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The Story behind the Story of The Story of Evolution.
Harry Thompson was a comedy writer and producer, working on Have I got News for You. He died of cancer in 2005, and This Thing of Darkness is his only novel – it was long-listed for the Man Booker prize of that year.
A history graduate himself, in this novel (based on a great number of detailed historical documents) recreates the 5-year journey of the ‘coffin brig’ HMS Beagle as it surveys the uncharted coast of South America.
On board are the Ship’s religious Captain, Robert Fitzroy and a University drop-out, Charles Darwin. This Thing of Darkness brilliantly sketches out the friendship that grew between the two men, and then its inevitable disintegration as Darwin’s amateur experiments lead him to disprove Old Testament’s ‘Great Flood’ event and then the story of creation entirely.
Thompson’s novel paints a portrait of two young men, both looking for answers to the ‘big questions’ confined in a tiny ship, often in terrible seas, but who were themselves contradictions: Fitzroy was a religious Tory, but did not consider the native people they encountered as inferior, on the other hand, the supposedly liberal Darwin did.
The novel ends with one of the friends a controversial superstar, and the other a forgotten inventor of meteorology. It sounds boring, but it isn’t, as this really has a fast-paced adventure story as its centre. You will learn a lot more about evolutionary theory here than you would reading Richard Dawkins.
Surprisingly riveting.
Tags: atheism creationism darwin evolution humanity pantheism
Live or recount
"... a man is always a teller of tales, he lives surrounded by his stories and the stories of others, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his life as if he were recounting it."
A stunning couple of pages in Nausea in which Sartre suddenly spears the illusion of meaning that we grasp from thin air and try to smother over the yawning abyss of existence. We narrativise existence, construct and impose meaning onto experience - but Sartre recognises we can only do so in retrospect:
"...people talk about true stories. As if there could possibly be such things as true stories; events take place one way and we recount them the opposite way. You appear to begin at the beginning [...] in fact you have begun at the end."
When we 'recount' our lives, we try to seek out the pinnacles and troughs, the 'annunciations' and 'promises', as though they were events there to be recognised and named, rather than conjured and created retrospectively.
"We forget that the future was not yet there; the fellow was walking in a darkness devoid of portents."
It is a Nietzschean moment, where Sartre manages, as he said was his intention, to follow the consequences of atheism to their conclusion. Without any inherent order to experience, we create our own illusion of order; but examination reveals the futility:
"I wanted the moments of my life to follow one another in an orderly fashion like those of a life remembered. You might as well try to catch time by the tail."