Richard Solly introduces his novel Bright Wings

Richard Soilly

Richard Solly gave the following talk at the launch of his novel Bright Wings, on Friday 2 October, at St Mary Moorfields in the City of London.

Thank you all very much for your kindness in attending this event. I'm going to say a few words about the book that has been published. They will tell you very little about the story, lest you conclude there is no point in buying it; but they will take an inordinately long time, so you may wish to replenish your glasses, if there's enough left of anything.

First of all, we might ask, "What has been published?"

Well, it's a novel. Its title is Bright Wings: a light-hearted tale of disappointment, destruction, desperation and death. It's not an academic work, nor a documentary, nor a piece of journalistic reporting.

People have asked me whether it's autobiographical. I would prefer to say that it's based on thirty years of dedicated action research. Most of the places where the story is set are based on places that I know, though they are fictionalised. Some of the incidents in the story are based on events in which I took part or knew people who took part. Others are figments of my imagination. The central character, through whom events are seen, is not me, although perhaps there are parts of me scattered around various of the characters, along with parts of other people.

All novels are lies. But I believe, with Cardinal John Henry Newman, that at times the closest approach to the truth may be a lie. For many of us, stories immerse us in the truth more deeply and more effectively than factual accounts. Perhaps that's why my corporate lawyer friend Mike Rebeiro phoned me from a beach in Corfu while he was reading the second draft of this novel and told me, "Now I understand what you've been banging on about for the past twenty years!"

But the central event in the story is ridiculous. It is most unlikely to happen in this world. Perhaps it might happen in one of the many millions of parallel universes which apparently exist. I suspect that if you are particularly closely wedded to realism, you will not enjoy this book.

Then we might ask, "Who is it that has been published?"

You'll note from the page facing the acknowledgements that I have asserted my right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. But I did not create myself, or the language in which I have written the book. I came to be through the love of my parents for one another. I was born with an evolved innate capacity for language which was not my own achievement; and I learnt, and have written this novel, in the English language, which I did not create but inherited, the collective work of millions upon millions of people over many hundreds of years, reflecting events in which I took no part. The story is filled with events, details and characters put together from observed raw material which I saw, noted, experienced, knew, but did not create. There are no self-made men or women, and no-one is an island. All life, all creativity is collective, so if there is anything worthwhile about this offering, the credit is to a vast conglomeration of humanity and not to me alone.

Which also means, of course, that if you don't like it, it's not my fault.

Some of the people who inspired this story - indeed, have inspired me more generally - are listed in the dedication at the beginning of the book. All those named there have died, and I wanted to honour them.

It is also possible that, over the course of my life, I may have observed and filed away in my memory particular mannerisms or turns of phrase from people other than those honoured in the dedication. If, as you read, you find yourself thinking, "Why, bless my soul, there's something about this character which reminds me of myself," I draw your attention to the note on the page facing the acknowledgement: "All characters in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental."

Thirdly, we might ask, "Why has this book been published?"

This is a question that my kind publishers, Austin Macauley, may well already be asking themselves.

From my perspective, it has been published because something else was not published. Death gave birth to life. Indeed, that statement is true on a number of levels as far as this novel is concerned, but I shall note two of them. When my beloved friend, teacher, guru, guide and mentor Father Bert White died in a fire in the darkness of the longest night of the last year of the last millennium, I exorcised my grief by writing. In one of the vividly imaginative meditations which I experienced around that time, Bert came to me and told me, "Write! I've been telling you for years to write! Will you get on with it!" Or words to that effect. So I wrote a memoir, the various struggles in which I had engaged interspersed with self-reflective letters to my dear departed friend. I called it Walking With The Dead, and I sent it to a publisher's reader, who read it and wrote back to me. She told me, "This is not material for a published work: this is material for a psychiatrist's couch. But you write very well. Why not write a novel?" So, after a number of years, I wrote one, and this is it.

I wanted to do two things with this story: one was to develop an idea that came to me years ago after hearing, from one of my history teachers, Barry Langston, a short, suggestive and ridiculous story called An Obliging Sort Of Fellow. What, I wondered, if a person were very much too obliging?

The other was to set that story against the background of the world of my everyday work. This is a far different world from the 'real world' in which we are invited to believe by certain political and economic commentators, a 'real world' in which it is apparently not possible to construct a just and compassionate society or to stop devouring the planet on which we live and which gives us sustenance, because in this supposedly 'real world' we have to live as though life were all about the maximisation of the production and consumption of material goods and their accumulation by those with the resources to purchase them; and if this process leaves behind a thousand million or two thousand million or three thousand million expendable human beings, causing death and misery on an unprecedented and unimaginable scale, and if in the process it lays waste the life-giving Earth and renders her all but uninhabitable unto the thousandth generation of our descendants, so be it, because apparently there is no alternative. This is the goose that lays the golden eggs, and we are not to do away with her.

But in fact there is an alternative, an alternative birthed by love, hope and struggle, the struggle of those thousands of millions of apparently expendable human beings whose voices cry out for justice and whose heroic efforts for a kinder world must gain victory if any of us is to survive.

I hope it will be clear as you read this story that its true heroes are the marginalised, the poor, the despised, the outcast, the oppressed of the Earth.

Fourthly, we might ask, "How has this book been published?"

It took me a few years to write this story, spending a few days every few weeks at Henrietta's house in Islip, or Rob's house in Thames Ditton, or Rags's house in Eastbourne. It went through three drafts as I took advice from various friends and tried to follow it. Then there were two more years of fruitless approaches to a number of literary agents, all of whom wished me well and thought I wrote well, but who thought that my story was too weird and, probably, I myself was a bit of a nutter - and a religious nutter at that; of which, more in a moment.

Worried that perhaps I had overreached myself, particularly in incorporating into the plot certain aspects of human experience which I had not undergone myself and have no plans to undergo, I decided to give up.

Then, unexpectedly, I was finally able to take advice from a friend who did have personal experience in the matter, and his words encouraged me to persevere.

I did and I didn't. I gave up on literary agents and made use of the shameful small ads at the back of an adult magazine known as The Oldie, aimed exclusively at the over-fifties and often placed strategically on my mother's sitting room table. I contacted, and finally contracted with, a subsidy publisher.

Let us be clear about the shameful reality that this represents: I have paid someone to publish my novel. Not the whole cost, it is true: it is a sharing of the costs. But let us admit the sordid truth: this is vanity publishing.

The third and fourth century monks of the Egyptian desert discerned eight negative thoughts which led human beings away from virtue and consequently away from happiness. One of them was vanity - an empty self-importance, the admiration of our own looks or achievements, the desire to be known and appreciated, whether or not we deserve it.

For some reason, vanity didn't make it into the list of seven deadly sins which Pope Gregory the Great enumerated in the latter part of the sixth century. It was conflated with pride - not the healthy self-respect which is rightly celebrated in Pride marches, but a form of self-importance which leads people to think they are solely responsible for their own achievements and regard other people with disdain.

So I put it to you, why write this form of publishing off as vanity publishing when we could write it off as pride publishing? Perhaps it's the case that not only do I want people to think I've written a brilliant book, but I even think so myself!

And in that case, what about the other seven deadly sins?

Why not call it anger publishing, because perhaps I was angry that none of the literary agents I contacted was interested in it?

Why not call it sloth publishing, because perhaps I couldn't be bothered to keep contacting uninterested literary agents?

Why not call it envy publishing, because perhaps I thought, well, so and so has had a novel published so why can't I?

Why not call it greed publishing, because perhaps I wanted to become fabulously wealthy on the back of mammoth sales figures?

Why not call it gluttony publishing, because perhaps I thought that with all that money I'd be able to eat at the best restaurants and gorge myself on fine food?

Why not call it lust publishing, because perhaps I hoped that my money and status as an author would attract droves of gorgeous admirers who would throw themselves at me, shouting 'take me, take me, come to bed with me NOW!' and I would reply 'yes, yes, just give me a minute to get my long johns on and fill a hot water bottle!'

And all this talk of sin brings me to religion.

This novel has got an awful lot of religion in it. Those of you who find religion not simply incomprehensible but deeply offensive may wish to avoid purchasing the work. If you have already done so this evening, feel free to return it for a refund.

The story is religious because if I am to offer some reflection on life that is drawn from my experience, it could not be otherwise. I have never thought a non-religious thought. I do not know what one would feel like.

Different people use the term 'religion' in different ways, and that can make for confusion. Father Bert White always said that he was not religious, and when people whom he had told this discovered that he was a Catholic priest they were certainly perplexed. Bert used the term 'religion' to mean a stultifying, rules-based way of life in which the fearful faithful were oppressed by cruel clergy under the domination of a demanding divinity dealing out rewards for some and punishments for others. Both he and I utterly reject such a system. Bert spoke of faith, spirituality, belief, but rejected the term 'religion'.

But I find that most people use the term to refer to any kind of thinking or talking about any kind of God or any of the beliefs or actions connected with such a God. So I accept the term. I feel so deeply religious that I cannot conceive of my continued existence as a human individual without my religious faith. I came to be me through this religious faith, and I continue to be me through this religious faith, and my whole sense of moral purpose, my whole understanding of the what and who and why and how of life is rooted in and defined by my religious faith. There is nothing about me, nothing within me, nothing that I have ever said or done or thought or felt, for good or ill, that I do not understand through the framework of my religious faith.

When I say that I have never thought a non-religious thought, I mean that every perception, every experience, every reflection is set, for me, within the context of absolute, infinite, unremitting, non-judgemental love, acceptance, mercy, compassion and forgiveness, by an eternal, creative, loving Being who is beyond being, a creative presence that relates to creation like the ocean to a sponge, who radiates and inculcates joy, delight, wisdom, purpose, understanding, kindness, hope. Perhaps I understand God this way simply because of the unconditional, non-judgemental, totally accepting, utterly affirming love of my beloved mother and father. If my God is simply a projection of my parents, what a beautiful projection that God is!

God - whether the Ultimate Reality whom I believe God to be or the imaginary friend that others may understand my God to be - is the One who always affirms me, never condemns me, never writes me off, however stupid or unfeeling or unkind I have been, but who gently points out how I might change in ways that will make life happier for me and those around me, for the oppressed of the Earth and for our Mother Earth herself. This God of love is a summons to solidarity and sharing. I am loved, so I must love. And because my understanding of this God is consciously and explicitly a Christian understanding, the God in whom I believe and with whom I imagine myself to be an intimate friend is an incarnate God, a God who has become part of the creation, incarnate in a first century Palestinian Jewish carpenter from Nazareth, in every human heart, in the Church, in the scandal of the sacraments, in the struggle of the poor, in every act of kindness, in every form of gentleness and beauty, and in our Mother Earth herself.

Not for a moment do I believe that this faith makes me any better than anyone without such a faith. Nor do I seek to convert anyone to my religious faith, though I would not want to prevent anyone from sharing it if they wanted to. I seek to understand and respect the understanding and motivations of those who see the world differently from me, and to find common cause with all those, from whatever framework of understanding, who seek to make the world a kinder, juster, more loving place. But I do feel a keen distress when people sneer at those of us who see the world through eyes of faith, or reject us as inherently stupid or evil or reactionary or ill.

My dear friend Lorraine Sinclair, the Indigenous Cree woman who founded the Mother Earth Healing Society in Alberta, in Canada, had been very deeply hurt by various men. She ran talking circles for women, where they could talk about the suffering they had been caused by men. But she took the view that men were not going to walk off the planet and go somewhere else, so ways had to be found for men and women to live well together. The same could be said for believers and unbelievers: whatever our differences of belief and perspective, we share the same planet. We had better learn to live together, and to live together graciously. Life's lovelier that way.

This faith announces to me the necessity of hope. It's not only religious believers who can be ministers of hope, but in my case it is religious faith which is the ground of my hope; hope that the world can become a better, kinder, lovelier place; hope that we can construct a society of compassion, solidarity and sharing.

We stand on the verge of an ecological apocalypse, and there is little time to make the changes necessary to save this gorgeous planet and all the forms of life it nurtures, including ourselves. But the most deadly error in the face of this appalling prospect is to abandon hope. Where hope seems ridiculous, we must create the possibility of hope's fruitfulness through a resolute refusal to abandon hope.

Through these eyes of faith, hope remains possible not only because of the ever-creative wellspring of the human spirit, but because, in the words of my favourite poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins,

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell; the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all that, nature is never spent.
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs -
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! Bright wings.

Bright Wings is published by Austin Macauley www.austinmacauley.com/ price £8.99 and available from all good booksellers. Review coming soon on ICN.