What We Talk About When We Talk About Crime by Jennifer Fleetwood

Posted by litlove

It’s not often that I’ll spend more than 99p on a Kindle book, but when I read the description of criminologist Jennifer Fleetwood’s essay collection with Notting Hill Editions, I didn’t hesitate to buy it. The premise sounded so enticing; it was irresistible to me as a reader very interested not just in crime fiction, but in the way that storytelling facilitates, complicates and sometimes transforms the reality of crime. In this book, Fleetwood takes seven personal narratives about crime ‘and examines the kinds of stories told, what they can do, and who for,’ she writes, in the context of a world that bristles with crime narratives of all kind, some of recent innovation.

‘Bookshop shelves heave with autobiographies by prisoners, victims, police and barristers; streaming platforms like Netflix and YouTube host hours of interviews with serial killers, death row residents, vigilantes and gang members; podcasts host a cacophony of personal anecdotes, and crimes are even live-streamed on social media. The past few decades have seen a remarkable rise in people speaking about crime publicly, as victims, witnesses, as people accused of, or convicted of breaking the law.’

The first four cases examined are Howard Mark’s autobiography of his drug dealing days, Shamima Begum’s disastrous interview with The Times, Olympic athlete Mo Farah’s documentary as a victim of human trafficking, and Prince Andrew’s carcrash interview with Emily Maitlis. Pretty excellent examples, I thought to myself. In each case, Fleetwood provides a comprehensive walk-through the narrative in question, and she makes a few points about them. But I began to feel uneasy at the subdued level of analysis. The chapter on Howard Marks concludes that the autobiography probably isn’t one hundred percent truthful. Mo Farah’s documentary shows that you need to be a huge success in your new homeland if your account of being trafficked is going to result in outrage and renewed acceptance, rather than swift deportation. The Prince Andrew account suggests that simply stating you are honorable is not evidence enough to persuade anyone. These were conclusions I could have drawn myself.

The Shamima Begum chapter is better. Here, Fleetwood makes a compelling argument that being an isolated, pregnant teen in a refugee camp, with a husband also imprisoned, Begum was not free to tell her story – if she was even able, given the level of trauma involved, to put together a story at all. Instead, the journalist, Anthony Loyd, exploited his opportunity for a scoop. At fifteen years old, Begum had run away from the UK with two girlfriends to Syria in order to join IS. The fact she would not express regret at joining the caliphate or denounce its atrocities was worked up into a media frenzy, with the result that Begum had her UK citizenship revoked and – as she feared – her baby died in the camp. This is a complicated ethical situation, and one more than worthy of revisiting with a cool eye. But I found myself frustrated that Fleetwood confined herself to discussing just this one interview and not the many subsequent ones Begum has made.

The problem was, this wasn’t at all the kind of book I’d been expecting. What crime does to, and with, stories is fascinating, and this didn’t seem to be getting any air time. Take your basic work of crime fiction: the dead body in chapter one represents the end of a story that has been invisible or disguised in order to fly beneath the social radar, and which will now require a master reader to piece together from incomplete fragments. When we look at crime accounts in the media, they offer a complicated Venn diagram in which ethical and moral stories dangerously overlap the monolithic myths of prejudice. A criminal trial is the battleground between two opposing narratives that will need to fight it out, each account subject to strenuous attempts at deconstruction en route to crowning one victorious. In other words, crime is a highly contested site for narrative, with stories jostling each other for precedence, proliferating unreliable truth content, fighting each other to be the defining representation. I understood that Jennifer Fleetwood was confining herself just to personal narrative, but even here we find the rich complication of our self-storied identities (the person we think we are, or ought to be) bumping awkwardly against the stories proposed by our acts and behaviour, post-hoc justification being a very powerful motivator for creativity. And this just didn’t seem to be coming out of her accounts.

The second half of the book improved. In this section, Fleetwood looks at Chanel Miller’s victim impact statement, true crime podcasts, and Myra Hindley’s attempts at an autobiography. For me, the chapter on Hindley was the best in the book, and there was much more to enjoy in her discussions of victim impact statements and the short shrift they often get in the courts. The chapter on podcasting saw Fleetwood finally talking more about stories themselves in this new format, suggesting that the podcast offered a place for failures of justice to be aired, and for ordinary people to get public attention.

And yet. Even here I found myself wishing that she would push her arguments further. For me, podcasts often exploit the grey area of old cold cases, or uncertain verdicts, where it’s not clear if a crime has been committed or if the correct investigative procedure has been followed. They tackle the definition of crime, sometimes our understanding of what crime is, and they challenge (and undermine) the work of the authorities in ways that have the potential to be troubling. As part of the democratization of knowledge, they give power and airspace to armchair Sherlocks, a situation that we ought to consider carefully. Take the Nicola Bulley case, for instance, in which a middle-aged woman disappeared on a morning dog walk. This attracted so much internet attention, with so many amateur sleuths insisting her husband had killed her, that the police ended up releasing private information about Nicola that in retrospect constituted an invasion of the family’s privacy. The information came out in an attempt to prevent an innocent and grieving man from being crucified in public, but at an unforeseen cost. The furore stemmed from the description of Nicola as ‘menopausal’ – itself an intriguing example of a word conferring a whole story upon a woman.

Oh, there was so much that could have been said in this book, about a culture that’s moved in living memory from Magdalene laundries to the prosecution of date rape; and from the kind of confession designed to renounce subjective desires and beliefs while reinforcing hegemonies, to the kind that makes wrongdoing a thing of intoxicating glamour. We live in a world where some people still get stoned in the streets, while Trump runs for the White House a second time. All this is due to the complex relationship between stories and the crimes they represent. I feel sympathy towards Fleetwood for having to confine herself within the short format that Notting Hill Editions offers – you never get to say as much as you want to in a piece of writing. And in fairness to her, she really does pick on some fantastic examples for her discussions. But this was, if you will forgive me for saying so, a criminal waste of the material.

Watch Me Turning That New Blogging Leaf

Posted by litlove

These past few weeks, I’ve made a new friend. It so happened that, in an idle moment in the weeks running up to Christmas, I clicked on one of those advertising links online that offered me a free in-depth tarot card reading. The reading I received surprised me by being more generous and detailed than I had expected. And since that day, the tarot reader has sent me regular emails, once or even twice a day, offering me limited edition fortune-telling goods of dubious nature, and never failing to inform me of challenges and opportunities on the horizon. I get a daily prediction addressed to ‘Dearest Litlove’, and at the end she always reminds me that she wants the very best for me, and will be delighted to help me out with any dilemma I should encounter. All of January, she has been a more than constant fixture in my relatively empty inbox.

‘You do realise you’re talking to a computer, don’t you?’ Mr Litlove asks me.

‘Surely not,’ I say. ‘I think she really likes me.’

Here’s a general rule of the universe: your inbox will never be more of a wasteland than when you are waiting for emails. At the end of last year I embarked on the wearyingly tedious business of finding a literary agent (or making an attempt at it). I have a novel I’m trying to sell, and I’ve got the novel itself with various friends, and the submission materials with various agents and the result is that now, no one writes to me. I think it’s going to be a pretty quiet year.

Mr Litlove has also had a quiet start to the year, though for slightly different reasons. He took a fortnight off for the festive season which was very pleasant for both of us. The first I knew about it was the week before Christmas when we were in the car together, headed into town after my first time of asking. ‘You’re being unusually amenable,’ I remarked. ‘Are you feeling okay?’ But as with all pleasant episodes, the end is mired in denial and obstinacy. Mr Litlove is supposed to be making a rocking chair (and I can’t tell you how delighted I am to have a rocking chair in prospect; I’ve long wanted one). But even with my very limited knowledge I can see that drawing the design is not easy. Much procrastination has followed, with Mr L. succumbing to rocking chair fear, and that’s totally a thing. He came into the study the other day, saying ‘Can we have a meeting? I used to have end-to-end meetings all day when I was at work and didn’t feel like doing anything.’ I’d rather staple gun memos to my forehead than have a meeting, and alas, his earlier suggestion of having a works Christmas party for the two of us fell on similarly stony ground. My heart does go out to him. It’s hard to procrastinate with goal-oriented introverts.

Where he can and does get me, though, is in the long-running ~~row~~ debate we are having over the news. For once I have to congratulate President-Elect Trump on providing a story that we can both of us enjoy. Not only an entertaining story, I understand today, but a story so like an old generic spy thriller that the very happy estate of one deceased author has actually brought forth the book with the exact same Russian blackmail plot (cue reprint, I imagine). Anyhow, I digress. Mr Litlove is a news hound. Every day he gets up and reads The Guardian and The Telegraph on his phone for 2-3 hours with Radio 4 playing in the background. In my world, if I did that much reading, it would be called research and it would be intended for a specific project. But the real problem arises between us because I take a very skeptical position in relation to the news. I scarcely believe one partisan word of it. And I am deeply unimpressed with Radio 4’s coverage, especially on the Today programme, which takes a ludicrously adversarial position towards any and every subject, with grumpy, negative, argumentative people intent on making sure all possible arguments are heard regardless of whether those arguments have any value or not. In short, it drives me nuts.

But that doesn’t stop Mr Litlove from inflicting it on me, and so I feel that he should be made aware of the rules in my world. In academia, you can’t put forward an argument unless it is a) fully backed up with evidence, b) grounded by sources whose authority you can prove, c) ready to challenge its own stance because nothing is black or white, it’s always more complex than it first appears, d) ready to show the gaps in its knowledge, or the questions that remain unanswered but eschewing all speculation and unsubstantiated claims and e) acknowledging that stories and arguments are powerfully distorting because they assume shapes that reality does not have, and this must be taken into account. Oh, and there has to be a clear understanding of what’s important and what is not. Doesn’t sound much like the news, does it?

In all fairness, the only decent programme I’ve ever heard on Radio 4 was broadcast last week. It was a meditation on the supposedly post-truth world that we live in. And its conclusion was that we don’t live in a post-truth world, but we do live in a world where the sources of information we trust are deeply polarised. It made the excellent point that to believe anything, it must come from a source – be it person or authority – that we trust, and fit into the framework of knowledge that we accept. So, in other words, if you want to persuade a Christian religious fundamentalist of climate change, throwing more scientists and scientific data at the problem is going to have a counter effect. It’s a bit like saying, if you want to convince Spanish people of something, you can’t go in talking German. So if we apply this thinking to our household problem with the news, the media are going to have to produce arguments more like those I consider to be useful and accurate, if I’m to believe them. But given Mr Litlove is already fully on board with the media, he will resist all criticism (and he does) to the hilt.

As so the individual family mirrors the wider world. We all have radically different sources we trust. But we live in a culture in which all those different voices, all those different opinions are considered to have truth value. How on earth are we going to agree on anything?

Still, if I argue with Mr Litlove for long enough, it does finally make the workshop look more tempting to him….

Glad Tidings (For Those Fed Up Of The News)

Posted by litlove

Whether you celebrate Christmas or not, I imagine most people are looking forward to some festive holidays of one kind or another. And probably looking forward to the end of this year as well; 2016’s been quite the curve ball, hasn’t it? I’m tempted to take it back and see if I can get a refund. Wherever you are and whatever you’re doing, I hope you are feeling as peaceful as this beautiful illustration by P. J. Lynch.

One thing I wanted to share with you that gladdened my heart a few weeks ago was an article in the CAM magazine that comes to alumni of Cambridge University. There’s a modest, one-page piece by Professor Simon Goldhill right at the back that talks about the group of academics and policy makers from the Middle East whom he convenes three times a year for two intensive days of debate. These people cannot meet on their own territories for all kinds of political reasons. But they come to the neutral city of Cambridge to discuss basic, pragmatic issues like civic infrastructure over the entire region of the Middle East. This is an extract from the article:

The debates are riveting – and properly collaborative. A young female colleague who grew up in Jenin was holding forth about how the United Nations’ plan to widen the streets in the camp was seen as a plot to bring in tanks. Another participant interrupted: “You had better blame me, then,” he said, “I drew up those laws. But that wasn’t their idea…”. The Palestinian instead of holding forth had to speak to the actual person who wrote the regulations – and the regulator had to face the recipient of his rules on the ground. Both learned from the exchange. Both had to recalibrate. The hope is that slowly such exchanges will eventually produce material that will change other people’s minds, too.

I thought this was uplifting in so many different ways. An excellent idea, brilliantly executed, safe, sensible and progressive. We don’t hear enough about the people out there in the world working with intelligence and insight to solve the problems that seem so threatening.

And I thought it was timely to remember that the media would not consider this to be newsworthy. It isn’t an emotionally manipulative, sensationalized, negative, fear-inducing piece of propaganda. Because that’s all the news delivers. The media keeps us in a state of anxiety, craving the next terrible thing they can tell us, the thing that proves yet again that everyone in authority is stupid, ignoring all the obvious solutions that seem so obvious to us. That’s simply a perspective on reality that the media creates; it isn’t reality. How many people, I wonder, are out there involved in properly helpful initiatives, like the one above at Cambridge? How many people are quietly going about their important work, far from the spotlight, unbeknownst to us all?

Lots of people. Lots and lots of them. We’ll just never hear about them.

But I was very grateful to Simon Goldhill when I read about his work, so grateful for the hope that work like his brings. Isn’t it time we reconsidered what constitutes the news?

The Self-Sabotage of the West

Posted by litlove

I suppose the thing is, it’s hard to live a good life.

It’s energetically demanding to keep negative emotions at bay, to remain open and inclusive, to feel ready to tackle difficult problems that have no simple solutions, to refrain from judging . Whereas it is so easy to fall into catastrophising, into resentment and hostility, into a lingering sense of injustice, into the media’s relentless net of fears and terrors.

Mr Litlove thinks that Trump is Brexit to the power of ten, that the world he knows is changing irrevocably for the worse, and that forces he doesn’t understand are rising. I completely get this – I feel it too. But the world has always been a cruel and violent place. It’s the past 60 years of peace and prosperity that have been the aberration. The tragedy is that we haven’t been smart enough to safeguard them.

The image that keeps coming to my mind this morning is that of the patient in therapy, battling against the damage done and old terrors. That patient keeps on trying to live a good life, but the deep-rooted self-sabotage comes back and back. Each time it returns, it returns in ever more acute form. So the patient is more aware of it, and more troubled by it, more afraid of its power, but still helpless in some ways to make it go away forever. It probably won’t go away forever. Whatever form the darkness takes – bigotry, unreasonable aggression, a creeping, paralysing sense of inferiority, greed, it will always need to be fought actively and energetically.

The West is an old troubled soul, torn between belief in, and nostalgia for, a form of glory that came at a terrible cost, and a new, liberal way of being that seems like hard work and hasn’t managed to prevent the spoils going to a small band of robber barons. The West wants to give in to the old bad habits of aggression and self-aggrandizement in order to feel better about itself, not quite realising that those habits are based on unreasonable but potent fears.

Giving in to those fears, whilst a kind of relief in the short-term, is no way towards a happy or stable life. Wallowing in fear and resentment – the motivators behind Brexit and Trump – only make us more miserable. And the people who are truly suffering: the poor, the disenfranchised, the marginalised, the disadvantaged, are going to be no better off than before. The qualities that are required to deal with intransigent social issues – compassion, the willingness to understand others and an instinct to share rather than hoard – have just been voted out of office. Neither Brexit nor Trump will do anything to prevent the rich getting richer.

For me, the biggest problem in the immediate future is the rise of lying as a way of gaining the popular vote. After Brexit, after Trump, what reason does anyone in political authority have for telling the truth, when extremist and outlandishly fictive statements are so much more effective? I thought we were sick of politicians lying to us, so why have we voted for the biggest liars every time? Ah well, myself I lay the blame squarely at the feet of the media, who have behaved, and continue to behave, with ghastly irresponsibility. They stoke fear and terror at every turn, report falsehoods and mendacious statements alongside more realistic ones as if there were no difference. I am currently alarmed by the ridiculous urging of the papers for a fast Brexit. So not only will we be committing a kind of economic and political suicide, but we will fall on our sword without taking the time to judge the angle that might miss most of the vital organs. How can anyone who voted for Brexit think that doing it hastily, confusedly and in an ill-thought-out manner will do any good? And as for the press in this country hounding the judges who insisted correctly upon the law… well, there words really do fail me. I’m not sure how we can allow this behaviour to continue.

If we have to be in a period of self-sabotage, and it seems that we do, then let’s try and insist on all the checks and balances and active restraints that we can, so we do ourselves the least damage. Let’s only believe the words that are reasonable, pragmatic, realistic. Let’s refuse to countenance the war-mongering and the scare-mongering and the alarmist tactics. Let’s keep our heads.

The good life always takes hard work. Let’s just keep working hard towards it.