My novel

"It hasn't all been bad, but it's changed my thinking. The main upshot is that I'm writing a novel. Finally!" I announced; shyly but with a certain quiet assurance, I thought. Obviously this novel was no passing whim, I knew what I was about. I wasn't one of those fantasists who come to grief on page 6, or even page 206. (As it happened I had only reached the top of page 2, but that's not the point.)

"Who about?" 

This was an unexpected angle.

"You had better not think of putting me or my family in your book. I know your sort. You don't know when to zip your lip. You're a blab. You don't even know you're doing it until I pick you up on it."

Later on, Godfrey returned to the subject.

"You'll do anything to get attention. I've caught you before stealing other people's ideas and trying to take all the credit. You're always feeding off other people's energy."

Godfrey meant, his idea. There had been some unpleasantness recently about a joke of ours that I'd recycled. I claimed I couldn't remember if it was him who first said it or me. Godfrey said that was a lie, and that my memory was a very convenient excuse. 

When I said that my novel was of course pure fiction, he returned to that theme. 

"Yes, you'll twist it any way you want, just to make people like you. There's no honesty about you."

The fact is, Godfrey didn't want me to write a novel, and I regretted having mentioned it. He foresaw that anything I wrote would be grossly pretentious and self-absorbed. It would also be an ignominious failure, receiving three reviews and selling zero copies. He saw me becoming ever more distracted, down-hearted and arrogant. No-one grows humbler from writing a novel.

I looked at his sandy, thinning hair, sitting out here in the September sun. It had rained yesterday and probably would rain tomorrow.  The afternoon sky was filling up with contrails. Closed shops, scaffolding, people on mobility scooters. An ordinary scene in an ordinary town. Love, grief .... what was I honestly feeling? Or was it nothing much at all, just fabricated emotion with an emptiness beneath? 

Lying often requires you to tell a lot of truth. That's how it comes about that people who receive their news from sources we personally despise end up knowing a lot of the same things we know. You can't tell lies, for instance about Vietnam, unless you first guide your audience to the site of deception.

Should I be as free with this word "lie" as Godfrey was? Most falsehoods were spread by people who largely believed they believed them, exactly like truths. There was a process of selection; you can't tell everything. Unspoken laws of discourse enforce putting a consistent case together;  you select mutually supporting examples that lead to a clear conclusion. That is how you are taught to write in the classroom. You learn to deceive others just as you were deceived all through school. 

Godfrey was a workshop manager, he fixed fuel systems, told the office what parts to order, rearranged the schedule when a truck failed to show up. He deceived people a bit, neither the customer nor the office knowing exactly what had happened inside a vehicle. But it was small beer; he had a right to speak of honesty. 

It was when I thought about the professions, teacher, lawyer, journalist, academic, doctor, novelist, politician, priest... then I saw that what society rewarded (though understood as responsibility) were really the arts of deception: knowing what to say and not say, the approved narratives and the condemned narratives, how to head things off, how to gently dismiss, how not to get caught out, the language that can't be impeached and the reserve that isn't noticed. The model professional had integrity as an accountant has probity: as a reputation, valuable in the service of corruption and fraud. 

Would my novel betray Godfrey and his large family? Yes. I wanted to tell him that it was set in Ceylon, or in the court of Victor Emmanuel, but what was the use in pretending? There were other kinds of novelist (I was already a novelist!) but the only kind of novel I could write or would write was the treachery kind. It would be full of covert unauthorised reporting. If in my novel there should ever be a hand drumming on a tabletop, it would be a hand I knew as intimately and saw as clearly as Godfrey's hand now.

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