At our Ladies' Litera-Tea on 29 October 2023 we were lucky enough to hear Fiona Farrell give the following talk. Fiona has generously allowed us to share it with you.
So - here we are again- a group of women gathered around a stack of books. We’ve had the good fortune to be taught how to read - and that’s not universal nor a given. We’ve got enough money of our own to buy a book if we want and that’s not universal nor a given. And quite a few of us are writing books and getting them published, and that’s definitely not universal nor a given and it’s all so incredibly recent. The first time I was ever in a room like this was Palmerston North, 1988, a new thing. A book festival. A women’s book festival.
Women read! Who knew? We read fact and we read fiction, which for women has always been more than just a story. It’s a form that was developed by women at a time when our roles were limited, it has had a kind of samizdat function, a way of creating a silent community when actual community was difficult. It’s where women have found out what other women really think, what we most desire, what we feel or know. And there it is: all neatly contained in this thing: the book. This greatest artefact of our civilisation, something we make from trees, from wood pulp and old rags and fill with a code of line and circle we learned to decipher in earliest childhood, a code that translates the miracle of human speech, so as a species we are not restricted to grunt or squeak or snarl, but can express the most delicate nuances of thought and feeling.
I’ve written fiction ever since women burst into the room back in the 80s and for me it has always been fundamentally a political act. My great grandmother signed her name with a cross. I’m lucky and I know it. The beneficiary of feminism and socialism and medical technology, birth control, vaccination. And when I sit at my lucky desk, making things up, hearing conversations with people who don’t exist, imagining scenarios that are not real, yet have the power of hallucination away out there at the limits of rationality, I don’t think about a market or an audience: I simply want to figure something out for myself, something about being born female, and born here on these beautiful, complicated, conflicted islands, and on this planet at this precise point in an immense history. I’m playing but it’s serious play. I make up little challenges for myself, something that will keep me focused for the two years it takes me to write a novel: write a novel about genetic engineering, for example, and the proposal to introduce untested life forms to this country. But don’t take it head on: present it instead as a pretty pink Victorian romance about the introduction of ferrets where a disastrous outcome is only too evident. Or write a socialist history of this country since 1908 where the main character is a house. And I’ve loved every minute.
But what happens when fiction falters? What happens when fact becomes so overwhelming, so urgent, that sitting at my desk, making up an alternative reality, begins to feel ridiculous, irrelevant? What’s the point when it’s the hottest year on record and worse to come, and wildfires are burning in Australia and Greece and Canada, when you’ve read that around 82 species will become extinct today, four every hour, and next year, 2024, will be the end for the mountain gorilla, the black rhino, the forest elephant? What happens when you know twenty five people died of Covid yesterday, one of them a child, and ten friends have just got it for the second, the third time?
And it’s all so bloody terrifying. So I separate the recyclables in the bin, but a friend’s just got back from an atoll in the middle of nowhere north of Mauritius and he tells me its buried in plastic. And I deliver flyers for a political party that at least registers there’s a problem, the great big endangered elephant in the room, though my fellow citizens seem to be more bothered about potholes.And I do my best to reassure my grand daughters that all will be well, they’ll live in a wide world, they’ll grow up, have jobs and love and children and mountains, whatever they want - and they’ll go to Florence and see the Primavera, they’ll grow old as I have grown old.
And I don’t believe a word of it. It’s a triumph of wishful thinking, of fiction over fact. Fiction always ends happily. That’s the whole point, the litany of horrors that ends with a storybook flicker of hope. I am old enough to recall the shock of Neville Shute’s On the Beach, the book and the movie. That nuclear cloud rolling southward over the planet until it reaches Christchurch which is the certain signal that there can be no hope and Fred Astaire climbs into his little red Porsche and roars off round the track, faster and faster to crash bang, The End. The entire cast, the entire world has been wiped out. No tap dancing here.
But it’s more usual in even the most dystopian fantasies - Cormac McCarthy for instance, The Road - to leave a survivor meeting other remnant survivors, which makes it tolerable. We can shut the book, turn off the light and go to sleep. Life will go on. In fact, it will be better in a way. It’ll be Adam and Eve all over again, starting out on a conveniently cleansed planet. Fiction offers comfort and distraction. We put on the goggles of alternative reality and stumble blindly toward the edge.
Now I don’t want to think this, nor feel it, I don’t want to be the wrinkled hag, the withered crone ranting death, doom, despair…especially not now, not this afternoon when it is all so lovely and the women are here and the books and the cakes, and it’s just utterly gorgeous, an affirmation of our civilisation, the very best of us. But that’s what my book is about.
The Deck is based on another work of fiction, the Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio, a scholar who
survived another pandemic, the Bubonic plague that arrived in Florence in 1348, decimated the city and went on to kill maybe 20 million across Europe and Africa, though no one was really counting. It wasn’t the era of contact tracing and the 1pm press briefing.
His book is made up of a short preface describing in hideous detail what a plague unrestrained by vaccination can do, then shifts abruptly to story telling. Ten young Florentines, seven women and three men, escape for a brief respite to a villa beyond the city limits. The women are all young and beautiful, the men all young and gallant, the villa is exquisite, they eat delicious food, drink delicious wine and in the afternoons they recline in the shade of the garden and tell stories: a story each, over ten days to a topic chosen by one of their number whom they have nominated to be queen or king for that day. One hundred stories, all with a happy ending, or as Boccaccio puts it, an ’unexpected felicity.’
My book The Deck is about another plague, not Covid but something more deadly, something a little way off in the future, and a group of friends who escape for brief respite to a remote bay, still bush clad, still beautiful, and a crib, architecturally designed with pods - because this is the era of the pod - and they eat well, they drink well and in the evenings - as the sun sets on this little haven in a dying world, where civilisation, the entire structure in which we live is failing - they put all that aside and they sit on the deck and tell stories.
Stories from their lives but each told in a different mode of fiction, the romance in which the lover finds the beloved, the action story with guns and pirates, the fantasy with the sorceress, each story with its own kind of happy ending, its own kind of ‘unexpected felicity.’ And these characters are not young but old, my generation, the one that started off with such post-war promise and has stuffed it all up so spectacularly - and each of my characters represents some aspect of what we generally accept as ‘civilised’ existence: one is a lawyer, because law, that web of words, is what underpins our civilisation, and there’s an architect, a musician, a chef, an artist.
And a man called Baz whose life is engaged with the natural world and a woman called Maria who is a documentary film maker.
Fiona then read two extracts from her stunning novel - you can find The Deck here
