{"id":91039,"date":"2016-09-13T16:57:36","date_gmt":"2016-09-13T15:57:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.scifinow.co.uk\/?p=91039"},"modified":"2016-09-13T16:57:36","modified_gmt":"2016-09-13T15:57:36","slug":"mr-carey-on-guilt-conscience-and-atonement-in-fellside","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.scifinow.co.uk\/blog\/mr-carey-on-guilt-conscience-and-atonement-in-fellside\/","title":{"rendered":"MR Carey on guilt, conscience and atonement in Fellside"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ayenbite of Inwit<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

I think that\u2019s how you spell it. Apologies if not. It\u2019s the title of a medieval tract by a Kentish monk, and it translates roughly as \u201cthe again-biting of inner thought\u201d. In other words, the pain you feel when your conscience is playing up. That\u2019s a purely psychological pain, obviously, but it feels real, doesn\u2019t it? A bite or a prick or a stab, one of those things. In its extreme forms it\u2019s as unpleasant as any physical injury can be.<\/span><\/p>\n

I had an argument a little while back with a very religious friend. Full disclosure: he\u2019s not actually a friend any more, but it wasn\u2019t this argument that tipped the scales, it was something else.<\/p>\n

We were talking about Darwin\u2019s theory of evolution by natural selection, and my former friend was saying \u2013 forgive the bland summary \u2013 that maybe Darwin wasn\u2019t all he was cracked up to be. This wasn\u2019t a pitch for Creationism, or anything wild and wacky like that. My friend allowed that Darwin had a point when it came to, say, the development of complex organisms from simpler ones. He was just saying that some human behaviours and tricks of personality can\u2019t be explained by evolution alone. You have to bring God into play to account for them properly.<\/p>\n

I asked \u201cLike what?\u201d<\/p>\n

And my friend said \u201cLike conscience.\u201d<\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t concede the point, but I could see where he was coming from. A tender conscience, certainly, is little or no help to the woman or man who possesses it. It causes us to lose sleep, to go off our food, to be severely unhappy and discontented with ourselves, to be distracted both from our usual pleasures and from our necessary work. In extreme cases, unable to live with the guilt arising from things they\u2019ve done, some people actually kill themselves.<\/p>\n

The ruthless, by contrast, sleep well and live long. With no agenbite of inwit<\/em> to worry about, they sail through this world with a smirk and a jaunty stroll.<\/p>\n

My former friend took this as proof that some of our beliefs and attitudes aren\u2019t pointed towards this world at all, but towards a different one entirely. Conscience is maladaptive for normal human life, but vital and precious for a mortal existence intended to prepare us for an eternal life to come.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve just written an entire novel about guilt, Fellside<\/em><\/strong>, which led to me spending a lot of time trying to get my ideas on the subject into some kind of coherent shape. And while I still think my friend was off the beam in seeing conscience as proof that there\u2019s a God, I think he was onto something when he pointed out its equivocal value.<\/p>\n

The truth is, I believe most people have a certain weakness for the slow motion action replay. For going over in our heads again and again the things we\u2019ve done and the things that have been done to us. And we don\u2019t tend to focus on the things that have gone right. On the contrary, the moments we replay are usually the ones that make us feel most unhappy, the things that have vexed or hurt us or the things we\u2019re afraid may have hurt others.<\/p>\n

Jess Moulson has killed a child. It\u2019s not murder, exactly, but still she\u2019s absolutely responsible for his death, and her guilt extends all the way to suicide. She can\u2019t live with her own sense of guilt, and so she has decided to die. When we meet her she\u2019s in prison for the crime, and she\u2019s trying to kill herself by pretty much the only method that the prison authorities can\u2019t forestall, which is a hunger strike.<\/p>\n

\"Author<\/a>
Author MR Carey<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

It\u2019s a solid plan, and although the reader may be appalled at it I\u2019ve tried my best to show it as what it is, which is a reasoned response to an unbearable situation. Jess isn\u2019t dying in order to atone, or to offer a life for a life. She\u2019s just shutting down because life has become intolerable for her.<\/p>\n

What changes her mind is an encounter she has on the borders of death. The child she killed, Alex, is waiting for her there, and they have a conversation \u2013 or at least Jess believes they do. Alex says there\u2019s something he needs her to do, and she can\u2019t do it if she\u2019s dead. So she lives. She abandons the suicide strategy and shifts to plan B, which is to accept a responsibility, a debt, and try to fulfil it. She comes to feel that in doing so she may win some kind of redemption for herself, or at least balance out the scales a little.<\/p>\n

Both decisions \u2013 to die, and then to live \u2013 are really expressions of the same thing, which is conscience. It was only her sense of guilt that made Jess wish for death, and it\u2019s that same sense of guilt that makes her accept the mission Alex entrusts to her.<\/p>\n

All of which may sound as though I\u2019ve bought into my friend\u2019s argument about the otherworldly origins of conscience \u2013 its function as a light shining from a more perfect place, showing us the way. But I really haven\u2019t, and the novel bears that out. Even after her meeting with Alex\u2019s ghost or spirit there are things about both herself and him that Jess doesn\u2019t understand, and her redemptive journey does not go as planned. I\u2019m not sure anyone\u2019s ever does.<\/p>\n

So what\u2019s conscience for, then? Wouldn\u2019t we all be happier if we could shrug off the hurts of other people and the potentially infinite downsides of our own actions? After all, if you\u2019ve got no moral compass in the first place you can\u2019t get lost. Life is just one endless picnic.<\/p>\n

But if you believe that, I think you\u2019ve made a fundamental error about what life actually is. Life isn\u2019t a flat, simple, regular thing. It has dimensions, in the same way that space and time do. And one of the most crucial dimensions of life is \u2013 precisely \u2013 other people. We\u2019re herd animals. We live our lives in a social space, and exile from that space invariably destroys us.<\/p>\n

And that\u2019s why we have a conscience. That\u2019s why we can feel guilt.<\/p>\n

Guilt is an alarm bell. Or even more than that, it\u2019s a kind of directional sensor. It tells us there\u2019s a problem and it gives us a sense of the vector, the direction from which that problem is coming. Conscience allows us to re-align ourselves \u2013 through apology or atonement \u2013 with the collective, whether that\u2019s our family or our friends or society as a whole. It only seems dysfunctional if you imagine the individual as an island, a life form that can thrive in isolation from others of its kind.<\/p>\n

For Jess Moulson, the social context, the collective, is the other inmates of Fellside: five thousand women many of whom have done much worse things than she has. And atonement is going to be much, much harder than she thinks.<\/p>\n

But like I said before, I suspect it usually is for most of us.<\/p>\n

Fellside by MR Carey is available now in paperback from Orbit. Keep up with the latest genre news with the new issue of SciFiNow.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The great MR Carey writes about his characters living with guilt in Fellside<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39,"featured_media":91040,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"MSN_Categories":"Uncategorized","MSN_Publish_Option":false,"MSN_Is_Local_News":false,"MSN_Is_AIAC_Included":"Empty","MSN_Location":"[]","MSN_Add_Feature_Img_On_Top_Of_Post":false,"MSN_Has_Custom_Author":false,"MSN_Custom_Author":"","MSN_Has_Custom_Canonical_Url":false,"MSN_Custom_Canonical_Url":""},"categories":[1,1624,1718],"tags":[2247,5384,5317],"acf":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.scifinow.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/09\/Fellside-Cover-scaled.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scifinow.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91039"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scifinow.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scifinow.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scifinow.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/39"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scifinow.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=91039"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.scifinow.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91039\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scifinow.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/91040"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scifinow.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=91039"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scifinow.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=91039"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scifinow.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=91039"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}