Lauren Slater: Opening Skinner's Box

'Opening Skinner's Box' is a collection of essays about ten significant psychological experiments of the twentieth century, including the eponymous B.F.Skinner's infamous black boxes, Stanley Milgram's electric shock chairs, Bruce Alexander's utopian rat parks and Elizabeth Loftus' imagined and implanted shopping malls. Each experiment is recounted as narrative, with Slater as the earnest, intrepid, increasingly existentialist detective narrator. The point, she says in the introduction to the book, is to lift these stories from the dusty academic journals, from the flatness of quantified data and black bar charts, and to elevate them, and celebrate them, as narratives, as theme and plot, as biography, history and philosophy.

One such theme is free will. B.F.Skinner's experiments, and their supposed implications, are well known - through conditioning and reinforcement, levers and pellets, the behaviour of rodents and pigeons, and so by inference our behaviour too, can be, and indeed perhaps is at some unconscious level, engineered and controlled. We are thus, according to the usual interpretation of Skinner's work, heteronomous slaves to the accidents and contours of our environments. We gamble because once or twice we were rewarded for doing so. We are superstitious because we seek causal links between our environments and our fortunes, between the levers and the pellets. These causal links are our narratives, and narratives are the format by which we make sense of the world, and of ourselves. Elsewhere in the collection, in an essay about Elizabeth Loftus' false memory experiments, Slater explores the idea that our free will may be undermined, not only externally by the contours of our environments, but also internally, because of the malleability of our own memories. False memories can be implanted, suggested, sewn as seeds which the subject then nurtures, elaborates and integrates into his or her own individual personality, into his or her own evolving narrative or world view. Loftus' experiments, like Skinner's, were controversial and incendiary, ostensibly because they were often, in the 1990's, utilised by defence teams in cases of historical sexual abuse, where the prosecution cases relied upon the previously repressed memories of the allegedly abused. In existentialist terms, these false memory experiments, like Skinner's experiments with rodents, were and are controversial because they strike at the notion of free will, and thus at our conception of ourselves as autonomous beings in control of our own choices, beliefs and personalities. Much of this book's appeal derives from Slater's interrogative approach to these and the other experiments, whether they be concerned with free will, or with conformity, cognitive dissonance, ethics or authority, and, more specifically, from the continual re-examination of the self that this interrogative approach provokes.

Inextricably woven in with the psychological implications of the experiments Slater explores are the biographies of the people involved, the psychologists themselves as well as the subjects. Skinner's biography is fascinating if only because of the schism between the myth and the reality. The myth is of a fascistic, amoral misanthropist, a monster who kept one of his two infant daughters in a box for two years to train her, who later drove her to suicide. The reality is more mundane, and more humane, a story of a man who was an early environmentalist, with a social conscience and two very much living grown up daughters. Our own responses to Skinner's experiments, and the existentialist insecurities suggested by those responses, are what the schism between the monster and the man, the myth and the reality, works so deftly to refine, reveal and challenge. Likewise, our initial responses to Stanley Milgram's infamous shock machine experiments are challenged, in part by Slater's biographical portrait of Milgram, but, more so in this instance by the retrospective biographies of the subjects who took part in the experiments. These experiments, as is the case with many of the experiments discussed in this book, are initially morally questionable. Milgram had his subjects believe that they were inflicting painful, sometimes potentially lethal shocks, upon a second subject, the latter strapped into an electric shock chair the other side of a pane of glass, often screaming in (feigned) protest. In the post-holocaust climate of the 1960's, the claims of the defendants in the Nuremburg trials still resonating, the point of Milgram's experiments was to test how far ordinary, rational people would go, how much pain they might be willing to inflict, under orders from an authoritarian personality. The results are now notorious, and seem, alarmingly, to give credence to those Nuremburg defences. Slater tracks down some of Milgram's subjects, and in her interviews with them tries to understand their responses to the experiment, as well as discussing the impacts and impressions it has left.

Altogether the experiments discussed in this collection serve not only as psychological interrogations, but also, in the trajectory of the moral, social and existentialist concerns they raise, as an alternative historical document. Each experiment is a reaction to, or resonance of the evolving landscape of the second half of the twentieth century. The Second World War and the Nuremburg trials provide the backdrop to Milgram’s electric shock experiments, and also to John Darley and Bibb Latané’s experiments into bystander behaviour, the latter also informed more specifically by the bizarre and disturbing murder, in 1964, of Catherine Genovese in Queens, New York. Leon Festinger’s experiments to test his theory of cognitive dissonance also draw from the post-holocaust climate of the 1950’s, and, in particular, from the perhaps inevitable emergence of apocalyptic cults within that climate. Bruce Alexander’s rat park experiments are set in the context of a newfound preoccupation with, and demonisation of drugs, born of the counter-culture movement of the 1960’s, and the final essays in the collection, concerned with memory, neuroscience and psychosurgery, draw our attention to modern day attitudes towards anxiety, depression and self-medication.

Anchoring the stories of these experiments in a familiar, evolving historical backdrop, Slater succeeds in lifting them above the dust of academic journals and into distinctly human narratives, narratives which cannot escape “the residue of mystery and murk” but carry it with them, narratives with themes which are conspicuously our own and a plot which, as all the best plots do, refuses resolution.

Laurent Binet: HHhH

This review has taken three or four months to write. I began it I think in September, wrote most of it in an hour or so, then left it alone until today. Today I finished it. So it has been three or four months in the making, those months bookended by an hour or so at either end. A gestation period this long tells you something about me, but it also tells you something about this book, and for that reason I include this as a not entirely irrelevant preamble.

HHhH stands for 'Hmmler's Hirn heist Heydrich', meaning, so they said in the SS, 'Himmler's brain is called Heydrich'. So this is a book about Himmler's brain, Heydrich, which it partly is. Binet wanted to call the book 'Operation Anthropoid', which was the code name given to the plan to assassinate Heydrich in 1942, organised in London by the Czechoslovak government-in-exile together with the British Special Operations Executive, and carried out by two paratroopers, Jan Kubis and Jozef Gabcik.  'Operation Anthropoid' is a better name for the book, but was dismissed by the publishers for sounding too much like a Robert Ludlum novel. I've never read a Robert Ludlum novel.

HHhH is a part-autobiographical account of the author's efforts to write a historical novel. Binet calls it an infranovel, and in as much as the prefix suggests a rumbling and a reverberation beneath the surface, emanating quietly outwards, it's not a bad name for it at all. That's kind of what lots of the scenes in this book feel like - not quite still, quietly reverberating. Binet's predilection for revisionism, and his seeming B.S Johnsonesque disdain for the contrivances of fiction, are behind these quiet reverberations. He will often correct or agonise over a detail from a previous chapter, whether it be the colour of Heydrich's Mercedes, a passing reference to a Charlie Chaplin film, or a single line of dialogue. One chapter early on is a sort of stream-of-consciousness reflection on four lines of dialogue from the preceding chapter, and becomes more generally a commentary on the problems and the artificialities of reconstructing dialogue in a historical narrative. At times this constant revisionism smacks of self-indulgence, especially towards the end of the story when the authorial interventions are conspicuously contrived to prolong the suspense of the final shoot-out scene. But at other times the interventions serve to expose a scene to a new perspective, or to present the scene in a different tone or colour. In this sense Binet goes some way to achieving what he set out to achieve, namely a sense of realism and authenticity.

Although not perhaps when it comes to Heydrich. The eponymous character remains just that, a character, too grotesque, too much like the caricature nazis of 1980's Hollywood to  ever convince as a living and breathing historical portrait. He is the blonde, blue-eyed paragon of Aryan idealism, and the machiavellian schemer of a Shakespearean tragedy. Heydrich never quite escapes from a technicolour procession of familiar cultural and literary templates: the bullied, humiliated schoolboy as embryonic form for the bitter despot adult, the sleazy "inveterate pussy hound" lieutenant smacking of sexual and moral degeneracy, the meticulous, kafkaesque behind-the-scenes schemer as chief of the Gestapo and the SD, and, as Protector of Czechoslovakia, the hubristic villain surveying his kingdom from his gothic crenelated lair.

The biographical procession of Heydrichs is one of two main threads in this book. The second is the story of Kubis and Gabcik, the two Czechoslovakian paratroopers charged with fulfilling Operation Anthropoid. Much of Binet's more purposeful prose is preserved for this second thread. Trained in Britain, dropped back into Nazi controlled Czechoslavakia in 1941, Kubis and Gabcik are presented as two sincere, determined boys "without a chance in hell of getting out alive." Eager to provide each with a fitting historical testament, and eager also to develop a dynamic to sustain a narrative momentum, Binet carefully delineates the two protagonists of this second thread as balanced, complimentary characters. Whereas Kubis, the Moravian, is tall, quiet, thoughtful and easygoing, Gabcik, the Slovak, is small, sociable, "a fiery ball of energy". Kubis was put in charge of the explosives, Gabcik the machine gun. Their training in Britain, the psychological portraits of them offered up by their superior officers, their acceptance of the mission and subsequent integration into an underground Czechoslovakian community in Prague, and of course their preparation for and implementation of the assassination plan, as well as what became of them afterwards, are details which make for an absorbing story. Binet communicates the story with enthusiasm and skill.

While the stories of Heydrich and of Kubis and Gabcik respectively are Binet's two main threads, the third, subsidiary thread is composed of the succession of narrative interventions, of the aforementioned revisionist kind, and also of the kind that are more direct digressions into the author's life. This third thread is the autobiographical part of the book. It is the part which most distinguishes its very conspicuous postmodern style, and though avowedly subsidiary, its function being to facilitate the two main stories, it is the part which, in hindsight at least, seems to reverberate the most. It is appropriate therefore to finish with a brief discussion of these autobiographical digressions. The first is an early memory of the author's father, "in a few awkward phrases", telling him the story of Operation Anthropoid, which sparked the enthusiasm which later became HHhH, written in part "to reciprocate (the) gift." Beginning with this anecdote from his childhood, Binet intermittently retraces moments of his life, ostensibly as background to lend authenticity to the historical narrative. In 1996 he was a French teacher in a Slovakian military academy. Soon after he met a beautiful Slovak woman, Aurelia, in Prague, and soon after Aurelia there was Natacha, with whom Binet shared the joke that he, with so many books about Nazism lining the shelves in their apartment, was running the risk of ideological conversion. He is quick to remind us that for the "son of a Jewish mother and a Communist father . . . immersed through (his) literary studies in the humanism of Montaigne and the philosophy of the Enlightenment", such a conversion was "obviously impossible." As with the earlier examples, these autobiographical interludes can sometimes be helpful, but sometimes they seem like diversionary procrastination, digressions meant to forge a coherence that HHhH otherwise struggles for. Sometimes they feel altogether like an awkward sleight of hand.

And so it's difficult to summarise this book. I learned about people and places and moments that I knew little or nothing of before. One or two scenes I still remember vividly. The climactic scene for instance, in which Kubis and Gabcik, holed up in a cathedral, under siege from seven hundred SS guards with machine-guns, hand-grenades, tear gas and fire hoses, defend themselves heroically with only pistols, holding out for two hours. A plaque inscribed with their names, photographs of their faces and bullet holes in the stone mark the cathedral on Resslova Street in Prague today. For scenes like this, HHhH is certainly worth reading. For its postmodern, occasionally indulgent stylistic idiosyncrasies, it is difficult to forget. It is perhaps a shame that it's not the other way around.

The Map and the Territory by Michel Houellebecq

I first read Michel Houellebecq when I was fresh out of university and working a dead end job in the early 2000s. At that time I was the kind of person who would drink too much, rant about politics, throw a pint glass through a window and then burst into tears.  Every night of the week. And this, it seemed to me at the time, was essentially what Houellebecq did on the page. For that I had to love him. Then he got taken to court in France for saying that Islam was the stupidest of all world religions, and he was wholly contemptuous of the entire affair. His responses to questions at the trial were indicative of the caustic sarcasm running through his fiction. When asked in court about his views on religion, Houellebecq famously replied that if the Qur'an was a joke, the Judeo-Christian bible was so boring that it made one want to shit. Who could fail to love that?

But a decade later, I'm not the sort of person who drinks a litre of whiskey and throws Nazi salutes at parties anymore. That kind of lifestyle is not really sustainable, nor, arguably, desirable. It comes about in the first place more through a kind of desperation than out of any coherent worldview. Going back to Houellebecq now, I wondered if it would be like meeting up with an old friend and discovering your paths have diverged so much that you no longer understand each other at all. For Houellebecq too is supposed to have grown up. Certainly, that's the hype around the Map and the Territory. And the same French literary establishment who once looked upon him as a reactionary, a charlatan and a chancer saw fit in 2010 to award the book the Prix Goncourt. 

The Map and the Territory tells the story of Jed, a contemporary artist, from his time at university through to the end of his career, with particular focus on his first two periods of production. Jed initially uses photography as his medium, and creates a series of photographs of Michelin maps of France. He meets a beautiful Russian PR executive from Michelin who helps him become relatively famous for these works. In true Houellebecq style, she also becomes his girlfriend. But here some of Houellebecq's fabled maturity is evident, because his treatment of the subject of contemporary art is actually quite subtle. At the same time as he uses Jed's work and career to quietly satirise the corporate nature of the contemporary art world and to investigate the cultural decline of France (all the buyers are foreign, as are the people who now travel to Michelin starred hotels), he steers well clear of the ignorant and ugly treatment of visual art as a con job that so many writers and journalists seem to think passes as incisive satire.

Jed really has no idea of his motivations, nor any coherent message to articulate through his work. None, at least, of which he is aware. When a newspaper reviewer gives his debut show its first theoretical interpretation, Jed is interested in how the journalist reads the work. "It's not stupid, what he's saying," says Jed. And it's not. But equally, it's an arbitrary reading foisted upon the photographs by someone filling pages in the culture section. In all of this, Houellebecq draws art quite well, and with some sympathy, without making any claims for or against its value. This is one of the major strengths of the book, and also the strongest element of Jed's characterisation.

Jed's girlfriend returns to Russia and the second period of his career begins. He starts to make paintings, as he did before art school. He paints images of people and these images represent different types of vocation. As his second major show approaches, he needs a piece of writing for his exhibition booklet. Jed's gallerist recommends Michel Houellebecq as a French writer who, while unpopular at home, can bring in the overseas money.

Now, generally this kind of self-referential postmodernist inclusion of the author as a character in his own work would piss me off to the degree that I wouldn't be able to finish the book, but this is another thing Houellebecq gets right. In fact, when Houellebecq the character is in the novel, the book is at its most entertaining. A bizarre recluse of a man, who admires pigs but has a guilty addiction to a variety of cold hams, the fictional Houellebecq is both sympathetic and pathetic. Houellebecq the writer plays entertainingly with his public image as a depressed, misanthropic alcoholic without ever glamorising any of those things.

Jed offers to paint the writer's portrait, and since the two men are alone in the world and neither has any friends, they form a kind of attachment. Here we see a familiar trait of Houellebeqc's fiction, which always concerns itself with isolated male characters, adrift from social norms and social relationships. Houellebecq has never been interested in realistic depictions of how affection develops between people. For him, the family is dead and the world inherently lonely. The Map and the Territory is no different in this respect. In fact, many of the ideas underlying the earlier Houellebecq books are present in this one, including many that I always took to be pure provocation. The eulogising of prostitution as a vocation, for example, which sat so comfortably in the gleefully amoral Platform, is rehashed here when Jed paints an image of an escort. Here again are reflections over the cultural corrosion of Europe. And when Jed is too drunk or too reticent to ask for a blowjob, he is said to have neglected his "sexual rights." Many of the clearly reactionary views about race and gender that were so brazenly flaunted in other novels are taken for granted throughout this book.

So I wonder now whether I misunderstood this writer all along. What I thought he was saying for the sheer joy of the shattered taboo may always simply have been garden-variety bigotry, just entertainingly expressed. And while I for one am not against a reactionary writer expressing reactionary views, it seems bizarre that these views have suddenly become acceptable to wider literary culture now that he has stopped expressing himself in the amusing and irreverent fashion that made his earlier work so enjoyable. This goes also for the bleak pessimism of the work. When the world as a meaningless, cruel and cold theatre of the absurd is presented in reckless and boisterously offensive prose, it's actually a lot more interesting than when someone tries to paint the same picture using the realist tradition. The nihilistic pessimism that was such an essential colour of the earlier satires just seems like a narrow and blinkered view of the world here.

Stylistically, this book also shares much with earlier works. The narrator of Atomised is a faux-objective semi-academic voice from the future, looking back upon events. In The Map and The Territory, the narrator is a future art historian, looking back at Jed's career, who goes into long factual digressions. In the final part of the novel there are several familiar touches of grotesque horror. And, like the vast majority of this writer's books, the novel closes with a meditation upon the end of the human race. One major difference between this book and earlier ones is however that Vintage have done an appalling job of proof reading the translation, leaving in place many grammatical errors and bizarre constructions such as "this further complicated the situation further."

In the end then, coming back to Houellebecq after ten years away was more the experience of meeting with an old friend and discovering you never knew him in the first place. He is more or less the same as he was, but you see him differently now. He has assets that you had always missed through your own youthful self-absorption. And it turns out that what you liked about him most was probably in truth never really there, but only what you saw of yourself.

An Open Letter to Eleanor Catton

Earlier this year I read Eleanor Catton's book The Rehearsal. I finished it late at night and I wrote her a letter. The next day I thought what I had written was maybe a bit over the top, but I thought maybe I would send it anyway, since I imagined her struggling with a new book, unsure of her future. I thought, surely it can't hurt to get fan-mail. But I never did send it. And now she's won the Booker Prize at 28 years of age, so now I never will. 

But here it is. 

Dear Eleanor Catton,

I read a lot, and I also write a lot, but I haven't written anything like this before. I suppose this is a fan letter.

I just read The Rehearsal. I think the last time I remember being so impressed by a writer was when I first read Elfride Jelinek, or possibly when I read Blindness by Jose Saramago. In both cases I was torn between feeling a huge excitement at the possibilities of fiction and a kind of yawning terror at the impossibility of my ever producing something so wonderful. I reminded myself that both Jelinek and Saramago were established masters of their craft. I'm only 31 years old. Eleanor Catton, you are younger than me. Eleanor Catton, you are fucking with my head.

You probably think there are all kinds of things wrong with The Rehearsal, given that it's a few years since you wrote it. I want to tell you, the book is note perfect. It is incredibly beautiful, well executed and true. I don't usually even like similes, but almost every one of yours shows the reader something new, and does so with revelatory clarity. You put a poet's grasp of imagery into a prose work, but without sacrificing narrative thrust or characterisation. How can you craft so many flawless sentences?

The vision The Rehearsal presents of social structures and the way people relate to themselves is realised with complete integrity. It is compelling to read. The interlinked stories are all equally fascinating. The structure of the overall narrative serves the themes at the same time as it triggers emotions and generates colours in such a way that one could be forgiven for missing how virtuosic its construction actually is. Your book is brilliant. Congratulations.

You probably don't even want to hear about that book anymore. I see from your Wikipedia page that you have another novel you're working on. I imagine you have other projects too, and it's likely you want them to be very different from what you've done before. I'm sure they will be different, and I'm sure they will be excellent. If you are ever subject to doubt, please don't be. You are what so many of us want to be in this life. You are a great writer.

Best regards,

Vince Stephen.

Paul Bogard: The End of Night.

A square inch of silence and a black night sky full of stars. These are two experiences which are becoming hard to find, and difficult to remember. 'The End of Night' chronicles Bogard's efforts to rediscover and rekindle our relationship with the night, and to remind us of the importance of unpolluted darkness. Ironically then the image that fuels these efforts is of a snowstorm. Bogard offers a memory of his eighteen year old backpacker self walking into a snowstorm, on the edge of the Sahara desert, except that the snow isn't snow, but a swirl of stars from one horizon to the other, swirling in a darkness that has depth and structure.

From that darkness Bogard's first stop is the Las Vegas strip, the brightest real estate in the world, where the brightest beam of light on Earth shoots into space from the apex of the Luxor casino's black pyramid. This is a Bortle Class Nine sky, the brightest kind, the kind that is setting the trend for a planet that is losing its darkness. And Las Vegas is a striking example of the trend. "In less than a human lifetime," Bogard points out, "what was almost an entirely dark place grew to the brightest place in the world." What was not so long ago dark desert land is now illuminated by ten million bulbs.

Much of the book is about how this increasing illumination is effecting our experiences of the night-time. Disappearing are the days, or rather nights, when one could stare into a sky full of stars, contemplating the universe and one's place in it, dreaming and breathing in its beauty. By way of a personal pilgrimage, in a somewhat hushed and sober part of the book, and in an effort to rediscover a little of these lost nights, Bogard journeys to the Massachussetts woods where Henry David Thoreau lived alone from 1845 - 1847 to, in his own words, "live deliberately." Here Bogard follows Thoreau's ghost through the "real darkness", Bortle Class 1 darkness, the darkness of stars and introspection and wildness. Here, as elsewhere in the book, there is a sense of the existential, human significance of our connection with wildness, in all of its forms - "the unknown, the mysterious, the creative, the feminine, the animal, the dark." There is, Bgard argues, a primitive kind of humanity, a more fundamental, essential kind of humanity, that diminishes as the connection becomes more tenuous.

As well as the existential, psychological impact of ever brighter skies, 'The End of Night' also looks at the ecological impact. From birds and bats drawn far from their natural feeding habitats to feast on the swarms of insects caught in the thirty-nine 7000 watt lamps of the Luxor Sky Beam, too tired to fly back to their young, to newborn sea turtles unable to find their way to the ocean because of the bright sodium lights of beach communities, to nocturnal migrating birds confusedly circling lit towers until they drop dead from exhaustion, to the fish, insects and plants whose internal circadian rhythms have evolved in synchronicity with the cycle of night and day, darkness and light, and are now upset by the artificial extension of the day. Bogard points to the impacts of "the blitzkrieg of artificial light" on not only the orientation and circadian rhythms, but also the predation and reproduction of the thirty per cent of vertebrates and sixty something per cent of invertebrates that are nocturnal. We are, he says, only beginning to understand the full ecological impact of this "blitzkrieg", but it seems intuitively logical that these turtles, birds, bats, fish and plants cannot have had the evolutionary time to fully adapt. It is the book's exploration of the different impacts of this evolutionary shortfall, as regards animals and plants, but also humans, that offers much of it's appeal.

The World Health Organisation now lists night shift work as a probable carcinogen, owing in large part to reduced levels of melatonin, ordinarily produced when the body senses darkness. With this information Bogard introduces perhaps the most resonant section of the book, in which he explores the impacts of disrupted circadian rhythms in humans. To do so he follows and talks to a few of the twenty million American night shift workers, the cleaners and caretakers, the drivers, nurses and service industry workers. There is the woman who has existed for years on two or three hours of sleep a day, the locomotive engineers who fall asleep on the job, and a nurse who drives home with her pony-tail trapped in her car's sun roof to jerk her awake should she fall asleep. All of them are awake during their biological night, when their physiology is telling them to sleep. All of them talk of fatigue and disrupted sleep patterns, depression or illness. Most of them are African Americans. These are sobering human stories. They are also, because of their familiarity, and because also of their seeming inevitability, tragic.

If much of 'The End of Night' explores the negative impacts, human, existential and ecological, of artificial light and brighter nights, as much or more relishes and celebrates the beauty of darkness, and also the beauty of darkness in interplay with good, directed lighting. One of the book's most beautiful and absorbing passages has Bogard walking the streets of Paris (the City of Light) at night with Francoise Jousse, the engineer responsible for lighting most of the city's monuments, bridges and boulevards. Walking with Jousse and listening to him expound on the ideas, designs and practicalities of lighting the Notre-Dame cathedral (there are, for instance, two spotlights directed towards the cathedral which are hidden inside two book stalls on the sidewalk across the Seine) the Tour St.-Jacques ("the light falls from the top, and when it reaches the ground it makes a splash.") or the Pont des Arts bridge (illuminated by projectors under the bridge facing the river) is like being lead by the hand through the hidden passageways and undiscovered dimensions of a sleeping city, its treasures and secrets revealed by its custodian and architect, it's beauty brought out by the interplay of darkness and light.

The beauty of darkness is celebrated also in a study of Van Gogh's oil painting, Die Sterrenacht (Starry Night), which hangs in Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art. Painted in 1889 from his sanitarium window at Saint-Remy-de-Provence, it depicts a swirling night sky with yellow-white stars and a crescent moon, and at the bottom of the canvas, a few orange gas-lights in the windows of houses. Bogard dismisses the idea that the sky in this painting is entirely an impressionistic expression of the artist's madness, or of his frenzied energy, and puts the idea instead that this is a painting of a time and a sky that no longer exist. It is, Bogard argues, an imaginary sky "inspired by a real sky of a kind few of the fifty million MoMA visitors have ever seen," a sky before electricity, when the swirling white of the Milky Way and the flashes of red, green, yellow, orange and blue in the stars were there for all to see, unhidden, unpolluted.

This then is a book of images, of a snowstorm of stars, of a beam of light, of bats and circling birds, of splashes of light and a swirling Milky Way.  It is also a book of stories, of ghosts from the past and ghosts in the night. It is part pilgrimage and part polemic. But most of all, it is an invitation, offered in earnest, to rediscover and remember the value and meaning of darkness.

The Case of Mary Bell by Gitta Sereny

In 1968, Mary Bell, then 11 years old, and Norma Bell, thirteen years old and no relation, stood trial for the murders of two little boys in Newcastle. Their trial took place in adult court and their names were released to the press to prevent the possibility of rumours spreading locally about other children. Thus Mary Bell became a notorious child-murderer before she reached puberty. A narrative soon developed around the trial and the crime, a narrative that remains to some extent intact to this day, which held that Norma Bell was an easily-led child of sub-average intelligence, while Mary Bell, far more intelligent, was an aberration, a fiend, an inexplicably evil monster.

Gitta Sereny's book, first published in the years immediately following the case, seeks above all to reject this concept of the evil seed, and argues that no trial of a child who has killed is morally worthwhile unless it seeks to understand not only what happened, but also why it happened. Perhaps, she suggests, greater understanding might prevent such a thing happening again. It might also help society understand how to deal with young people like Mary Bell, who are, on the evidence of their actions alone, deeply disturbed.

Sereny has worked with disturbed children. She writes generously and compassionately about everyone involved, and writes from a belief in the need for serious reform of the justice and social service systems. But the truth is also that Mary Bell is endlessly fascinating, and it would be facile to pretend that this doesn't account for part of the book's great appeal. She is simultaneously terrifying, confusing and endearing, and many people who had contact with her in the years this book recounts spoke of the inexplicable hold she could have over a person, and of the complex emotional reactions she awoke in those who were charged with dealing with her. Reading this book, one experiences a similar mix of emotions and unlikely attachment to the child murderer.

The book begins with the events of the summer when the killing occurred, and any discussion of the subject probably requires a quick explication of those events:

On 11th May 1968, Mary and her friend Norma "found" Mary's cousin injured and bleeding behind some sheds. They came to his aid and were later asked to give statements to the police.

The following day, a local mother complained that Norma and Mary Bell had assaulted her three daughters in the local nursery's sandpit, leaving visible marks on the neck of her seven-year-old. The two girls again gave statements to the police. These statements are reproduced in the book. In Norma's account Mary asks one of the children, "Do you know Mary Bell?" and when the the girl replies, "You are Mary Bell," she says, "No I'm not. Can you fight Mary Bell?" She then asks, "What happens if you choke someone, do they die?" and then begins to strangle the girl until the child turns purple. Norma ends her account by saying that she is no longer Mary's friend. What is disturbing though is that Mary's own account is almost identical to begin with, except that she has Norma asking, "Do you know Mary Bell," and then saying, "Do you wish Mary Bell was dead?" Mary then claims she went behind the shed from where she couldn't see what happened next, but from where she did hear some screaming.

On the 25th of the same month, Martin Brown, four years and two months old, was found dead in an abandoned building. Mary and Norma were observed near the scene and they tried to enter the room where he was found. The cause of death was unclear. The policeman working on the case considered asphyxiation as a cause, but dismissed this because Martin's throat was unmarked. (While it is possible to strangle a four-year-old without leaving a mark, explains Sereny, an adult will almost always apply unnecessary force and cause lasting discoloration or damage.) The following day, the local nursery building was broken into and vandalised. Weird notes were found inside, scrawled in childish writing. They read as oblique confessions to the murder but were dismissed as a tasteless prank. The following week Mary Bell and Norma were arrested breaking into the same nursery.

In the meantime, Mary Bell knocked on the door of Martin's house and asked his mum, smiling, if she could see Martin. "Oh, love," said Martin's Mum, "he's dead." Mary, still smiling, said that she knew he was dead. "I wanted to see him in his coffin," she explained. Later in the book, Gitta Sereny discusses the diagnosis of two examining psychologists who stated that Mary Bell was suffering from a psychopathic personality. For me, even as an interested layman, this early incident was a clue that Mary was a psychopath. It also seems that she wanted to get caught. That same week she told other children that she was a murderer and had murdered Martin Brown. Sereny sees all this acting-out as a series of cries for help, which, had they not been ignored, might have prevented what happened next.

Almost exactly two months after the death of Martin Brown, Brian Howe, a child of less than three and a half years old, was found murdered in some waste ground not far from where Mary and Norma lived. Mary and Norma were interviewed several times. Mary called attention to herself by trying to implicate an innocent boy who often played with Brian. Norma eventually implicated Mary, who then accused Norma of the murder.

Having laid these events out in detail, the book goes on to deal with the two girls' time on remand and with the trial. Sereny discusses how the trial was adapted to fit the requirements of two very young girls, how everyone involved did their very best, but how ultimately they were hamstrung by the structure of a criminal trial designed for trying adult defendants, which may not in the end have benefited anyone. Throughout the process, Norma was emotional and childlike, while Mary Bell seemed composed, except when she grew angry. Faced, as an eleven year old, with impossibly complex legal jargon, she nonetheless followed the trial and carefully adapted her account of events to incorporate plausible explanations for evidence she had heard presented against her. She was often blank-faced and was able to discuss topics like murder and death without apparent concern. Sereny points out, though, that all Mary's anxiety was visible in her hands. She constantly made weird gestures and stretched her fingers apart. Mary's vocabulary was also very advanced for her age, and her ability to keep track of the discussion uncanny. She was able to confuse and get the better of her interrogators on more than one occasion. All this ultimately worked against her though, since it supported the idea that she was the instigator and Norma was merely a stooge. Mary alone was convicted. What was completely absent from the trial, and this is why Sereny says she felt compelled to write the book, was any discussion of either girl's background.

And this aspect of the case was not missing only from the trial. For many years Mary's childhood experiences were not known to her carers, and despite being diagnosed as "of unsound mind," she was given little or no psychiatric treatment. Sereny would later write a whole book, Cries Unheard, about Mary Bell's childhood, a book that exposes unsuspected levels of abuse, but even the single chapter of The Case of Mary Bell dedicated to the topic makes it clear that Mary's mother, Betty Bell, was a very unwell woman from very early in her life. Had Betty received psychiatric intervention, or had Mary been removed from her care, argues Sereny, perhaps the damage could have been greatly reduced all round. Sereny is polemical about the need to separate children from unfit parents, a position which might seem controversial until you know that Betty tried to kill Mary Bell on at least four occasions.

Just as there was a lack of medical expertise or psychiatric intervention in Betty's life, so there was for a long time no medical dimension to Mary Bell's captivity. This was a girl in serious need of treatment which, for a long time, she did not receive. Those who dealt with Mary were often dedicated and enthusiastic, but Sereny argues that they needed the support of psychiatrists and psychologists; support which simply was not there. In fact, the ignorance of those with responsibility for the child seems shocking. Sereny discusses more than once Mary's ability to make her adult carers feel they had some kind of special connection with her, some affinity nobody else had. In detention, at least one of Bell's mentors had to resign after becoming convinced Bell was innocent. Several others were unable to cope with Mary's rejection of them. Her mother was allowed visitation rights, despite being the source of many of her mental issues, and was even allowed to photograph Mary in her underwear. The institution where she was held believed they were "doing miracles" with Mary, even as two batches of hamsters died in her care from neck-related injuries. 

The Case of Mary Bell was reprinted in the 1990s, following the death of James Bulger at the hands of John Venables and Robert Thompson. Appended to this later edition is Gitta Sereny's account of the trial faced by Venables and Thompson, which again took place in adult court. To some readers this addition might feel a little exploitative, as if the aim were to resurrect the Mary Bell book with the addition of contemporary material related to a completely separate crime to give it relevance. And to a certain degree I sympathise with this idea, because the two cases are strikingly different in at least as many ways as they are similar. The core ideas of Sereny's argument are, however, relevant to both trials, and it's instructive to see how little had changed in the intervening two and a half decades. More than this though, the Bulger case highlights the destructive consequences of the justice system's disinterest in the motivations and reasons for this kind of crime.

Sereny contends that the murder of Jamie Bulger was a sex crime, and that until this was understood, very little of value could come from the proceedings. The behaviour of the boys during questioning, especially in relation to the batteries found near Bulger's body, supported a sexual motive from early on. It was eventually established that the two killers had forced the batteries into Bulger's mouth—a behaviour which Sereny claims is almost always a sexual act in children. The sexual nature of the crime was in fact clear to the police, but it was felt that discussion of this aspect of the boys' actions would cause only unnecessary distress. Sereny suggests that without taking all this into account, and with no attempt to understand the two boys' backgrounds, the best we can hope for from legal proceedings is a punitive custodial sentence, which might well be necessary, but should be regarded as the absolute minimum response to such a crime.

The second edition of The Case of Mary Bell was published in 1998, and when the two boys were eventually released, sure enough, one of them was sent back to prison for reoffending. It's interesting to note that while Sereny and others suggested that Robert Thompson, who was likely sexually abused himself, probably instigated the sexual element of the original crime, it was in fact John Venables who ended up getting sent back inside for child porn offences. Perhaps Sereny misunderstood the dynamic of the crime, or perhaps Venables' sexual development was stunted by the traumatic crime he committed as a young boy, or by his being condemned to negotiate puberty and the journey into adulthood in a punitive institution.

Either way, the addition to the book of the Bulger material was tragically vindicated by this turn of events and further underlines the key message that Mary Bell was not an aberrant, evil soul, but a vulnerable child damaged by an appalling formative situation.

The girl that emerges through the pages of this book is intelligent, manipulative, strange and impossible to fully understand. She is emblematic of the total failure of society to grasp either the causes of violence or the best approach to dealing with child offenders. The Case of Mary Bell strongly rejects the mainstream discourse around "evil" children, which tends to suggest that we should save our compassion for the victims of murder and for their families. This is a story full of victims, it argues, all of whom deserve our compassion.

Patrick Ness: A Monster Calls.

Conceived by Siobhan Dowd before her cancer took her, and reimagined by Patrick Ness four years later, 'A Monster Calls' is a children's novel of the indelible sort. The story begins  just after midnight. Conor O'Malley, a thirteen year old insomniac, is already awake, reliving the nightmare, "the one with the darkness and the wind and the screaming." He hears a voice, a monstrous, untamed, wild sort of voice. He hears a billowing wind and groaning floorboards. Through his window he sees a graveyard, a church tower, and the steel lines of a railway track glowing in the moonlight. From the centre of the graveyard there rises an old yew tree, its branches twisting and creaking, forming a terrible face, a colossal spine and torso, a moving, breathing skin of woven needle-like leaves.

These opening pages are foreboding. Children's stories do not usually begin quite like this. There is an uneasy restlessness behind the words, and the same restlessness twitches at the margins too. Here, in the white spaces, Jim Kay's distressed inky doodles scratch, sprawl and smudge the edges of the pages, closing in on the text as Conor's nightmare closes in on him. Kay's obsessive monochrome details border the story throughout, sometimes bursting into beautiful full page or double page illustrations. They are midnight landscapes, bristling, sinewy and moonlit. They are of the same material as the text, inseparable from it in any meaningful sense.

Setting its black knotted hands on either side of the bedroom window, the monster glares in at a sleepless Conor. It roars and screams and pounds its fists against the house. It smashes a fist through the window, shattering glass and wood and brick across the floor, filling the room with its warm breath and its angry bellows. The white space of the page collapses into shadows and splinters.

"Shout all you want," Conor says, "I've seen worse."

In the author's note to the book Ness confesses to only one self-imposed guideline: "to write a book I think Siobhan would have liked." This seems like a sensible way to have gone about things. Ness and Dowd never met. He was handed her beginning, premise and characters by her publishers, Walker Books, and asked to, or felt like he had been asked to, in his words, "Go. Run with it. Make trouble." And that's what he has done.

Ness tells a story about stories, and not one of them, the frame story or the others, is ordinary or familiar. Each one troubles. Each one runs into the other. Each is a kind of inverted fairy-tale, populated with the familiar stock-characters, but without the stock morality. In one, for instance, we follow a noble Prince and a beautiful Princess into exile, fleeing hand in hand from an evil Queen, and from a kingdom rightfully theirs. They stop one night in a wood and rest beneath a tree. In the morning the Prince is distraught to find his love dead by his side, murdered in her sleep. Heart-broken and vengeful, he returns to the kingdom with the Princess' body, raises an army and overthrows the wicked Queen. In the name of his love he liberates the people of the kingdom from the Queen's despotic rule, and so, it seems, all is well. But then the monster, as the book's omniscient, omnipresent story-teller, takes us back to the dark of the night beneath the tree, and from the darkness he teases a different story, one which disfigures, or exposes the first. And this is what Ness does too. He teases out unseen, unfamiliar strands of stories from the dark, shadowy parts of the seen, familiar ones, and so the stories and their meanings become relative, shifting and contorting to accommodate the shifts and contortions of their neighbours. Each story is also, in and of itself, a commentary on the act of story-telling, challenging and toying with our intuitive responses to seemingly familiar stories.

'A Monster Calls' might have been another didactic children's book, a poe-faced message with a story attached as an afterthought. But instead it is a fully-formed, evolving story, a thing born of a dying breath with its own breathing musculature, and its own hulking shadow. It broods and bruises like Ted Hughes' Iron Man. It is beautiful and dark, restless but unwavering.