The Herald - The Herald Magazine
Thomas McMullan on an ancient technique that destroys lives
IN my novel The Last Good Man, an isolated community governs itself by writing on a large wall. Walk up to this structure, looming on the village’s outskirts, and you’ll find notes and missives about piano lessons and lost cats, but you’ll also find accusations plastered in red paint. Geoff Sharpe the butcher has been stealing cuts of meat, a poster might proclaim. Geoff Sharpe has been slacking on the job. And, if there are enough accusations about a person, something is done about it; atonement will be sought.
This novel has come from a period where questions of public writing – and public shaming – have risen to the fore. These have been years when the architecture of social media has had a powerful effect on debate. Newspapers have carried headlines decrying judges as Enemies of the People; conspiracy theories have spread virulently across pockets of the internet and into the mouths of populist politicians. More recently, community tensions have boiled over as we have been forced to live and work in close quarters, when rule breakers are watched closely by their neighbours.
These are contemporary concerns, but they have deep roots. The Last Good Man started on the wall of a university in China. Between 2011 and 2013 I was teaching in the English language and translation department at Nankai University in Tianjin. In one of the older parts of the university, dating from the first decades of the People’s Republic of China, was a series of small buildings that housed photocopy machines.
The back wall of one of these rooms was plastered top to bottom in sheets of paper, covered in Chinese characters. My feeble Mandarin wasn’t able to make sense of this writing, but one morning my girlfriend at the time accompanied me. She didn’t want to talk about what she’d read on the wall until long after we’d left the room.
It turns out there were a lot of cruel words on that wall; a lot of hateful slurs about named people who worked on the campus.
I learnt about public writings, often anonymous, that are writ large on the walls of public
adding her own spin to local dishes. Oh, and much to her obvious delight, she spied a bald eagle in a tree.
There was the occasional off note when she stated the thoroughly obvious – New Orleans was where jazz was born, don’t you know
– but, by and large, her commentary zipped along.
was a documentary that seemed to have it all. Here was the tale of Americans buying a stake in the
Red Army hockey team just after the Soviet Union had collapsed. The American investors sent a marketing whizz called Steve Warshaw over to Moscow, and he found a club as broken and rotten as the country. Chaos reigned, a little money came in for sponsorship but more of it went out the door.
Gabe Polsky’s film took an age to get going, which made it run far longer than the story merited. As for that story, there was too much of everything, from strippers on the ice at half-time to bears serving drinks. The viewer was supposed to find all this funny/freaky in a perverse kind of way. Don’t know about you, but I tend to have a sense of humour failure around performing bears.
The whole thing was too self-consciously “I’m mad me” wacky, starting but not ending with our
Steve. By the time the Russian mafia got their hooks in and events took a turn for the seriously ugly, the shift in tone was jarring. Less would have been so much more with this subject.
Luxury Christmas for Less (Channel 4, Monday) was fronted by likeable consumer champions Sabrina Grant and Helen Skelton. “After the year we’ve all had there’s only one thing that can save 2020,” they announced. “A cracking Christmas crammed with luxury trimmings.” Clearly the show was in the can before Santa, aided by the pharmaceutical industry, came up with the vaccine.
Some of the top tips were as tired as last year’s salvaged wrapping paper. Who doesn’t know there are terrific products at cheap prices in discount supermarkets, or that stores pump in the Christmas music to get you in the mood to overspend? At an hour it was thin stuff.
Hurrah for Yasmeen, whose victory over awful Geoff was a stirring sight to behold in Coronation Street (STV, Monday to Friday). Justice seems to move at lightning speeds in Weatherfield, with the period from crime to doing time (or not, in Yasmeen’s case) a relative blink of a judge’s eye.
Now that Imran is a hotshot trial-winning lawyer perhaps he can be persuaded to ditch that coat of his, which is even more awful than awful Geoff.
As for the big 6oth anniversary episode on Wednesday – it had its moments, but the stand-off over the flats is no Pat Phelan on the rampage. Or Ken and Deirdre breaking up and making up. Or poor Rita, running for her life in Blackpool.
Still, we shall keep the faith and carry on. We owe Corrie that much, and more.