Portrait at the Pav

Just sitting in the sun in Brighton's Pavilion Gardens, and someone decided to draw me. Not a bad likeness, though I think I look quite severe!

The Gift of Green

It’s not often I can say I’ve actually met someone famous who I admire, and actually spoke to them.

East Sussex has plenty of home-grown celebs, such as Eddie Izzard, Natasha Kaplinsky, Norman Cook and Arthur Brown. Its proximity to London guarantees a certain number of famous faces to be spotted mooching through Brighton’s North Laine, or even Lewes High Street. There’s often that moment when, recognising them, you mistake them for someone you know and smile. Sometimes you’ll get a smile back, or they look back, puzzled by your confident greeting because they definitely don’t recognise you.

My biggest celebrity frisson this year until last Sunday was when comedian Joe Wilkinson approached me in the library to find out where to plug in his laptop. But then last Sunday with my Charleston Lit festival ticket clutched in my sweaty hand (yes, it was actually warm enough to sweat) I didn’t expect to get within 20 feet of acclaimed American writer, Barbara Kingsolver, author most famously of The Poisonwood Bible.

Last year I read The Lacuna and enjoyed it.  (No, it wasn’t just the Frida Kahlo thing. Really.)

OK, yes, I loved the Frida Kahlo element, but it was the portrayal of Trotsky I found the most intriguing.

And the attitude and treatment of the Japanese by American government and media during WWI.  

But then I read The Poisonwood Bible, the sort of book that people press into your hands with a kind of frenzied excitement that you’d expect from bearers of Watchtower magazine.

It took fewer than a dozen pages before I found out why.

A few chapters in and I had to take break. There was too much going on to simply race through each delicious page. Like my fourteen-year-old self overwhelmed by the beauty of Tender is the Night, I needed to take a step back, relish the vicarious pleasures and sorrows of the characters; appraise the view of the complex, contrary emotional landscape.

The story lived in me, or I lived in the story… it was impossible to think about anything else. Then along came my Book Club book choice, Jeanette Winterson’s Why Be Happy When You Could Be Be Normal? I loved it. I had wanted to read it for so long. But, when it came to articulating my feelings about such an incredible story of personal courage and endeavour in the face of a loveless, damaged upbringing, I found that I could not do it justice. I was still enmeshed in the Poisonwood Bible, waiting in trepidation to discover which of the daughters would die. Fiction was more overwhelming than fact.

Books like The Poisonwood Bible are a gift. But, does that make the author a giving person?

In the case of Barbara Kingsolver, I think it most certainly is.

While ‘The Lacuna’ and The Poisonwood Bible’ deal with themes of social and political injustice, it’s clearer than ever from the environmental theme of her latest novel, Flight Behaviour that Barbara believes that fiction can be a vehicle for social change. 

Barbara says that the very process of entering a character’s consciousness, someone you may think you have nothing in common with, and seeing the world through their eyes, is one of the most powerful experiences one can ever have, and she acknowledges the responsibility she feels for facilitating such an experience. Storytelling is a powerful cultural element the world over all over. Humans need stories: origin stories; moral parables; supernatural tales; funny anecdotes.

In a world where science and art can seem very much at odds, as the popular media strives to feed its audience with short-sighted editorial that passes as news, and as ‘alternative’ subcultures edge towards an unquestioning hippy embrace of vibrations, auras and fluffy spirituality, the scientist’s world of empirical data seems light years away. 

The infuriatingly lack of objective certainty which scientists offer does not translate well into tabloid headlines, and becomes increasingly misunderstood and misrepresented. If a scientist says, ‘Research shows that the answer to this problem could be X, but it’s entirely possible that it could be Y.’ The journalist will just ignore the data that doesn’t fit her political paradigm.

As issues such as breast cancer, inoculations and, of course, global warming get hi-jacked, the messages carried by the authority of black and white print  - or pixels – become received wisdom. Thus breast-screening is good, MMR is linked to autism, and global warming – that most inconvenient of truths -  may not actually be happening. Those hysterical women, those careless parents, those green loonies are all spouting crap. Why? Cos we, the media, say so.  Now, take a look at that car advertised on page five.

As a scientist and an artist, Barbara Kingsolver is in a position to fuse science and art to explore the real impact of environmental disasters, the psychology of belief, and just why we humans are so willing to conspire in our own destruction. 

So, back to last Sunday at Charleston Literary Festival. And Barbara Kingsolver speaks so eloquently about green issues alongside Caroline Lucas, the only Green Party MP in this country. I sit in the packed marquee watching the silhouettes of birds and leaves flutter over their heads and hesitate to bother an esteemed author with my own first impression of her book. It seems a small, silly thing compared to the global issues of poverty, industrialisation and the destruction of wilderness that are being so earnestly discussed.

As the event concludes, my friend and I stand to leave and we observe the enormous queue forming for  Barbara's book-signing, so instead we turn to the tea tent. Outside, we huddle against the sea breeze gusting across the South Downs as we sip tea from paper cups, chat about how much we’ve enjoyed the afternoon and watch the beautiful literary folk mooching around Charleston.

Finally we decide the crowds will have died down enough to risk the book tent and I can get my own copy of Flight Behaviour. To our surprise, Barbara is still there! By now she looks a little pale and tired. She has exchanged a few words with every person who has lined up to have their book signed. A long day for someone who’s travelled several thousand miles and is recovering from a recent surgery.

As I thrust my copy of Flight Behaviour under her nose I decide to go for it. ‘The beginning to your book,’ I say, ‘I often listen to country music – particularly female Nashville artists – and when I read the beginning of your book I felt transported to that world of gritty, impoverished women whose only freedom is to jump in a car and drive.’

She smiles, and I feel like I’ve touched on something that resonates with her. She tells me how one of her book groups in America made a compilation CD of all the music referred to in Flight Behaviour, creating a soundtrack for her novel. ‘What a touching gift!’  I say. And I am envious that they were able to reciprocate so beautifully. For a book that you love is a gift, and it is only human nature to want to give something back.  Isn’t it?

So why have humans forgotten that we are obliged to give something back to the planet that sustains us? Perhaps the task is just too great for most people to comprehend, perhaps the weight of our disbelief is too great to shift. Comedian Sean Lock once remarked that recycling his yoghurt cartons felt about as useful as turning up to the aftermath of an earthquake with a dustpan and brush. Believing that you can make a difference against a blitz of consumerist propaganda and bad-news journalism is a challenge.

Things change. That can be scary or reassuring. Humans are capable of challenging and changing some of the most seemingly intractable things. When I was a teenager it seemed impossible that Nelson Mandela would ever be released, that apartheid would go, that the Berlin Wall would ever fall … that Margaret Thatcher would ever leave Downing Street.

I recall a quote from an unlikely source  – The Lone Ranger's sagacious comrade, Tonto: Respect the earth; you’ll be part of it one day.

If the only thing I can do is divide up my rubbish for recycling, then I’ll do it to avoid contributing to more acres of landfill. Maybe you think I’m sucked in by a Green conspiracy or middle class sanctimony, but hey, what do you believe in?