In his essay about capital punishment, Orwell describes a man who is walking toward the gallows. He swerves to avoid a puddle.
This is but a minor exemplar in James Wood's startlingly brilliant, recently-published book How Fiction Works. Wood was highlighting what he calls 'the reality effect' of a writer's use of an apparently irrelevant detail. His analysis is helpful in understanding the media's repeated headlining of the story about Britt Lapthorne's tragic death in Dubrovnik over the past few weeks.
How is it, when thousands of people are dying in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and millions are dying of hunger and preventable disease in Africa, and when all this is being exacerbated as the world's economic institutions go into free fall, with inevitable and massive loss of homes, jobs, health care, education and so on, that the headlines focus on one tragic tourist death?
It's heartbreaking to think of Lapthorne's sudden and probably violent disappearance. Likewise, it's unfortunate that perhaps the local police were not as forensically astute as one might have hoped.
But how is it that we are more focused on a tragedy which befell a young girl who was out in the early hours of the morning in a foreign country, than we are about billionaire board directors and managers of financial institutions selling off the risky debts they tricked people into taking and bringing the infrastructure of the whole world to its knees? The subsequent suffering will be, if we are to believe what we read, incalculable.
As I write, my eye rests on a print on my wall: Breughel's portrayal of the fall of Icarus. I have read about how it was inspired, in its turn, by Ovid's verse. He tells us that a fisherman, a lonely shepherd and a ploughman were there at the time, and that they observed Icarus' watery death.
In Breughel's painting, it is they who are given star roles as the final disappearing leg of Icarus makes but a small splash on the surface of the ocean.
Does the presence of the fisherman, shepherd and ploughman make the Icarus tragedy more real? Does the commentary on the investigation of one particular death offer us some sense of our own reality as we try and conceive of a world in which all expectations of predictability might cease? Perhaps ...
But Wood also finds that novelists can employ details