Fiction is truer than fact

Willing suspension of disbelief is not a good basis for lawmaking

Two books I read in my teens made me want to be a writer. One, Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch, appeared when I was in the third year of secondary school and delivered a style of memoir so warm, so funny and affable that I wanted nothing more than to do the same. The other was Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, a very tattered tenth-hand copy borrowed from a friend (and never given back, sorry). I was mesmerised.

It was probable that I would have headed down the path to Grub Street anyway, but if you want to blame anyone for my contribution to the discourse, then Harper Lee must shoulder a small part. English wasn’t my favourite subject – that was history, followed by maths, and the profession I first saw myself trying out, after a careers fair in school, was as an actuary. Probability always interested me, perhaps because it feels like a tangible way of understanding a confusing world, and statistics are usually less frightening than one’s imagination. It’s a shame I didn’t stick with that idea, in retrospect.

Harper Lee’s influence was enormous. There was a point during the early 2010s, when I used to read weekly theatre reviews, when I remember noticing that there were four different plays about racial prejudice in the American South showing in the West End. The book and its film adaptation had a huge impact on how audiences viewed racism and the law, and this is hardly surprising, since fictional works have far more influence on public opinion than dry polemic.

Perhaps the most famous example was Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which helped galvanise the anti-slavery movement in the northern United States, leading Abraham Lincoln to tell its author Harriet Beecher Stowe ‘So you’re the little woman that started this great war!’ (in fact that probably didn’t happen, but the story reflected a widespread understanding of the book’s influence).

In Britain, public opinion on abortion was hugely influenced by Up The Junction, the radio play directed by Ken Loach, with its depiction of a back street termination. Loach was also responsible for Cathy Come Home, which influenced elite opinion on homelessness and probably played a part in the 1977 Housing (Homeless Persons) Act; this radically overhauled the social housing waiting list system by giving priority to those in need, with enormous consequences.

Ken Kesey’s novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and its film adaptation had a huge effect on perceptions about serious mental illness, promoting the R.D. Laing school of thought that the mentally ill were best placed in the community rather than institutions - again, with huge consequences.

Fiction has often driven social reforms, none more so than the work of Charles Dickens, whose novels also continue to colour our view of Victorian Britain more than any historian. Drama as a means of shaping the discourse has also seen a revival with last year’s Mr Bates vs The Post Office, and now with the arrival of the Netflix drama Adolescence.

It is harrowing stuff, especially as a father of a boy just a bit younger than its antagonist, and Adolescence has proved a huge hit; watched by six and a half million people in its first week, the biggest ever audience for a streaming television show, it even beat The Apprentice in audience ratings. It is a credit to the writers and the actors, in particular the hugely talented Stephen Graham, who both co-wrote the drama and played the killer’s father with a rare degree of empathy.

It is also a drama quite consciously aimed at driving the discourse, which Parliamentarians have taken up with zeal. The Prime Minister announced that ‘As a father, watching Adolescence with my teenage son and daughter hit home hard. We all need to be having these conversations more.’ Backing Netflix’s plan to show the series for free in schools across the country, ‘so as many young people as possible can see it’, Starmer even accidentally referred to it as a ‘documentary’ in Parliament before correcting himself, and then did so a second time. Kemi Badenoch, meanwhile, has been slammed by radio hosts for not watching the fictional work, one calling it a ‘dereliction of duty’. One gets the feeling that we’ll soon all be out clapping for Adolescence.

So with the backing of the Prime Minister, the programme will be watched in Parliament, where the show’s creators will meet with politicians to discuss ‘online safety’. The drama will also be shown in schools as part of anti-misogyny lessons; the message behind Adolescence, that the small, weird kid is probably a demented women-hating killer, will no doubt have a very positive impact on classrooms.

You might say that ‘Britain has gone from Government-by-Newspaper-Columnist to Government-by-DocuDrama’ But, of course, there is a key difference between Mr Bates and Adolescence – the Horizon scandal portrayed in that ITV series actually happened; Adolescence is total fiction. In fact, not only did the story in the Netflix series not happen, it’s not even likely to happen, as any actuary might tell you. This has not stopped the BBC reporting how the ‘Netflix hit proves necessity of male role models’.

The drama recounts the story of Jamie, an intelligent 13-year-old boy from a loving and intact upper-working-class family. His father has never seen the inside of a police station before but Jamie, influenced by ‘that Andrew Tate shite’, as the female detective phrases it, and the beliefs of the online manosphere, murders a girl who calls him an ‘incel’.

As Ian Leslie wrote, ‘At the centre of the story is a boy who stabs a girl to death in a fit of rage, driven by fear of masculine humiliation. Jamie is intelligent, and while he has problems controlling his anger, he is not mentally ill. Jamie’s normality is crucial to what you might call the argument of Adolescence. We have seen dramas about children doing terrible things before and invariably it turns out that the children’s parents have done terrible things to them.

‘Adolescence toys with this convention, leading us to expect a shocking revelation of parental abuse. The only shock turns out to be that Jamie’s parents are decent and loving. They are not the problem; the problem is in the phones. Jamie’s mind has been poisoned by the online “manosphere” (a concept clumsily introduced in a scene between the lead detective and his son). This online culture is to blame, rather than parents, teachers, or the kid himself. The manosphere performs a role that we used to assign to evil spirits, arbitrarily taking possession of vulnerable souls and acting through them to commit awful deeds.’

Jack Thorne, the show’s writer, said that Jamie ‘comes from a good background, like me; he’s a bright boy, like I was. The key difference between us? He had the internet to read at night whereas I had Terry Pratchett and Judy Blume.’

As Leslie points out: ‘Your beloved son could be the next Jamie, the story tells us. This is a terrifying and riveting thought. It is also, let’s be clear, quite mad. I don’t believe for a moment that if Jack Thorne had had access to Andrew Tate videos he would have turned into a rage-fuelled murderer, and in general there is no empirical support for such a proposition.’

It is because the show is targeted at concerned parents that the killer is so improbable in every way. Small and sensitive, his best subject at school is history and his favourite character Brunel, as is so often the case with teenage killers; honestly, I’ve almost lost count of the number of times Isambard Kingdom Brunel is cited by knife attackers in crime reports.