and more and more people are straying from the ancient pathways of the tribe. Not surprisingly tribal leaders are both under siege and using repression to reassert their monopoly over dealing with the demons of their people.

And we’ve found another way to collaborate and watch each other’s back that cuts right across all the old boundaries. That makes it an exciting time, a dangerous time, a time when our demons circle, waiting to see if these developments brings them new opportunities—or whether we will have a better understanding of our fears and new tools to shape our minds to control them. It becomes our never-ending story. Collaborations will remain the best game in town against all classes of demons. Ask yourself: who is watching your back, and whose back are you responsible for watching. Being part of a team and co-operating is may not be the only game in town but without it neither you nor me would be here.

I have observed in this space before that author bios tend to be short on interesting detail and overfull of prize lists. Philip Roth, for example, doesn’t seem to exist, according to his bio. He doesn’t live anywhere, nor was he born. He simply receives prizes. This week I’m reading a very good historical novel by a writer who shall remain nameless. Perhaps it’s best that she remain nameless, because her name exists, according to her bio, only as a receptacle for prizes. Seven prizes are listed, plus four for which she was shortlisted. I note that she was a nominee for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award (I’m told this is a big deal, but the name just smacks of a pub quiz in honor of an old boy who’s always in the snug nursing a pint of bitter and looking half dead). It occurred to me that writers might set up such a prize and award it to themselves. I’ve already won a couple of literary prizes, but had I not done so, I’d invent a prize and bestow it upon myself so that I could refer to myself as a prize-winning author. Now I’ve decided to do the same thing for my colleagues by handing out prizes and, more importantly, incorporating the word “Prestigious” into the name of the prize, assuming that most readers will think this is an adjective to describe the prize rather than part of the prize title itself. This is genuinely more and more important in an age when it’s difficult for many authors to get attention, because newspapers and magazines review fewer books, if any, and conventional media publicity avenues are swallowed whole by the Patricia Cornwells and Salman Rushdies. Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll be accepting your nominations for the following prize categories. (Note, authors are welcome to nominate themselves. Because that’s the irreverent point. But readers can participate, too.) Please add your nominations to the comments section of the blog and note that I won’t mind if you nominate books that weren’t written in the last year, because most of the books you think are new are really a few years old; who can pay attention to all the new releases, right?

The Prestigious Matt Rees International Prize for a Book I Bought Because It Had a Nice Cover (Kindle readers, please ignore.)

The Prestigious Matt Rees International Prize for a Book I Bought Because It Was Nominated for Prizes But Ended up Wondering What the Judges Were Thinking

The Extremely Prestigious Matt Rees International Prize for the Best Book by Matt Rees This Year

The Prestigious Matt Rees International Prize for the Best Book That’s Kind of Like “The Kite Runner”

The Prestigious Matt Rees International Prize for the Book Least Likely to Be Made into a Movie

The Prestigious Matt Rees International Prize for the Crime Novels Whose Violence is Most Likely to Make You Sick to Your Stomach

The Prestigious Matt Rees International Prize for a Book by an Indian Author with the Most Inventive Use of Exotic Fruits and Trees in the Title (known affectionately as the “Mango” prize)

The Prestigious Matt Rees International Prize for Crime Fiction for a Book You’d Swear You’ve Read Before

The Prestigious Matt Rees International Prize for the Least-Merited Enormous Literary Reputation

The Prestigious Matt Rees International Prize for Crime Fiction for a Book You’d Swear Only Just Received the Same Award

I’ll also accept nominations for categories I haven’t mentioned here. Send them to me and I’m sure they’ll be rather… prestigious.

Like an angry Greek god
dusk crashes swiftly on the sea
powered by a lightning rod
Hermes prophecy for all to see

Deflation of sacred cultural cows
black towers silhouetted by the sky
wars destructive force ebbs and flows
the sovereign mind rules the third eye

Procreant body fluids splash on Venus thighs
as war turns the green land fused in bloody rain
pirouetting she sails through purple evening skies
her progeny awaited in this culture of lies and pain

High society filled with impudence and self destruction
they worship self indulgence and wanton pleasure
ignore illuminists the prophecy of the volcano of sedition
caveat emptor, the revolution will plunder your treasure

The privileged and titled indulge in tasteless bling
snort cocaine, smoke cigars and binge on claret
manicured fingers pimpled with diamond rings
poisoned tongues wagging like jungle parrots

Among ice floes and the bitter Arctic snow
breeds and hunts the noble polar bear
ursus deus, he kills so his progeny may grow
sated the ivory beast returns to his lair

He is not blind but the truth can not see
society has imprisoned him on Death Row
as man conspires and plots ecological heresy
ursus deus wanders in Antarctic snow

Tread softly, vain anti-intellectuals, the die is cast
the revolution will abolish the tyranny of rich over poor
oer Mammons treasure chest a flag flies at half mast
beware the prophecy, the revolution will plunder your treasure

Antonio Pineda (2011)

The United Kingdom is still a very class dominated society. Our Prime Minister, David Cameron, might like to think that he’s being ‘one of the people’ by flying with a budget airline to Spain for his holiday, but he’s fooling no one. We know he’s rich, we know he’s aristocratic and we couldn’t really give a toss whether he chooses to spend his own money on budget flights or whether he wants to go first class to the Moon. If that were public money, I’d be pleased, but it isn’t and so I really don’t care. Fly cattle class across the Atlantic or to Australia, David, and you’ll impress me. If not, just keep it to yourself.

There’s the same ‘look, we’re just like you’ thing going on with the Royal Family. Prince William is marrying a ‘commoner’. I suppose taken in the sense of ‘not royal’, Kate Middleton is a commoner, but she’s hardly Sharon from a council flat in West Ham is she? Her parents are millionaires, she’s connected. William, dear, marry Sharon whose mum drinks Bacardi Breezers down at the Working Mens Club every Friday night with her unemployed boyfriend and maybe we can talk about how much life experience you can share with the common herd. Maybe it’s because we’ve got a Conservative government now, but there seems to be a lot of upper and upper middle class guilt going on at the moment. Maybe they’re trying to appease the rest of us, fearing, after the student protests against tuition fees at the beginning of the year, a revolt amongst the ‘unwashed masses’? I can see why they might be nervous. A lot of us on the dole is probably quite a worrying prospect. But then when you live in a gated community, or surrounded by beefy security men, I can’t really see how some Scally with his mum’s bread knife is really going to give you too much aggravation. Not unless, of course, you tell him how you’d really like to be like him. Oh God.

In my circle of friends and family, I know a lot of people who have recently become unemployed. Government cuts have hit hard and even those of us who are still employed are just about clinging on by our fingernails. I know people with mental health problems, people with terrible addictions and folk who suffer physical illness with almost no money and so support whatsoever. What do you think David Cameron, Prince William, all the rest of you, that these people, all the ‘unwashed’ and that includes me, think when you say you’d really like to be ‘like us’? Basically it’s unrepeatable and do you know why? It’s about aspiration. I was the first person in my family to get a university degree. Go back two generations and you find hunger and illiteracy. Don’t these privileged people get that although we might not want to be ‘like them’ we do want some of the advantages, the power over our own lives and a few little luxuries, ‘just like them’. If we didn’t, why on earth would we bother to better ourselves?

When wealthy and powerful people tell me that they’d love to be ‘just like me’ it’s because they see the life of a writer as somehow dashing and romantic. They see shabby chic garden flats in West London where great ideas blossom over a picturesque old manual typewriter. They don’t see the headaches over the bills, the wild and uncharted mess that accompanies anyone who works 24/7 or even the overflowing cat litter tray that has to be dumped in the bin every morning. Less Lady Antonia Fraser and more Amy Winehouse after a heavy night, I am the sartorial equivalent of a derelict pub. Who, in their right mind, would want to be me?

Well, it’s people who don’t understand and I don’t blame them for that. What can people like Prince William or David Cameron know about people like me? Not much. They could try harder to get to know us and we could have a shot at not being so touchy and resentful. But one thing they must get to grips with if any of this class thing is ever, ever, ever to even begin to change is that they are not like us. They can’t be and even hinting at some sort of connection is ridiculous. Further, to say they want to ‘be like us’ and actually envy us our ‘homespun ordinariness’ is deeply, deeply insulting. So David and William, you go ahead and be wealthy, privileged and all the rest of it and I’ll get on with working and looking like the wrath of Satan. I wish you well. I hope you wish me well too. Just don’t say you’d like to me like me, because you wouldn’t.

I have been thinking about family murders – there has been a rash of them recently and they were, at one time, the quintessentially South African crime. But I can’t focus. There are just too many weddings on at the moment.

Weddings say as much about social fault lines, tension and desire as murders do, even if they rarely feature in crime fiction. There is the royal wedding in London next week. Buckingham Palace has been polished, there are flowers in the parks, the television channels are booked, commentators are digging deep into the mine of platitudes for things to say. However, despite the huge effort at whipping the dead horse of British public spirit into some semblance of enthusiasm, there seems to be little interest in the nuptials of Kate and Wills.

The press draws parallels with Kate and Diana constantly and it does seem as if the injured spirit of Princess Diana is hanging over the whole affair. When Diana married the unappealing and unfaithful Charles, the world was riveted. Diana was so young, so innocent, so virginal, the last in a centuries long line of girls (like the ill-fated Lady Jane Grey who was executed at seventeen) who were married off for dynastic purposes. Looking at those old wedding pictures, Diana looks like the human sacrifice she was. A living creature cynically used to keep the Royal Family going. Even if it was not novel, it was still a crime.

The wedding of Kate and William seems different. It is at once contemporary and old-fashioned. For one thing, Kate is old enough to know what she is doing. Kate has also been living with William for years, so the mythic spectacle of offering of an innocent virgin to a cynical and powerful man will be absent from this wedding. It is just a wedding, a knowing exchange of looks, power and money that might or might not last. It seems like a strategic and contemporary couple career move more than anything else. And they seem happy for it. Kate gets a balding but presentable man headed for a top job, if not the top job, in a firm that will survive the recession. William gets a socially adept woman who seems like one of the people because she is one of them, just wealthier and better groomed. Kate grew up with the era of celebrity frenzy that hounded her groom’s mother to her death and she has learned to handle the press with aplomb. It is not the stuff of fiction – not even Barbara Cartland could find romance in such a protracted and pragmatic courtship – but it will live forever on YouTube, as do those home movies of cats falling into the bath.

This past Easter weekend South Africa celebrated its own Wedding-of-the-Year, complete with salmon, silver Laboutin shoes and elephants. A real – perhaps surreal – event that took place in the entirely fictional – and perhaps criminal – universe of South Africa’s political elite.

Conspicuous poverty can be irksome. The poor, fed false promises until their stomachs turned, wear their hunger without shame. Poverty is not something that one can hide. But overt displays of deprivation could really get a bride down, especially when her day job is running the Zuma Foundation for Children and Destitute Women. No one wants to take work with them on their wedding day, especially not when one is wearing a Swarovski encrusted, off the shoulder dress and a diamond necklace so large that it looked at first like a Kevlar vest.

The photograph that filled the front page of the Sunday Times showed a beaming Duduzile flanked by two men. Not her new husband and her father, as one would expect, but her father and the jeweller who loaned her the diamonds. The perfect set up for a heist novel, of course, but that would not be the focal crime if I were to turn this flashy and rather tasteless event into a novel.

Because no diamonds were stolen – or lost – despite the obvious anxiety of the jeweller. What has been lost is a sense of political and moral decorum. It was rumoured last week that Ms Zuma organised twelve Lamborghinis to ferry guests to her Parisian-themed wedding. This might or might not be true, but the lavishness of the vehicles that whipped the invited elite to the wedding venue, a luxury game lodge in the impoverished Eastern Cape, carried more than a touch of the hubris of Marie-Antoinette.

I grew up in a world where it was expected that judges and juries would be neutral. That neutrality was an essential mechanism to resolve conflicts. Countries were also neutral. Places like Sweden and Switzerland had a long history of not taking sides, by staying on the sidelines, as other European countries took off their gloves and brawled in the streets.

I don’t recognize neutrality in the modern world. I’ve been searching everywhere for the retreating remnants of that defeated army called neutrality. People are not just expected but required to take sides. “Either you’re with us or against us,” said that great American philosopher George W. Bush. If there was ever a phrase that marked the end of an era, it came the date that phrase was uttered.

What has happened that we no longer have room for countries and people who are neutral in a dispute? Is it that we feel they are fence sitters? Are they opportunists waiting to take advantage when one side goes down in the dust? Or is it that we feel they lack conviction or courage? We doubt their motives, convictions and beliefs. Friedrich Nietzsche observed: “Convictions are more dangerous enemies of the truth than lies.”

Convictions, like values that underscore them, come out of our emotional well; the place we draw our sense of self and identity. Anyone trying to poison that well with an inconvenient fact is going to be run out of town.

This emotional state pushes back against the intellect unless the rational side supports the emotional boss. This interaction comes with a cost attached. Once there is no neutral ground, no person is respected for his or her neutrality; we’ve knocked the stool out from negotiation and compromise. Neutral people aren’t trusted. They make others fear they aren’t vested in their emotional stake or understand how that emotion is connected to their identity.

The Thais don’t want neutral observers on their border with Cambodia to observe the standoff between their army and the Khmer army. The decision supports an emotional feeling about territory and neighbors as well as defining the idea of Thainess. Thais don’t want neutral observers for the elections that appear to becoming soon. The Americans don’t want a neutral UN human rights expert to meet in private with Private Bradley Manning who is being held in military detention and without formal charges. There is little chance that rational, independent arguments will change minds in these circumstances.

The Chinese don’t want the Nobel Peace Prize Committee going to a dissenting citizen and feel that the committee isn’t acting in a neutral fashion in making the selection but is choosing one side over another. And so it goes on and on, around the world, from pillar to stone, from congresses, parliaments, presidents, prime ministers, filmmakers, opinion makers, pundits, and novelists to the far reaches of our species. Every niche filled with quarreling sides, factions within factions, lines drawn on the basis of religious, ethnic, gender, age, nationality. We automatically color ourselves between these social, political and cultural lines as this allows us to live securely inside the comic book we call modern life.

In a world where neutrality is a dirty word the creation and consumption of information is tailored to support the position of one side. Journalism becomes a corporate information delivery system. The Guardian recently had an article about the popularity of crime fiction in Sweden (formerly known as a neutral nation—post NATO sorties over Libya—now known as partially neutral, like those places which have a partially free press). The article takes the position that left-wing sentiment is reflected in the best selling Swedish crime fiction and this is has made it a commercial success. By promoting through fictional devices the left-wing agenda, conspiracy theories, such novels have given readers the kind of dark, gloomy world they’ve come to accept as their destiny.

I have a theory why neutrality is in disrepute. It goes to the heart of evolutionary theory. There are no neutral agents or environment in nature. Those who survive do so not by being neutral but by besting the competition inside their niche. To be neutral is to face oblivion. Perhaps neutrality has always been a ‘construct,’ a kind of sham that allowed for non-committed people to exert influence in a highly conflicted environment. Emotions provide the heat and passion for those with strong convictions to demonstrate, protest, threaten, intimidate, imprison or murder when issues such as going to war, gun control, legality of drugs, prostitution, abortion or capital punishment are raised. It is difficult to find a neutral referee in such debates that can change the mind of either side or keep the peace between them.

There is another explanation—that we no longer have room for non-participants, non-believers, or non-stakeholders. Such people or countries are thought of with disdain or out of touch with reality. Most places portray those who assume the old position of neutrality as weak, confused, stupid, or at best apathetic. Neutrality has been downgraded to a kind of mental failure. Power and strength fills the political vacuum and no neutrality will interfere into the pursuit of national interest.

In this post-neutrality world, most democracies no longer act democratically. They have the words but not the action that allowed a place for neutral people to express their views and opinions. Those voices are largely gone. And those that remain are met with silence, neglect or banishment. Most leaders are expected to ignore those who come from a neutral outside source to observe, study and report.

Victory is measured in terms of submission to the principles and desires of the strongest. The losing side eats the dust of history, and shares that buffet with the last of the neutral men and women who no longer matter as the victory parade marches past with the marchers filled with pride, conviction and a vow never to surrender their emotional freedom to someone who might be seen as challenging a cherished delusion.

In the Royal Navy, there’s only one kind of facial hair allowed. British Tars are either clean shaven or they sport a beard, known in the service as a “full set.” The antipathy to the mustache is no doubt because of its predominance among the rival landlubber officer class (although it could’ve later been its association with a different kind of “sailor.”)

Book authors now fall into similar categories. There are those who do nothing online and those for whom each book must be accompanied by the full set.

Those who do nothing are usually writers who were already well-known before the web became so important. They don’t need to be online, so they aren’t. Or they’re too old to get into a new kind of writing. Me, I have the internet full set. Here’s what I’ve got going on already for my new book, which is out in two weeks in the UK:

First there’s the updated website, www.mattrees.net. The website is, of course, the equivalent of facial stubble. Everyone’s doing it, even those who don’t get around to growing a full set. Some of them are pretty rotten and look like they’d itch… You can tell that the writer only sports the stubble because he thinks he has to – a fashion necessity. He’d get rid of it in a moment if the fashion changed.

I’m very involved in the design of my site. I put lots of Extra Features in it. You can hear much of the music from MOZART’S LAST ARIA, my new book. (It’s a historical thriller in which Mozart’s sister tries to uncover the secrets of the great composer’s death.) I have a couple of brief essays about how I came to write the book; how I researched it; how I structured it to mirror my favorite Mozart piano sonata. A photo tour of all the real locations featured in the novel, and images of many of the real characters from the book.

Of course, I also paid for the thing.

On the site, you’ll also find the book video. The book video is the mustache of the authorial full-set. Everyone’s doing one these days, but they’re quite hard to get right. They often end up looking weak and thin. (Sorry if this facial hair analogy is going on a bit too long, but actually I think it works…) There are two videos in fact for this book – one two-minute version for short-attention-span types; and a five-minute director’s cut with a whole extra sequence. The music for the video is performed by Orit Wolf, a friend of mine who’s a concert pianist.

I dressed up as Mozart. I dressed my son up as Little Mozart. And of course I paid for it all, too.

Ah, but it’s not over yet. If you’ve been following the analogy, then you’ll recall that I have a mustache and stubble, so far. The full set must include a few further features and a lot of updating of current features. I have to get my blog designer to change all the “Matt’s Latest Book” stuff to reflect the new book. I have to load my video everywhere else I possibly can, like Amazon.com, for example.

I’ll post a reading sample on the website. I’ll podcast a section of the book read by me. I’m still planning to podcast sections of the book as read by Michael Caine, Richard Burton and Mick Jagger (well, ok, my impersonations of them reading MOZART’S LAST ARIA, but I figure I’ll be able to get some Stones fans to my site…)

With those podcasts, I’ll also be introducing the readings with a little chat from me about the book’s themes. Later in the year, when the book comes out in the US, I’ll be doing a “virtual book tour.”

As I’m doing this, I also have the manuscript of my next book, a novel about Caravaggio, to complete. My UK publisher is expecting that at the end of the month. Now, to get into character for that book, as it were, I decided to try to look a bit like Caravaggio. So I grew a real beard.

Maybe when I do publicity for that one, it’ll truly be the full set.

Ficksburg, in the dusty heart of South Africa, was until last week one of the small, hopeless towns that one accelerated past unless you needed petrol. Towns like it have been the backdrop in recent years to an increasing number of protests, marches, burning tyres, angry crowds with raised fists. There have been the occasional volleys of stones. These have bounced of the armoured cars of the riot squad just as the anguish of the poor has bounced off the plexi-glass shielded consciences of our politicians.

No longer.

Last week a man called Andries Tatane took part in a march against a state that is failing its people at the point where government matters most to individuals – the provision of water, power, health, education and housing. The basic ingredients of a decent life. Tatane was one of the faceless millions of South Africans who have been short-changed by the promise of prosperity that was the pot of gold at the end of our nation’s rainbow.

During the protest, for reasons that remain unclear, he was set upon and sjambokked by a large number of policemen in riot gear. He was then shot at close range and he died in the street soon afterwards.

Tatane is not the first person to die in what are called ‘service delivery protests.’ Some months ago police in another small, anonymous town shot a schoolgirl dead. There was a great deal of political pussyfooting about her death. There have been other deaths in other places. These earlier killings have slipped below the surface of our troubled political waters.

Tatane’s death has been different. First of all his murder was recorded on mobile phones and video cameras. It was immediately broadcast on state television, a sign that the news editor was thinking as a journalist not as a political lapdog. The images are so similar to the images that have been coming from Syria, Bahrain, Libya and before that from Egypt and Tunisia where there is now a flowering of hope and political optimism.

There are similarities and differences. The protesters across north Africa and the Middle East, as poor, as desperate the service delivery protesters in Ficksburg and elsewhere, came up against the murderous hubris of governments too long in power. The Jasmine Revolution is happening because dictators closed the space for dialogue long ago. That, combined with poverty, drove their people’s backs against the wall.

South Africans are getting closer to that wall, but there remains the hope of a different, democratic outcome. If we – the government, those aspiring to government, and the people, – learn to talk another languages, if we learn to listen.

Andries Tatane died in the arms of his friend Molefi Nonyane, one of the march organisers. Nonyane told reporters that he knows who the officers are because he had been talking to the men while helping to marshal the protest. ‘I was walking and talking with them,’ said Nonyane. ‘I thought we were working together, but they turned on the community and they took a life.’

Why did these policemen turn on the community? What allowed them to view an unarmed man as an enemy? Why did they kill Andries Tatane in full view, according to witnesses, of their commanding officers? Why, unlike Nonyane, did these policemen think that they were working against, rather than with the community it is their job to protect?

The policemen involved have been arrested and charged. That is a good thing and the trial will reveal some uncomfortable truths about the nature and the exercise of state power in South Africa. There was, I believe, something more complex than the unruliness of a few rogue cops led to the killing of Andries Tatane’s in Ficksburg. Andries Tatane was one of many South Africans who, excluded from a political conversation with an increasingly defensive state, have been using the language of the street, the collective physical conversation of protest that is impossible to ignore.

The protagonists in this particular tragedy operate within a political culture in which debate, difference, dissent and tolerance are losing traction as the fundamental values on which South Africa is premised. Those who express their dissatisfaction with how wealth and power are distributed are increasingly vilified or silenced. It is how this we engage in this conversation that will determine our future. All of us, citizens, policemen, politicians, need to learn how to hear each other.

Now here’s a thorny issue. France. Or rather a new French law that prevents Muslim (or any other women) covering their faces in public. If they do so they risk being fined and having to go on a course about French life and culture. Not exactly public execution but unpleasant and above all, I feel, discriminatory.

That said, I must say that I do balk at criticising the French too loudly. I am not after all, French myself and so I cannot know how strongly, or otherwise, they feel about this issue. I do know that France is and has been for a very long time, a secular country and that secularity is a, if not the cornerstone of their political life. That I can only applaud. Here in the UK we still, if minimally, retain involvement of the church in state affairs. This is not generally a problem and can sometimes even be of benefit except of course when politicians like ex-Prime Minister Tony Blair use the Almighty to justify an illegal war. But all that said, I would, given the choice, always go for secular rather than religious government – up to a point.

Those of us with secret and sometimes not so secret grey hairs will recall the old Soviet Union and its ‘enthusiastic’ pursuit of a secular utopia. It involved things like collective farms, a space programme, athletic prowess, Stalin, the ruthless suppression of dissent and religion and of course, the all conquering Red Army. And however much one wanted to believe that all the Christian Orthodox priests who managed to cling to life in the Soviet era were just rather pathetic reactionaries, one could never quite believe that or even begin to condone the cruel and unfair treatment that was meted out to them. It is also quite instructive to note that in modern times, post Soviet Russia is a place where the Christian Orthodox religion is now alive, well and at the centre of public life.

So how does this relate to covered ladies in France? Not for a moment am I saying that France is in any way like the old Soviet Union. In many ways it’s a far more free and easy place than my own country. But I do think that this new law is a bad move. What harm are these ladies actually doing? If we assume that they are all covering their faces out of free choice and because they want to honour their God in that way, then where is the problem? I accept that it is possible that some of these women may have been coerced into covering themselves by their male relatives, but then many people who adhere to all sorts of other religions are probably made to do things they maybe don’t actually want too.

I am not religious, what do I know? Well, I know that as a democrat in a democratic society, I value freedom of speech and of expression. The argument is often used that some of the countries that Muslims come from do not allow freedom of thought, word or deed and so we in the west are better than they are. But, even if true, is that any reason to institute laws that limit people’s freedom of expression? I don’t think so. I also don’t think that banning face veils will have any effect upon those people who like to live separately from the mainstream and who seek to practice a very austere form of their religion. Not all of those people cover their faces after all. Some people with extreme view look just like the rest of us. On the other hand, I have met numerous women over the years who choose to cover up but who are also active and engaged in society and have a sense of humour to boot!

I understand fear and I can totally relate to a preference to see someone’s face when you are talking to them. But that’s my preference and it isn’t all about me. Peaceful freedom of expression is one of the most valuable things that we have here in the west and we’re just about clinging to that by our fingernails anyway. This will not, I think, help in any way at all.

What drives the current interest in noir fiction is that the stories validate our worst fear. There are no longer any heroes who will ride to the rescue, put things right between those in conflict. What has happened to the heroes who rose above the crowd to serve the large community interest? Or did those people always live deep in mythology and not the real world?

I write a crime series about a private eye, Vincent Calvino, who works inside a system of vanished heroes. Many of the Calvino readers like the realism of the novels and critics have commented on their authentic insight into Thai culture.

It seems like a lifetime ago when Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces was read and quoted; it was part of the public conversation that people who read books had with one another. The new age has hugely diminished the idea of heroes. We have become too cynical to celebrate heroes. The concept has been tainted by disappointment of those elevated to hero status who performed in less than heroic ways.

Our preoccupation as writers and readers has taken a different course. Readers, if what is selling in fiction is a barometer, are more interested in exploring the political, social and economic landscape in search of the Villain with a Thousand Faces. The popularity of crime fiction is connected with this new reality. The reader devours stories where villains are unmasked. The crime novels confirm our deepest suspicions about those who have power over others by virtue of skill, wealth, family name, status and position.

Deference to authority has been undermined worldwide. It seems no institution or ruler has been spared scrutiny and criticism. When respect for authority is replaced with hostility, mistrust and hatred there is a deeper effect: people begin to believe this hero business has always been a sham. There aren’t a thousand faces; there isn’t even one face that is heroic. The idea of heroes is nearly dead. They seem old-fashioned and remote. The first casualty suffered by the traditional elites is the privilege to use heroic status to advance their interests, position, and privileges. Once the sacred veil has been lifted, people lose their fear to challenge authority. It is that absence of fear that is a defining characteristic of people who have taken to the streets calling for change.

Anti-heroes like Richard Stark’s Parker, the professional criminal, have a code of conduct, one that says a bullet in the head is the penalty for a double-cross. Parker doesn’t pretend to be decent, nice, sociable or sentimental. He is a practical organizer and outlier who exploits an opportunity solely for personal gain. He doesn’t try to be heroic when one member of the criminal team double crosses him, Parker has no problem shooting the traitor in the back as he or she tries to escape.

These villains are unmasked as consumed by greed, envy, motivated by revenge, fueled by money, powerful connections, and high status. They often, on the surface, resemble the kind person who used to be a hero. But something is absent. We rack our brains to ask what has slipped away, leaving the heroes without the emotional scaffolding that has supported them for thousands of years.

I don’t pretend to have the full answer. But an explanation has been the challenge to the sacred. In the West, the sacred has been on the way out for more than a hundred years. Ever since Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche proclaimed that God was Dead, the sacred has been in the death throes. In our life time, we’ve watched the sacred in the West die; we’ve witnessed a clash between the crowds demanding changes and the authorities using violence to retain position of power that were traditionally sacred based. Those who are part of the old political structure fear that they will gradually lose out to and will be replaced by the profane, the material, the now, and consumerism.

Looking back, we can see how importantly linked the sacred and heroes have always been connected. The heroes with thousand faces explored by Joseph Campbell through many civilizations and cultures shared a common thread—they were associated, touched by or served the sacred. When the society shifts from the sacred to an acceptance that we are in a secular battle with he selfish gene, and no amount of worship or ritual is going to change our biological destiny, no higher power, no sacred book, person or code gathers a community into one that inspires men and women to sacrifice themselves to such a larger purpose. Sheltering in the cozy common purpose to worship the sacred has always been a convenient refuge in gloomy, miserable times.

We have secular teams in sports, offices, the military, political parties, and loyalty to the team is often thought of as heroic. Though if there are dark secrets the team is keeping away from the rest of us, then disclosure of that conduct becomes, in some quarters, the new avenue for heroes to walk. Wikipedia has been part of the mythology of hero creation for a modern era.

In noir, it is every man and woman for himself or herself. With the sacred in many parts of the world abandoned or marginalized, we need to accept a world without heroes created in the traditional way. Heroism was another way to celebrate the sacred. There is little celebrating in that realm today. The void is filled with cynicism and pessimism. The new noir gives expression to the collective feeling that in an age of villains, there is no way out of the existential dead end. All of the elites have been corrupted by self-interest. This Hobbesian world streams at us through our TV screens, in blogs, newspapers, non-fiction books and novels. We are still trying to absorb the lesson of what it is like to live in a world without heroes. We haven’t worked our way through exactly what this new world will look like.

Perhaps all times have been gloomy and miserable but our time, this time, having jettisoned the mysticism of the sacred, our base delusions have exposed those who would have occupied the shoes of heroes in the past are ordinary mortals like the rest of us. That makes people restless and angry. Turn on the TV news; you see them filling the streets around the world. You are watching people shedding their ‘sacred’ notions, their heroes, and their traditions and, like Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, they are waiting for someone who will never come. Heroes, like God, are dead. It will take a lot more courage to live happily in such a world. If I had to lay down a bet, it would be that the people with this special kind of courage that gives the rest of us hope that we can be better than we are. And just maybe will realize that deep down that has always been the definition of being a hero.