Introduction
Isles Lost, Isles Found
Every novel contains at least three stories. Of course, there’s story in its pages. But then there’s the story of its writing. And there’s also the story of its reaching, or not reaching, the bigger world of its readers. As these things go, The Summer Isles proved a remarkably easy novel to write. But then it hit a wall which only now, through the book you hold in your hand, it’s finally managing to break through. At the time, I was puzzled and hurt. It is, I still think, my most rounded and complete work, and deals with an important, if not vital, subject. The success of the novella, which I created from the book at Gardner Dozois’s kind suggestion, only added to my confusion.
I don’t have any explanations to offer about the strange progress of this book. Novels aren’t about certainties, and introductions to them even less so, and writers must learn to exist in lands of confusion. Alternate history, by any standards an honorable strand in speculative fiction, has often been said to be in the doldrums by people who claim to know such things. There’s this book’s very Englishness. There are the sexual leanings of its main character. Then there’s its politics. But I firmly believe (as I writer, I think I have to) that that which is worthwhile will eventually rise to the surface. And here they are; these risen pages.
The Summer Isles explores the undeniable fact that we humans are pack animals. That, most of the time, we keep in with the crowd and do what seems to be expected of us. This process—our ability to enter the mind-set and attitudes of the culture we find ourselves in—is vital to our survival as a species. After all, if every decision and precept were continually challenged, life and society would soon grind to a halt. We live and comply each day with innumerable petty demands, hierarchies and regulations. In any other direction lies chaos and madness. But this instinct to comply runs far deeper than our willingness to pay parking good, and what we think of as evil.
Sometimes, an entire society can become so skewed in the standards it sets itself that to find an understanding of the things which are done in its name can seem, in retrospect, barely possible. But the instances in history of such events happening are worryingly many. There’s the Terror during the French Revolution. There’s the mechanised slaughter in the trenches during World War One. There’s Nazi Germany.
When I set out to write The Summer Isles, I wasn’t so specifically concerned to mirror any particular episode of what might be called social madness as to make a general exploration of it. The necessary choice of a time and place, however, dictated that some parallels were more obvious than others. If England had suffered what Germany suffered in the 1920s and 30s, it seemed to me not so much plausible as inevitable that the so-called certainties which we English still merrily cling to would drift and darken towards some form of fascism.
But the politics was incidental. Fascism, when you attempt to analyse it, is a will-of-a-wisp of meaningless prejudices and hopeless aspirations in any case. What I really wanted to show was that, like the participants in Milgram’s famous experiment, people will mostly do what they are told, even when the things they are told to do, or witness, or conspire in or turn their backs from, are terrible. And I wanted to show how ordinary our compliance would feel—and then, being an Englishman, just how English.
Prejudice exists. People condemn and dislike and persecute. You see it in the news. You encounter it when to talk to otherwise charming people at parties. You’ll also find it in your own heart, if you’re prepared to look deeply enough. So much of what happens in The Summer Isles, and many of the things which are said by its characters, is simply a reportage and reflection not of some oddly twisted alternative universe, but of the way things really are.
You scarcely have to look far in this current world of ours to see similar horrors and stupidities. It seems to me that deep certainty, especially moral certainty, whether it is bolstered by religion or some political philosophy, is the best breeding ground for this kind of social madness. It exists, plainly, in the minds of many terrorists and so-called freedom fighters, but it still also exists amid nations. The terminology is irrelevant. Fascism sticks out to us now only because it is currently seen as laughably outdated. Terrible things have been done in the name of such nebulous concepts as the will of the people, or of God, and in the name of science, and of freedom, and even of democracy.
History, even alternate history, has never yet stopped repeating itself. Let’s just hope, now, that it’s time for a change.
Bewdley, England
December 2004