Abstract
Reviewed by: Ralph Bathurst and Margot Edwards, School of Management; Massey University, Auckland, New Zealand
As far as she could see all the fish were pointed in the same direction along the wave face, and all were swimming furiously as they sought to escape the breaking wave’s hold. And all the time the wave had them in its power and would take them where it would, and there was nothing that glistening chain of fish could do to change their fate. Amy felt herself beginning to rise back into the wave’s swelling, she tensed in anticipation and excitement, not knowing whether she would succeed in catching it, and, if she did, where she and the fish might end up (Flanagan, 2014: 126).
These questions background our reflections on two novels recently published: Sebastian Faulks’ 2015 Where My Heart Used to Beat and Richard Flanagan’s 2014 Man Booker prize winner The Narrow Road To The Deep North. The novels touch on major historical events in which all these issues are posed. The Great War (1914–1918) impacted on all four corners of the globe. It brought unprecedented misery to millions and soldiers returning to civilian life spoke reluctantly of the horrors they had endured. “This must never happen again,” they reported, and yet, the next generation of young men were to return from another global conflict equally traumatised and disillusioned. The so-called War to End All Wars became instead a prelude for genocide on a grand scale, and all continents felt the terrible impact of Second World War (1939–1945).
In our revisiting these past conflicts, could we have done things differently? By implication, how might we as leaders learn lessons from the past, finding ways to mitigate the damaging effects of structures that weaken our agency, and construct more humane societies?
Where My Heart Used to Beat canvasses issues of memory and identity, particularly how narrative descriptions of the past construct the present, in the context of both wars. Here, the story of psychiatrist Robert Hendricks acts as a stimulus for us to examine our own histories from individual and global perspectives. We are drawn into the conversations that Hendricks has with the mysterious antagonist Alexander Pereira around insanity and the cruel history of people diagnosed as “mad” being consigned to life in asylums, separated forever from their wider (we might read “normal”) human community. If insanity is a genetic disposition and/or a transmittable disease, then isolating these dysfunctional people makes sense. However, for both Hendricks and Pereira this in and of itself is mad.
Insanity seems to result from responses to traumatic events, they agree. In this sense, Faulks takes this question of personal development and generalizes to 20th century global history. That civilized nations might engage in war that is mutually destructive is insane. Here, through Hendricks, Faulks rehabilitates modernity’s grand narrative claiming that 19th century geopolitical arrangements needed to change. But could not these changes be made through civilized conversation rather than the horror of war?
Hendricks muses on how, through astute and courageous leadership, the world might have evolved from “Tsars and Kaisers and archdukes and kings to a place of elected leaders where all men and women can vote”; if the citizenry had sat together in the main square of a notional city at the turn of the 20th century and set about reconstructing the world through open conversation. Speaking in their fictional voice he says “the inhabitants would have said, ‘That sounds like a good plan. Let’s be careful how we put it into action.’”
As if to further underscore the insanity of the 20th century, Hendricks continues: And if you had then said, ‘In fact, that transition can only be achieved by genocide across the century, tens and tens of millions dead, pogrom upon purge, slaughter upon holocaust, throughout Europe into Russia,’ the people of this city would have escorted you to their small but well-run lunatic asylum (p. 214).
Beautiful poetic forms express the Japanese spirit: its waka, tanka and haiku on the lips of Colonel Kota as he remembers the sweet taste of blood and contemplates another neck for his sword to strike; another artful decapitation, as beautiful as Manchukuo.
Major Nakamura reflects on his actions, reconciling his wartime behavior as the camp commander in fulfilling his life purpose for the Emperor, responding faithfully to the call to serve. The madness of his dutiful obedience elegantly reflected in his egotistical insanity, where without pity he worked men to death to meet the targets set by his masters. In his unfaltering service, “he knew that he had selflessly performed his duty with devotion and honour” (Flanagan, 2014: 407). His deeply held spirituality, in deference to powers greater than himself, plays out in his ruminations: He told himself that, through his service of this cosmic goodness, he had discovered he was not one man but many, that he could do the most terrible things he might otherwise have thought were evil if he had not known that they were in the service of the ultimate goodness (Flanagan, 2014: 409).
In Flanagan’s novel, these descriptions of passion are profound, with decaying flesh being tightly meshed with loving flesh; the Australian surgeon and senior leader among the prisoners, Dorrigo Evans, reminisces on his mad illicit affair that entangled him as he surrendered to its ultimate power, while waiting to be shipped overseas to fight. Faulks’ protagonist, Hendricks, too is thwarted by memories of his youth and an affair that strangely tilted his prospects. Nostalgic desire and the power of lost love prods and punches the characters’ hearts as they negotiate their changing lives.
The men’s youthful memories live in stark contrast to their older, more ordered lives where they are controlled by situations and circumstances that are sometimes repressive and debilitating. The men yearn for the spontaneity, freedom and exhilaration of their youth; for as Evans confesses: Her touch electrified him, paralysed him, and amidst the noise and smoke and bustle that touch was the only thing he knew. The universe and the world, his life and his body, all reduced to that one electric point of contact (Flanagan, 2014: 107).
These love affairs are pivotal to both novels. Hendricks and Evans are only truly free when they are in the arms of their lover. This is the only time when they experience the richness of their humanity in all its hues and contradictions. And yet these relationships ultimately imprison them so that they are never able to resist the tide of events which take control of and overpower them.
Such moments create opportunities for reflection and self-examination, for readers. They prompt us to consider how we want to live in the years to come, and how we might construct our world in this generation. As we consider the strength of our bonds, we make decisions about blame and forgiveness, although the impact of circumstance and chance – “fate,” perhaps – may never be fully understood.
In Flanagan’s novel, the failure of Evans’ relationship blights his self-image. Throughout the novel, he struggles to conceive of himself as the kind of leader that his comrades need him to be. He finds that the men elevate him to exulted status despite his reservations. It was as if they were willing him into being, as though there has to be a Big Fella, and, having desperate need of such, their growing respect, their whispered asides, their opinion of him – all this trapped him into behaving as everything he knew he was not. As if rather than having him leading them by example they were leading him through adulation (Flanagan, 2014: 50).
Both these novels coincide with current 100-year commemorations of First World War and the final passing of veterans from Second World War, giving rise to discussions and assessments of the impact of these wars on human history and development. Troubling conversations around the dining tables of private citizens and seminars in public forums across the globe leave unresolved the question of how these conflicts could have occurred in highly civilized societies. It seemed in mastering our technological universe we turned the sophisticated machines of industry to fulfil nihilistic ends. And like lovers caught up in an illicit affair, we became set on Mutually Assured Destruction; (MAD) by any assessment.
Are we to reflect on our history and confess with the same bitterness that we “belong to a failed species. A disastrous mutation” (Faulks, 2015: 130)? Or are we, a century after the War to End All Wars able to find ways of living together that obviate a call to arms and defensive postures. Our chosen novels give us pause for thought about the kind of world we want to construct for the future, and to our role as leaders in constructing that world.
If we turn these learnings to our world of work, is it possible to imagine a different future? For instance, what would happen if next Monday morning we all got around the table of our organization and plotted together how we might work productively without undergoing the dramatic and traumatising structural changes that scar our enterprises? How might we as leaders embrace the civilizing abilities that are within our reach and use them to protect the integrity of staff members?
Yet the sacrifices necessary to pull off this step change ultimately bring us to the same sense of impotence experienced by Evans and Hendricks. They both live off the memory of a beautifully mad time; of being held spellbound by love’s unpredictable passions. They cannot move on to live a life reconciled with their losses, feeling acutely the surrender of their loves and of being thwarted by those memories.
Re-imagining our world as a beneficent place, where we draw on the memories and learnings of the past so that they actively inform our present; and to live fully, passionately, without regret, is perhaps too utopian for pragmatic leaders. The visions that underpin these novels prompt us to reflect on 20th century nihilism and consider alternative ways of being for the future.
What is that world we want to create?