The truth. The elusive truth. Everything else and the truth.
What is the truth, asks Nicholas Hasluck in his latest novel A Grain of Truth. A plaything of the legal system, perhaps.
This is Hasluck’s third novel set in the fictional west coast city of Blosseville. For Blosseville, read Perth.
As he wrote the game plan changed.
“”When I started I set out to describe the legal system,” he said in an interview last week.
The central device was a criminal libel action brought by police officers against a drug-dealing whistle-blower on police corruption. The newspaper was also hit with a libel action. The plot twists and we wonder where the truth is _ or where the truth lies, to use an oxymoronic word play.
Just as the plot twisted, so did real life. As Hasluck was writing, WA Inc Royal Commission was taking place and Fitzgerald had just been completed.
Not only was he writing about the facade of the legal system, but the facade of the political and commercial life of the 1980s.
Penetrating the facade is the way to the truth. It is not an easy task. The task is made harder by people lying, libel laws, mistakes, the way the legal system distorts reality in court actions.
Hasluck deals with these in his novel. In the interview he pointed to a splendid irony about truth. In some situations the truth can only be revealed by flights of fancy.
“”Obvious examples are Orwell’s 1984 and Catch 22,” he said. “”The absurdest satire or extreme fictional construct, which is almost a total departure from reality, can none the less say the truest and profound thing. That is the fascinating thing about fiction.”
Hasluck was referring to political and social censorship preventing the true story being told straight. Equally, however, libel laws make it difficult to tell the true story straight. To tell the true story you have to revert to fiction.
Hasluck is a supporter of libel-law reform. That reform revolves around the question of truth. Present law usually requires that the publisher prove the truth of what is published. It sounds reasonable, but of course it is not.
Hasluck’s novel illustrates the difficulty splendidly. Once a few lawyers get hold of a case, who knows what the truth is. When you are dealing with self-serving informers, corrupt police, petty crims mixed with honest and decent people, the quest for the truth can be quite hopeless.
Hasluck would like to see a public-figure test and something akin to the 1964 US Supreme Court case of Sullivan.
In that case Justice William Brennan said: “Erroneous statement is inevitable in free debate. It must be protected if the freedoms of expression are to have the breathing space that they need in order to survive. . . . A rule compelling the critic of official conduct to guarantee the truth of all his factual assertions _ and to do so on the pain of libel judgments virtually unlimited in amount _ leads to a comparable self-censorship. . . . Under such a rule, would be critics of official conduct may be deterred from voicing their criticism, even though it is believed to be true, and even though it is in fact true, because of doubt whether it can be proved or fear of the expense of having to do so.’’
Hasluck makes the point about the 1980s with WA Inc, Tricontinental and Fitzgerald.
“”If journalists and the media had felt freer to speak about a whole lot of things about which it was difficult to get the facts and information on, then iniquities would have been revealed earlier,” he said. “”It would have assisted the democratic process generally because people would have spoken out and been more robust in their opinions.
“”There really is a place in Australia for the public-figure defence.”
He was optimistic, though.
“”With what the High Court has been doing of late, this will perhaps emerge as a common law interpretation as much by any legislative action.”
Indeed, given politicians are among the beneficiaries of the libel law, legislative action might never come, as the past 20 years has shown.
I would add the Chelmsford psychiatric hospital case as a more serious case of the defamation law preventing publication. People died and were grievously harmed there while those responsible hid behind threats to sue for defamation if their malfeasance was made public.
Of course, the ordinary masses who privacy is sometimes infringed or who are otherwise badly treated by the media have no redress. They cannot afford defamation actions. None the less, they naively believe that strict defamation laws protect them. To the contrary they enable the rich, powerful and sleazy to hide their sins to the detriment of the ordinary citizen, as Hasluck’s book subtly shows.
Hasluck is a QC in Western Australia and has written eight novels. He probably hates being referred to a the son of Sir Paul Hasluck, Foreign Minister and Governor-General, and I only mention it here to satisfy any nagging curiosity that would send readers to Who’s Who instead of concentrating on the important things he (and to a lesser degree I) have to say.
Hasluck likes to run the practice of law and novel-writing in tandem. There are similarities.
“”Lawyers are very much concerned with the telling incident and the gripping detail which can be the pivotal point which changes the outcome of a case in a way it is similar to the novelists craft to find the vignette or telling incident which will reveal a wider truth,” he said. “”There is that point of similarity _ between lawyer and novelist _ but they part company because there comes a point when lawyers focus upon and get too attached to verifiable fact.
“”Of course, generally lawyers disdain fiction because it departs from the truth, but there is the irony that the truest thing might be said by the most extreme flight of the imagination.
“”I’ve liked to run the two things in tandem because the sort of writing I do is generally trying to say something about society in action and the law in action. So Therefore you need to be practising law on a daily basis to pick up on those reverberations. But in a way if you are practising you lose that capacity to stand right aside from it all and get to grips with the essence of something which is unfolding that is really while writers like at least periods of withdrawal.”
With Grain of Truth he got the task under way with an Australian Council grant three years ago. Anyway he went to an artists’ and writers’ colony in upstate New York for six or seven weeks.
“”I could look back from a great distance both metaphorically and geographically,” he said.
I was not cynical enough to ask him what the Australia Council is doing giving successful barristers grants when there are writers in turrets, shoeboxes and ‘oles in road, but I did wonder if he was aggrieved that any American writer who had eight successful novels on the shelves would be wallowing in wealth and would not have to continue to hang out the shingle.
“”I have taken it as a fact of life,” he said. “”There is a compensation in Australia with the Australia Council and Literature Board grants, but they are one-off. I haven’t brooded about it too much.”
Of more importance to him is the subject matter available for fiction in Australia these days.
“”In a way were are living in an era that reality is becoming so bizarre there is such a scope for writers to reflect what is happening in society in an interesting a gripping way, but oddly enough at the very moment that is happening so many writers, particularly contemporary Australian writers are doing the post modernistic thing and almost abandoning the fertile field which has opened up in front of them.
“”You engage people best, I think, by writing books they can see are in some way related to what it happening around them.”
On engaging people best, he is optimistic about the book in the face of the electronic onslaught of multi-media, video, pay television and the like.
“”It may be no more than a hope, but there is something very precious and personal about the book because it is something that in a private way you can carry in your hand or in a bag and you don’t have to plug it in or turn it on,” he said. “”It is very much related to the rhythm of your mind in a way that I don’t think electronic gadgetry will be. If you have to switch something on or plug it in then you are necessarily dealing with an object which is tuned into a lot of minds. CD games must be tailored to the common denominator _ just by following instructions they can pursue the thing, but with a book it is an entirely different experience. You proceed at your own pace, you can go back and reread passages that are special to you. It is a deeply personal experience.
“”Readers bring their own private rhythm to a book and it becomes a constructive process.”
Hasluck says his main ambition was to show the legal system in action at every level: the legal firm, the judges, the courts and the low life.
In the interview he pointed to an irony in the relationship between the legal system and the Australian people who have to use it.
“”The law has always been costly, but people are more aware of the law now on a day to day basis,” he said.
Whereas the expense appeared to make the law remote from the people because it excluded them, large legislative changes had made people more aware of the law as a vehicle of social change, he said.
“”In the past 20 years we have been going through an immense period of change _ when you think of all the significant legislation like family law, equal-opportunity law and trade practices and now native title,” he said. “”Immense social transformations are taking place which are being led by legislation _ if you like the law _ and everybody in community is generally conscious of that.
“”There is a conundrum there. The legal system because it is too expensive may at times seem remote and disengaged and be something apart from the community, but the other side of the coin is that the presence of so much legislation that is effecting so much change shows that the law is very much engaged with what is happening in society.”
Such changes _ social and legal _ make good raw material for both lawyers and novelists.