Here we are at the rear-end of August and Devil’s Island is about to be printed and distributed in the US. I would never have believed that it could be this exhausting to get a book out. Little things, like being asked questions by readers, make the exercise incredibly fulfilling and rewarding. I’m not sure that the novelty of knowing that someone read something I wrote will ever wear off. It’s especially pleasing when the reader obviously put a lot of intelligent thought into what they’re going to say. On the other hand, it does happen that the report backs show how a reader has completely missed the mark…
Those of who’ve read the book will have encountered a number of characters based loosely upon a nefarious collection of school teachers I had the misfortune to run into. These portrayals often take a number of attributes into account and put them across in a new identity. A reader who was in school with me will sometimes come across of these characters and give me an angry blast: ‘You were very cruel to Mister X!’ Often I’m caught off guard. Frequently I would have thought that the character they’re on about better describes another Mister Y. One of our memories, or maybe my ability to characterise and describe is a bit faulty! Then again, maybe the personalities we’re discussing really didn’t actually have enough discerning aspects for them to be told apart.
The most disturbing aspect is why they are still referring to the individual concerned as ‘Mister’. These guys do not deserve to have a prefix denoting some kind of societal degree of respect in front of their names. Something like ‘Felon’ might be better suited. In an age where a school teacher can get fired for somehow humiliating a class by making them all stand on their desks for two minutes, it’s hard to believe (and it wasn’t that long ago either), that an entire class would be beaten, one after the other and in full view of their classmates, for someone having not stood up when one of these cretins entered the classroom. I could go on about them being paid by my parents to abuse me and my friends, them being unsuited for the job completely and having to look after adolescent boys because they wouldn’t have cracked it in the real world, but I needn’t. Who would believe that a teacher could chain smoke while teaching, poke children in the ribs with a sharpened pencil and give them the sorts of head slaps that send me spinning at karate now when I encounter the equivalent? I could go on about it all but I don’t have to. They’ve had the best punishment available in their little world’s crashing around them and their brutal ways being forbidden. It must really irritate, confuse and frighten them that they cannot any longer hit, bully and diminish little children. Knowing that the kids they used to terrorise have grown up to be functioning adults, despite what they ladled out, is punishment enough. Seeing their fellow educators, the ones who weren’t out to brutalise and humiliate (it’s always a few who spoil it for everyone), having been vindicated in their approach, must be pure torture.
I seem to have gone on about it quite a bit actually, especially as I said I wasn’t going to. Is there a point? Yes. I’m introducing the First Law of Frank: never upset anyone who might grow up to be a novelist, ‘Mister’. You might find your inadequacies reproduced in a book at some stage, there for ever afterwards for the whole world to read and marvel at, your insecurity and how it made you act, made immortal while your own grip on mortality slips!