by Lee Child
Stories need characters. At first I suppose they were generic and symbolic. The girl who left the village, the boy who outran a bear, the old man who would surely come along, any day now, to tell them where the aurochs were. I suppose some stories proved more popular than others, and more successful in meeting their emboldening aims. Probably last-gasp narrow escapes worked well. And sudden last-minute rescues, when all seemed lost. The characters in those popular stories would soon become eponymous. The girl who, the boy who, the man who, the woman who. Not the supporting characters, if there were any. Not the boy who got it wrong, or the girl who got eaten. From this early point onward, I think we focused on main characters. At first as types, probably. Stories became synonymous with the type of main character in them: The brave girl, the artful dodger, the wise old woman.
Of course, it’s important to remember that none of those people actually existed. They were all made up. There are only two real people in fiction – the storyteller and the listener. The story proceeds based on the teller’s aims and the listener’s needs. If the listener needs light entertainment, and the teller aims to be loved, then light entertainment is what the listener will get. But if the listener needs reassurance of some kind, or consolation, and the teller aims to better equip her family for future trials, then the story will likely be suspenseful in nature, replete with dangers and perils, over which a memorable character will eventually triumph in a decisive manner, such that the listener finishes the tale with a tight and determined smile, with moist eyes fixed on the distant horizon.
In order to keep memorable characters inspiring, they grew steadily, in both complexity and powers. Sooner or later they got a name, and a backstory and parentage, and possibly a lineage that linked back to people in earlier stories. And sooner or later they also got size and strength, and tremendous endurance, and nobility of purpose. They became larger than life, the better to stand out and lead. If they got too much larger than life, they were given supernatural explanations.
Bottom line, they became idealized examples of desired behaviours. But idealized by who? Desired by who? Remember, all characters in fiction are invented by the storyteller, to fit the storyteller’s agenda, which might be subconscious or subliminal, or might be absolutely in the front of her mind.
Who were the storytellers? We know very little about social organization during the Old and Middle Stone Ages. There may have been very little. The hunter-gatherer lifestyle is essentially cooperative and egalitarian. There was probably an overriding loyalty to the band or the group, but within it, maybe informality ruled. In which case the flautists and the painters and the storytellers would rise and fall on merit alone. For storytellers, the merit would come in two parts. First the composition of a compelling narrative, sometimes extemporaneously. (Although these days the best ‘spontaneous’ performances are rehearsed within an inch of their lives, and I don’t see why it would have been any different in the Middle Stone Age.) The second part was a talent for performance. Maybe even for acting the story out, with drama, and expression and timing. Now ‘voice’ is taken to be a vague stylistic issue to do with writing. Then it was literally a human voice, warm, spellbinding, seductive, drawing people in. The New York Times bestseller of the day was the storyteller with twenty rapt listeners at her feet. Not like the guy in the next hut along, with five fidgeters. Obviously that guy is not going to make it. Obscurity beckons for him. His audience of five will join her twenty. She’ll become a minor star, like the guy who finds truffles, or the woman whose dog catches deer.
Then something very strange happened. Weirder than language, weirder than fiction. In fact almost inexplicable, and completely irrational. Unhinged in a bad way. The Neanderthals would never have done it. The woman standing 248 places behind my grandma started farming. Which produced a whole mess of issues. Ownership of land had to be invented as a concept. Nomadic lifestyles were abandoned. We ate what we grew, which was sometimes a lot, and sometimes not much at all.
It was very bad for us. Before-and-after archaeological studies show farming made us smaller, weaker and sicker. One of the books kicking around our forty-plus-years-married bedroom is Against the Grain, by James C. Scott. In it he challenges the easy and unthinking assumption – to which I plead retrospectively guilty – that farming was somehow progress, natural and inevitable. Scott says it wasn’t. He wants to know why we would abandon a relatively pleasant lifestyle – finding truffles, catching deer, having time for stories – in favour of drudgery, disease and malnutrition. His final conclusion technically exonerates the woman 248 places behind my grandma. It turns out she didn’t start farming. At least not voluntarily. Her mistake was not to resist harder, when she was forced to start farming.
Scott’s analysis was that the five hundred post-glacial generations of Mesolithic hunter-gatherers had indeed lived a stable, simple, straightforward, satisfactory life, marked by notable levels of cooperation and informal equality. But that also, all along, the human brain had harboured notions of hierarchy and elitism. Some people wanted power and control. It was a long time coming. But eventually, for an unlikely combination of reasons, the time was right. People were sold the idea they should become subsistence farmers, in service to unpredictable crops and weather, in virtual slavery, and sometimes literal slavery. Reluctant adopters were coerced. Wheat was favoured by the elite as a crop, because it was energy- and value-dense, and easily bagged-up, and therefore easily taxed. One bag for you, one bag for me. Or whatever the rate was. (Did the bigwigs then go chill out and smoke dope? Archaeology says someone started to, right there, right then.) There would be excise raids, and penalties for low weight or late payment. The whole proposition must have been a hard sell. Recent research from the Mediterranean rim suggests that increasing population density might have been a factor. Encounters with other roving tribes might have become much more common, and possibly not pleasant – possibly even rivalrous. The idea was sold that people needed to band together, in one secure place, even at the expense of their own individual best interests, in order to resist the external enemy. Which if true was the birth of fascism, right there, 5,000 years ago. (From the Latin fascis, a bundle of separate sticks, tightly strapped together.)
Story must have played a part in that hard sell. The entire purpose of story is to manipulate. Previously who was doing the manipulating didn’t matter very much. It was always just some random person, with talent and energy, and no real agenda beyond some kind of empowering encouragement, which was intended to help the community as a whole anyway. But now there was a state, however rudimentary, and a government. There was an elite, and a hierarchy stretching out below them. There was power and control. The New Stone Age. A new system. Perhaps too long ago and too small and too prototype-crude to be given names from later periods, but all authoritarian and totalitarian governments need to control the story. From this point on, who was doing the manipulating mattered a lot. From this point on, there was an establishment, with powers of approval and prohibition that swung from the vague to the admonitory to the savage. From this point on, to get ahead of ourselves for a moment, there were official heroes, and there were folk heroes.
The stories told around the time the woman 138 places behind my grandma was alive are the first we know in any detail. They are the great Greek legends, most notably Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, respectively the oldest and second-oldest extant works of Western literature. To Homer (whoever he was, or however many different people he was) a ‘hero’ was a warrior who lived and died in pursuit of honour, and – specifically – had fought in the Trojan War. My daughter Ruth, the linguist, feels the last part is unduly restrictive. She says surely the word is the Greek heros, which meant ‘protector’ or ‘defender’, from the same Proto-Indo-European root as the Latin verb servare, which meant ‘to safeguard’.
What exactly were Homer’s heroes protecting, defending and safeguarding? Certainly not later conventions about good behaviour. Achilles �
� the star of the Iliad – was a psychopath given to red-mist homicidal rages. Not really the notion of the Greek state itself, either. The Trojan prince Hector, Troy’s most formidable fighter – in other words the enemy – is the co-star of the Iliad, in which Homer calls him brave, bold, noble, courtly, peace-loving, thoughtful, a good son, husband and father, and entirely without a dark side to his nature. No partisan bias at all. At worst, in terms of manipulation, we’re invited to see a murderous conflict between nation states as a necessary and noble thing. Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori, to quote twice from the future.
The Odyssey is the sequel to the Iliad, about – short version – a fighter named Odysseus, who spent ten years at the war, and then ten more getting home again afterward. Along the way he suffered many tests and trials. The stakes were high, because his wife Penelope was home alone, with their son Telemachus, and a rowdy crowd of suitors up to no good at all. More than anyone Odysseus codified the long-term, mainstream understanding of ‘hero’ – one who suffers, one who endures, one who survives a long and complicated journey through dangers and perils, and thereafter emerges with his honour and identity intact. Certainly that was how the word was instinctively understood by scholars in the nineteenth century. Any other educated person would have concurred, perhaps with a little confusion around the background verbs protect, defend and safeguard, which would have chimed in with late nineteenth-century norms about noblesse oblige and a sense of the common good. In fact Odysseus was motivated solely by personal pride, hubris and arrogance, but the nineteenth century preferred to imagine an element of altruism in his struggles. Thus by, say, the late 1880s (when the first use of odyssey as a common noun was recorded, meaning a long wandering or voyage marked by many changes of fortune) ‘hero’ meant, in practice, one who suffers, and endures, and survives a long and complicated journey through dangers and perils, in order to do good in some vague and unspecified way.
Felix Hoffmann was at the University of Munich in the late 1880s. The German chemist, who tried to synthesize codeine and ended up inventing something else entirely. He graduated magna cum laude, and then again two years later, with a doctorate, also magna cum laude. An educated man, no question. What was heroic about his invention? There are two possibilities, I think, in a nineteenth-century context. Either he wanted to imply his product had been on a long and complicated journey through dangers and perils, but it had survived, and it had emerged to do good, in the form of bringing pain relief and pleasure to the masses. Or possibly he wanted to imply his own personal work on the project had been a long and complicated journey through dangers and perils. Either version would have been absurd, given the accidental nature of the discovery. But vanity knows no bounds.
My grandma was born two years after Hoffmann’s product went on sale in Britain. (Maybe she was quietened down at night with his cough syrup.) She had 399,998 women standing behind her, and only one more to come ahead. The word ‘hero’ – and a lot of other words – were about to set out on long and complicated journeys of their own, through dangers and perils of their own. It was the age of the high-speed printing press, and mass-circulation newspapers, and monthlies, and scandal sheets, and popular mass-market fiction. By that point one whole generation had been through compulsory education, and a second was currently in school. Never before in history had more words been consumed more often by more people, or with more passion.
The word ‘hero’ itself fragmented into three separate things. A third of it stayed where it was, in the oak-panelled rooms of Oxford and Cambridge, with its classical definition endlessly refined and debated; a third of it was claimed by the establishment and its mouthpieces for political use; and the final third came to mean nothing more than ‘the main character in a popular book’. Each definition was in permanent uneasy conflict with the other two, especially the establishment’s and the popular. At this point, five thousand years after the first proto-governments, the split between official heroes and folk heroes became definitive.
The split had been brewing for many centuries. The people of Britain (and Europe generally) had been governed for a long, long time, occasionally by remote and irrelevant rulers, but more often by intrusive and demanding tyrants, in a manner we find hard to imagine, accustomed as we are to democracy and the rule of law. Another of the books in our undergraduate bedroom was Shakespeare Our Contemporary by Jan Kott. Kott was a Polish academic with a lifetime’s experience of communist rule. He felt such a background was necessary to understand the paranoid political subtext in much of Shakespeare. He felt Elizabethan England was a vicious and capricious police state, not much better than Stalinist Russia. He was probably right. And Henry VIII was just as bad. And long before him we had the regency of Prince John, while Richard was away at the Crusades, during which time John ran the country like the head of a crime family. Which was when Robin Hood was invented.
Except not exactly. Robin Hood was first borrowed, then adapted, then established, then reinvented over and over again for hundreds of years. People continually looked back from a later perspective, and they thought, well, surely such a man really should have done this or that too, and those new details were added to the legend. As a whole it was a seamless and perfect example of everything we had ever learned about building a story, from the Stone Age onward.
What is the purpose of fiction? I think it can be summed up in a simple phrase: To give people what they don’t get in real life. Originally it was courage and a sense of security; now it’s a whole host of things. I used to live on a block that also housed a model agency. Every time I got on the subway, I found myself sitting opposite a supernaturally stunning nineteen-year-old. Of course in the real world I never spoke to her. I didn’t ask her out to dinner. We didn’t fly down to the islands for a steamy weekend. But we could in a book. Romance and romantic suspense is full of that stuff. In my own line of work – crime thrillers – I’m aware that readers need an antidote to an unsatisfactory everyday reality. If their car is stolen, they’ll never get it back. If their house is burgled, they’ll never see their stuff again, and the police will never catch the burglars. But they will in a book. Instead of a constant real-world buzz of low-level frustration, there will be a beginning, a middle and an end, by which time order will have been restored. A parallel or theoretical universe, where things happen, based on experience, but not constrained by fact, and from where the sheer satisfaction of a happy ending will osmose back into the real universe, in the form of contentment, compensation and consolation.
Thus peasants suffering Prince John’s repressive taxation and brutal punishments no doubt idly dreamed of some tough, sparky guy who would show up and fix things for them. No doubt storytellers and balladeers immediately rushed to fill that need. Like working pros everywhere, they pulled what they had off the shelf and adapted it. They borrowed the name and the basic shape of the character from previous chansons, and then set about giving their listeners what they wanted. No doubt they started with those Stone Age principles: a suspenseful story full of dangers and perils, over which a memorable character would eventually triumph in a decisive manner, such that the listener finished with a tight and determined smile, and moist eyes fixed on the horizon. No doubt they improvised as they went along, in real time, sensing the listeners’ mood, adding and subtracting as necessary. They gave Robin a superpower – archery – and narrowed the antagonist to a specific local flunky (the Sheriff of Nottingham), for enhanced focus and local resonance, and perhaps also for safety, because it was always better to disparage someone slightly lower down the hierarchy than the king.
Originally, Robin Hood was a regular guy. He was described in the earliest poems as a yeoman, which was a word with drifting meanings, bouncing up and down between a skilled agricultural labourer – like a miller – to a small freeholder. But in every definition a yeoman was a commoner, of no formal rank at all. Robin’s sympathy for the downtrodden was clear from the start, as was his impatience with
priests and clerics, his respect for women, and his opposition to the Sheriff of Nottingham. Some of his merry men were there in prototype form – Little John (an early proto-sidekick), Much the miller’s son, and Will Scarlet (although originally his name was less generic – usually Scarlock or Scathelock). Originally Robin had no views at all about Prince John’s misrule or King Richard’s splendour – in the earliest versions the monarchy is not mentioned at all (local opposition against Nottingham being enough for the narrative) and in one version the reigning king is given as Edward, not Richard.
Then came hundreds of years of edits, and cumulatively they are a perfect example of the push-pull pressures on a story, as various interested parties put their various oars in. The appeal of the tale was overwhelming and undeniable, so the establishment couldn’t simply suppress it. Instead, like working pros everywhere, they adapted it. They fixed it in time during John’s regency, at a historical distance which they felt was safe enough. It didn’t exactly damage the notion of monarchy itself – in fact maybe it strengthened it, given the subliminal message that the actual monarch’s absence had caused all the problems. Then came a call from the audience for more characters. Now we get this request on the phone from editors and producers: Can there be a love interest? Back then, the storytellers must have sensed restlessness in their listeners. So Maid Marian was brought on board. Then like storytellers everywhere, they realized they needed a comic figure. Friar Tuck was invented. And so on.