Geoff Dyer’s absorbing essay on the fine line between fact and fiction (New Review, last week) acknowledges a “long and distinguished pre-history”, but neither he nor any of your contributors mentions Aphra Behn’s 1688 Oroonoko, a genre-defying book that deserves to be hailed as an originator. It is presented as first-person journalism, a mode not yet born.
Did Aphra Behn go to Surinam? Did she come to know there a “royal slave”, a prince captured in Africa, whose story so moved her she needed the world to know about it? That’s what she tells us. The details of colonial government, including names, are historically precise; the outcome – a slave rebellion, horrific punishment – convincing. But at the same time, the preoccupation with royalty and princely honour evokes the memory of the execution of Charles I and the revival of those anxieties in 1688.
Critics charting the rise of the realist novel in the early 18th century regarded Behn as too “romantic” and dubbed Daniel Defoe the father of the form. Perhaps now what was seen as faulty in Behn can be understood as a seasoned professional’s creative reworking of fact, fiction, memory, imagination and politics, and she will get due credit.
Norma Clarke
London N15
Make a house a stately home
An irony of the saga of Highgate and the destruction of its community is that Witanhurst, the house now owned by Russian Andrei Guriev, was built by Sir Arthur Crosfield, whose family had made their fortune in soap (“Fenced off: how London’s super-rich are destroying the soul of their community”, News). Sir Arthur was chair of the Kenwood Preservation Council and his campaign in the early 1920s raised enough money from the local community to buy the grounds of Kenwood House when it was put on the market. His friend Edward Cecil Guinness bought the house itself in 1925 and filled it with a selection of his art collection. Thus the grounds and mansion were saved, and then bequeathed to us to enjoy for free.
It does not appear that the current generation of millionaires has the same community spirit.
Lynne Scrimshaw
London N11
The daily battles of the poor
It was fascinating to see in last week’s issue the number of “experts” giving advice on healthy eating when you are poor. Do people not realise that living in poverty, day in, day out, sometimes for months or years on end and having always to watch out for every penny, is such a depressing and demeaning experience, it simply reduces the human life force, making people’s lives merely an existence.
When I was a social worker, visiting people with a range of family psycho/social issues, many were very poor but expert at coping with very little. However, seeing them beaten down with daily struggles to make ends meet, I often felt that what they needed most was more cash. It would enable them to go out, relax and enjoy themselves once in a while. The stress inevitably damages human relationships. Recent suicides are, I believe, a case in point.
Rex Harpham
Tavistock
Devon
Driven by fear of repatriation
From my experience of working with unaccompanied asylum-seeking children, I would assess that what drives these children to disappear is fear that their application for leave to stay will be unsuccessful (“Fears as more children seeking asylum are lost”, News). The decision-making process for asylum is experienced by young applicants as arcane, punitive and convoluted. In court, painful life-stories are regularly discounted as fabrications. Once a young asylum seeker reaches 18, there appears to be a strong presumption in favour of repatriation. For all too many, the choice is between trusting a mate, who will help them “disappear” into London by providing accommodation and illegal work in the kitchens of a restaurant; or trusting to British justice, which has placed fellow asylum seekers in a detention centre to await deportation. However much we seek to improve social services to these unfortunate children and young people, the majority will continue to distrust a hostile judicial system and will see “disappearing” as the least worst option.
Peter Jeffries
Chartham
Kent
Climate change needs cash
Aidan Harrison says that we need to “profoundly transform our consumer society” if we are to end our dependence on fossil fuels – and he says that our politicians are not up to the task (Letters).
Surely the problem is that most of us won’t vote for politicians, such as the Greens, who would implement this profound transformation.
If we are to prevent catastrophic runaway climate change, we need a strategy that will both work and be one that people will vote for. This means investing in geoengineering, removing and burying atmospheric CO² and reforestation. The tens of billions of pounds per year needed could be raised by a financial transactions tax of just 0.05%, agreed by the 10 or so leading global economies.
Richard Mountford
Tonbridge
Kent
