Chapter 18: Picnic at Hanging Rock

 The publishers of Picnic at Hanging Rock may have escaped judgement (in an Oprah-esque way) by saying that they didn't know it was not a true story. That they had done their due diligence and had been convinced by the local legend of the disappearance of the three girls and one woman. We might have thought that they were lazy or (and this is probably more accurate, with my experience of the last fifteen years in the publishing industry) facing an impossible deadline that encourages you to cut corners while also producing a peerless product.

But then there is Chapter 18. The last chapter of Picnic at Hanging Rock that was not published in the original edition (1967). There's a reason for that. It's B-A-N-A-N-A-S. Bat poop crazy. Philip K Dick in the shed nuts.

I will expand on this in a later post. In the meantime, an updated edition with the missing chapter was published in 1987. It seems to be out of print, so the only copies you will find will be second-hand. I don't have that patience, so I (and I do not do this often) found *cringing* a PDF.

Watch this space.

True stories and not-so-true stories

I read Picnic at Hanging Rock when I was about eleven. It was a well-worn paperback from a second-hand bookshop, and I have no idea where it is now (I don't know why this is important but it is). It's the true, legendary story of three Australian schoolgirls and a teacher who, in 1900, go missing during a school field trip - a picnic to Hanging Rock. They (or, to be macabre, their bodies) are never found, nor is there a single trace of them - even in pre-CSI days, you would think they would leave something: a footprint, a piece of linen or thread from their dresses, even hair goddammit.

This mystery has haunted me for years, along with the mystery of what happened to Amelia Earhart and who the Somerton man is (this one has apparently been solved - but has it really? Do I really want it to be?). Later, when I was studying English Lit at varsity, we read Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. It drove me Nuts (capital 'N' intended - I'm an editor, so just assume every error is intended. It'll save both of us time). 

Chronicle of a Death Foretold tells the story of the murder of a man named Santiago in a small town in Colombia some time in the 1950s. The foretelling bit isn't an issue - I'm okay with magical realism. The novel suggests that the murderers are a pair of brothers, the Vicario brothers, who are avenging the honour of their sister. (They murder him, his family murders them, their family retaliates, etc.) But there is some doubt. The novel never definitively names the brothers as the murderers and there are other characters who have reason to hate Santiago, which apparently is enough to murder someone.

Sparknotes and similar sites will tell you that the Vicario brothers are, without a doubt, the murderers, but it's not true, so don't write that in your essay. The story is told by an unnamed 'unreliable narrator', who is recalling the events long after they happened. Bits and pieces are missing, and it's possible that the narrator is remembering the whole event incorrectly - or is the murderer themselves. So what we have at the end of the novel is a whodunnit without a 'who'. So just a 'dunnit'. Trust me. I read the thing three times, determined to prove my lecturers wrong and solve the case.

One of my lecturers claimed that one of the themes of the novel is the nature of storytelling itself. What we expect and how violated we feel when our expectations are not met. Well done. Expectations violated. I suspect that if I ever met the author and asked him who the murderer(s) was, he'd say he doesn't know. Sometimes I really hate post-modern literature.

But Chronicle of a Death Foretold is fiction (although it is apparently loosely based on a true story). It doesn't claim any relationship to the truth. (Truth.) Also sometimes crimes like these don't have a resolution. The police have evidence, but no way to piece the evidence together to form the profile of the murderer. Although frustrating, we have to accept this or go mad every single minute of the day.

Imagine my reaction when, this week (i.e. 28 years after first reading the book), I found out that Picnic at Hanging Rock is not a true story. It's a local legend, but there is no evidence that it is true - not a newspaper article or editorial, no police reports, nothing. This mystery has lived in my brain and I have worried about those girls and what might have happened to them. For. Nothing. Why would someone do this? More importantly, why would someone do this to a reader who already has trust issues?

Fargo, both the movie and the series, used the tactic more recently. The writers and directors and producers who take our money argue that an audience will trust the storytellers more if we think the story is true. So they begin the story with the disclaimer, "This is a true story." They then explain where the events took place and when, hammering in the last nail in what turns out to be the coffin of our trust.

None of these storytellers think ahead, apparently. Yes, we trust you in the moment and suspend disbelief so high that it's pretty much a UFO in the sky. But what happens when a person's trust is violated? You feel angry, right? You think back through your interactions with the other person and brand them 'untrustworthy'. You feel violated. I really enjoyed watching both versions of Fargo. But once I learned that they were fiction and not the true stories I had believed them to be, I felt like they had experimented on me and without my consent.

If they had begun their tales with "Based on a true story" or "Based on true stories that happened [where] in [when]", I might have had slackened the rope I'm using to hang them. Alternatively, they could have ended with a similar disclaimer that acknowledged that the story was in fact not true or not entirely true. It's a small difference, but it acknowledges that at least part of the story is fiction. I would have been annoyed when I learnt that there is no truth to the story, but I would not have been so angry. I would have appreciated the (semi-)honesty.

Instead, I am POed. Part of the reason I am so Angry at this ploy is that the storytellers acknowledge the sleight of hand they played with our trust. They said that they could get away with more when they had the audience's trust. Seriously? Are you children who don't understand ethics or the implicit contract between creator and audience or just social mores? There's a scene in The Office where Michael is giving a seminar and he advises the salespeople to lie to their customers. He says, "You bought it. And now you can't return it." The manager of the branch says, simply, "But now we think you're a liar."

Now we think you're liars.

The Power

In my generous sabbatical from updating this blog, I have read The Power by Naomi Alderman twice. I read it for the second time at the end of 2020, after trying (and failing) to finish Alderman's fictional, experimental podcast The Walk. So why am I writing about it now, a year and a half later? Because I overheard someone say recently that if women were in charge, the world would be a more peaceful place. They clearly did not go to an all-girls' school.

I might have agreed with the sentiment, at least partially, before reading The Power. Not because I think that women are innately more peaceful, but because we are raised to be more empathic, to take the feelings of others into account and to try to resolve conflict. Consider the games we play as children. Girls play 'house' and they play with dolls, where they roleplay social situations and how to interact appropriately with others. Boys build things and then destroy them. They play games where they only have to consider themselves and their needs - and how to fulfill their needs.

There are of course exceptions and overlaps: girls may play with their brothers' toys and boys may have enlightened parents who let them play with whatever toys they'd like, even if they're considered 'girly'. Society is also changing, but that simply proves that these divisions existed in the first place.

Another reason I am returning to the novel's ideas is that I have watched seasons 1 and 2 of The Wilds three times in the last month and am eagerly waiting for the third season. Without giving away too much of the plot, the series begins with eight girls shipwrecked (plane-wrecked?) on an uninhabited island. We soon learn that this traumatic experience has been engineered as part of a social experiment to prove that women, because of their society-building skills, are better equipped for leadership.

I admit I scoffed when I heard the reasoning for the experiment and felt tense every time the head of the scientific team appeared on screen. Saying that women are more equipped for something like this is as offensive as saying that men are.

However, what we soon learn and the reason I have watched the series so many times, is that each girl is different. She has had different experiences and she has reacted to them differently, disproving the thesis that women behave inherently one way and men another - and proving my thesis that we are all individuals. I'm addicted to those stories (which is well-established on this blog), which are told so well and acted out so well.

(There's also the realism of the script - apart from the cycling of clothing, so that the girls seem to be wearing a new outfit every episode. The longer the girls are there, the more bedraggled they look. Their skin starts to burn and shed from exposure to the elements, they are dirty most of the time, their clothes have holes in, and their hair becomes either limp or frizzy and unruly, to the point where one of the characters breaks a brush trying to comb it. They aren't able to build elaborate shelters or to find an abundance of food - they often go without for days at a time. They don't try to map out every inch of the island, beyond confirming the island is uninhabited, finding freshwater and trying to find food. They also behave like the children they are, rather than shouldering the challenges like adults - they have tantrums, verbal spats and many passive-aggressive meltdowns.)

The Power goes to the opposite extreme to disprove the thesis that women are 'peaceful' and relationship builders. The novel considers what the world would look like if women were physically more powerful than men. Note: not as powerful as, but more powerful. One day, young women around the world wake up with the ability to shoot electrical jolts from their fingertips. In some women, it's stronger than others: they can main or kill someone with one jolt. This ability spreads to some older women, too, and it can be awoken by encounters with younger women. It can also strengthened with practice.

Predictably, patriarchal society is horrified - heavens forbid that young women assert themselves or fight back when molested or attacked. In the beginning, men and older women (most of whom don't have this freak ability) try to isolate and shame these 'mutants' - until they realise who really has the power in this new age. They also try to protect poor young men much more vociferously than they have ever tried to protect young women (trying to protect the 'virtue' of young women is not the same thing).

The novel, like The Wilds, follows seven main characters, including one young man (a self-styled journalist) and an older politician and mother whose daughter has the power. Many, but not all of the girls have been victimised, ensuring that the reader begins the story with strong empathy for these young women who are finally able to turn the tables on their abusers. Young Allie defends herself against her foster father who is molesting her (with her foster mother's implicit consent). Roxy plans to avenge the brutal death of her mother at the hands of her father's enemies. Tatiana flees her dictator husband to set up a new state where women are free.

But, as they say, power corrupts. It not only corrupts one's actions, but also one's mind. What started as a genuine grievance against specific people spreads until innocent and guilty people are lumped together and so that people who have committed different degrees of violence are given the same punishments. There's no awareness among the women wielding the power that they have now become the abusers or that they are repeating history. They are blinded by their own emotions, like militia in the midst of civil war.

The damage the women inflict on global society outweighs anything that history can offer as a warning, but it almost seems inevitable. The scale of the violence equals the violence that women have experienced throughout (at least recorded) human history and have simply borne. In addition, would some of the retaliations that are described in the book seem so heinous if they were carried out by a man?

There is some sort of gender revolution on the horizon and the seeds have already taken root. I guess we'll have to see what kind of plant it grows into. I'm not sure what plant would adequately represent the future described in The Power - probably something written by Jeff VandenMeer, but that seems like cheating.

The cover of This World is Full of Monsters by Jeff VanderMeer