Mind Reading

One of the nice things about Christmas is getting lots of new books.  What might be even nicer is getting the time to curl up and read them, but that’s another story!  One Crimble pressie from me to me was Jane Finnis’s new one, Danger In The Wind. Jane’s promised me a guest blog, so I won’t say too much more about it at the moment, other than it’s an absolute cracker, with a really good story and well worth adding to your reading list.

One of my other Christmas presents was Clive James’ new book Point of View, taken from the radio series. D’you know the series?  It’s replaced the old Letter From America slot on  Sunday mornings on BBC Radio 4 at quarter to nine.  If quarter to nine is too early, you can get in on iplayer and (usually) as a podcast.  I’ve been a fan of Clive James since the days he wrote hilarious TV criticisms for The Observer years ago.  I mean, part of the fun of watching Dallas was watching Dallas, if you see what I mean, but reading Clive James on watching Dallas was sublime.

You knew you had seen something funny; something that an intellectual French poet would instantly place in the Theatre of the Absurd.  But quite how funny and quite how absurd it was never really hit home until Clive James got to work on it.  What’s more, he had the gift of making you want to go back and watch more.  Whether this is a good thing or not, I’m not entirely sure, but I attribute my ownership of a mug which says, “I shot J.R.” that still lurks at the back of a drawer somewhere entirely to him.

He does a piece about the attacks on private life by the press  (you know, all the phone hacking and so on).  Here’s a quote: “Most of us are capable of grasping that if everyone could suddenly read everyone else’s thoughts then very few people would survive the subsequent massacre…. To live in society at all, we have to keep a reservoir of private thoughts, which, whether wisely or unwisely, we only share with intimates.  This sharing of private thoughts is called private life.”

I had that thought somewhere through one of the first showings of Star Trek, when Mr Spock had Captain Kirk or someone or other gripped in a mind-meld and I wouldn’t be surprised if Clive James had it too.  Basically, any normal person’s  thought would be, “Get your hand off my face,” seasoned with a few expletives and some mordant personal criticism.  However, it did occur to me that one of the place where you can actually move around in someone else’s mind, without incurring an unlooked for degree of violence, is in fiction.

Agatha Christie does this all the time when she’s scene-setting, so we get the same event described by different people with their different takes on it.  It’s a very effective, very quick way of establishing what’s going on and who it’s going on to.  Another neat little trick that involves mind-reading, is when an action is contemplated but not carried out.  I’ve done this a few times, as in, “Jack stopped just short of slamming the door.”  So you get all the emotion of him actually slamming the door without any of the consequences, plus he gets Brownie points for being so restrained.  Then again, having what he’s thinking flesh out what he’s actually saying takes the reader immediately into that privileged space that makes us true insiders.  And it’s fun to write.