The Suspicions Of Mr Whicher: or, Why Fiction Always Beats Truth
We watched the televised dramatisation of this based-on-a-true-story novel last night. We haven't read the book, and I for one don't intend to, even though it's been all over the bookshops in Trowbridge for ages because, you know, local interest and all.
( Fairly comprehensive spoilers behind here... )
The difference between fiction and reality is that fiction makes more sense. This may seem a strange thing to say, when we draw our criteria for "making sense" from our experience of reality. I don't mean that logic doesn't operate in real life, or that effects happen without causes (on the macroscopic level, anyway); I mean that in reality we aren't given all the facts. In a whodunnit it's part of the fundamental nature of the genre that someone is caught and that we, the readers, are given enough information to know that that someone is the right someone (unless the writer is playing at being "realistic," of course, and I wish they wouldn't) and that leads to a satisfaction at the end of a good whodunnit that stories like this, be they never so real, simply cannot deliver. Where there is a murder, there is a murderer, on that we all agree, but whether the right person gets punished is far less cut-and-dried in reality than it is in fiction, and all too often the answer presented simply does not seem to make sense, because we don't know all the facts.
And I think it's the same in other areas of life; things don't seem to make sense because we don't know all the facts, whereas in fiction we're used to clear and understandable explanations for everything. And that, dear readers, is why fiction beats truth every time, and why in reality we should never settle for an explanation that doesn't make sense. People have told me that life would be boring if we knew all the facts; I don't agree. I think life would become more like it should be, the best story ever written, and that the ending would still surprise us...but would make perfect sense.
( Fairly comprehensive spoilers behind here... )
The difference between fiction and reality is that fiction makes more sense. This may seem a strange thing to say, when we draw our criteria for "making sense" from our experience of reality. I don't mean that logic doesn't operate in real life, or that effects happen without causes (on the macroscopic level, anyway); I mean that in reality we aren't given all the facts. In a whodunnit it's part of the fundamental nature of the genre that someone is caught and that we, the readers, are given enough information to know that that someone is the right someone (unless the writer is playing at being "realistic," of course, and I wish they wouldn't) and that leads to a satisfaction at the end of a good whodunnit that stories like this, be they never so real, simply cannot deliver. Where there is a murder, there is a murderer, on that we all agree, but whether the right person gets punished is far less cut-and-dried in reality than it is in fiction, and all too often the answer presented simply does not seem to make sense, because we don't know all the facts.
And I think it's the same in other areas of life; things don't seem to make sense because we don't know all the facts, whereas in fiction we're used to clear and understandable explanations for everything. And that, dear readers, is why fiction beats truth every time, and why in reality we should never settle for an explanation that doesn't make sense. People have told me that life would be boring if we knew all the facts; I don't agree. I think life would become more like it should be, the best story ever written, and that the ending would still surprise us...but would make perfect sense.