How a Chinese wall of shame inspired my novel

places. They’ve been a part of Chinese culture since its imperial period, but many modern Chinese people associate them with the worst of the Cultural Revolution, when names and smears about supposedly bourgeois anti-revolutionaries would be written on the walls of universities and gangs would attack alleged offenders. What might have started as a political tool descended into neighbours defaming each other, old scores being settled in public places. In one case, a Beijing teacher was beaten to death by her own students.

I began to write a story about a village community that policed itself with writings on a wall. By then I was working as a journalist in London, and writing a lot about technology. This was around the time the Gamergate controversy was leading to female video game critics being targeted by sustained misogynistic harassment, rape threats and death threats online. Soon, a similar vein of abuse-based, hashtag-hinged campaigning would appear under the alt-right banner. Then the Brexit vote happened. Then Trump happened. The idea of words on walls leading to violent acts felt real.

In my novel, Duncan Peck travels to Dartmoor in search of his cousin, James Hale. In the village, he finds

Hale has become leader of a group that enforces punishments on those accused of wrongdoing, a role that affords him many privileges. But when Hale’s neighbour is accused of horrendous acts, this order of things begins to unravel. Personal transgressions and community tensions spill out.

SOME people have said the novel makes them think of “cancel culture”. This term was not around when I was writing the book, which I’ve been working on for at least five years. In any case, it seems a difficult phrase, largely used as a pejorative by those seeking to decry perceived wrongdoing on behalf of the “cancellers”. It’s tangled up with questions of who gets to speak and in whose name they speak for; who has been silenced historically and the extent to which social media platforms enable our voices to be heard, or whether our voices are pushed towards outrage by the insidious architecture of these digital spaces.

Public shaming is nothing new, but the internet has given it new forms. As the narrator writes in Thomas Mann’s

Doktor Faustus: “You only need to tell a crowd they are ‘the folk’ to stir them up to all sorts of reactionary evil,” but go online and the edges of “the folk” are difficult to trace. Where does the group begin and end? Perhaps the question is less about the specific ills of Twitter and more how the nature of community is shifting in these perilous times.

“Now a book lives, as long as it is unfathomed,” wrote DH Lawrence. “Once it is fathomed, once it is known and its meaning is fixed or established, it is dead.” He’s not wrong. And so I am reluctant to draw too fixed a line between the events of my book and any particular meaning.

These are complex, knotted quests without easy answers, and The Last Good Man is not a polemic. It is a story about characters contending with responsibility, justice and atonement, and with a world of great uncertainties, teetering around the threat of extinction. Seen against this backdrop, perhaps it is understandable that they seek solace in the sureness of sentiment that is written on the wall.

The Last Good Man by Thomas McMullan in published by Bloomsbury, £16.99