In the local cafe, I imagine a whispering David Attenborough-style voiceover. “And it is here, at the watering hole, that the complex rituals of the herd play out.”
With animals, it’s all about the external display. Desired outcomes are general: mating, procreation, survival. We don’t know if one wildebeest laughs at another, or is subtly shaming another, or is unlikely to return another’s phone calls. Humans, with their complicated brains, are broadly predictable but also unknowable. At the watering hole, you know what you’ll find, but so much detail is layered, nuanced and hidden.
When my sister was a very bright student, she liked to take a break from her textbooks to read chick lit. She always enjoyed the denial of reality. Those fat, glossy sex romps and fiscal thrillers were full of good and bad people, but not complex people. At every turn there was a cliché, a trope and a stereotype, and the whole package was like fast food: predictable, saccharine, shallow.
You churned through and were left with a faintly metallic taste, an unassuaged hunger. I wasn’t a fan, just as I’m not one of those who’ve found a new literary respect for genre fiction. Psychopathic villains and heroes. Horror writing, ghost stories. “Goodies and baddies” seems inane when the world is full of people who are both. Fantasy seems anodyne unless there are interesting human dynamics.
My late mother-in-law was an intelligent woman who’d had to leave school aged 14. Stoutly sceptical of my fancy ideas, she would ask, in her Mancunian accent, “How do you know this book is trash and this one isn’t?” I replied (fancily) that if you spend years studying the good stuff you start to recognise the crap. The crap factor is usually a lack of complexity. She would give me her standard look of tolerant ridicule, and we would harmoniously move on.
A psychologist once told me, “If you want to understand psychology, read the Russian novels.” The best books, TV shows and films entertain by showing us ourselves. We like recognising ironies, complications and truths about human behaviour. We love to be surprised – and a string of clichés is never going to do that. Who wants to see the punchline coming a mile off?
The surprises need to be plausible and authentic, striking because they’re (chillingly, fascinatingly, startlingly) believable. There’s a much more entertaining ride if you forgo the bad art and make the effort to go deeper.
Today, at the local watering hole, the humans are talking about murder. Two British teenagers have been convicted of killing a classmate. We discuss psychopaths, those exotic rarities of the human menagerie. Just as we’re agreeing the problem is lack of empathy, someone says, “Give them the death penalty.”
We’re an irrational animal. Shocked by a murder, we call for two schoolkids to be executed. Disgusted by animal cruelty, we relish our bacon and eggs. Deploring child abusers, we want to lock up 12-year-old ram-raiders. These contradictions are our instinctive behaviours, our bonding signals. These are the complex rituals of the herd.
Here, at the watering hole, are the everyday villains. The man who reveals his coldness by overacting. The way he smiles and leans just a bit too close. He’s definitely a wolf, but most of the herd don’t notice. Here, too, is human ambiguity. The mother who expresses such dewy, sugary affection it’s sinister. The devoted couple whose rage is simmering.
And here are the secret lives: the drug deal, the break-up, the Tinder date. It’s all here to be observed. Our fixed action pattern, our own Russian novel, hiding every day in plain sight.
