Reasons to Write
From Allos Ego, a new magazine in the US and one that seemingly manages the difficult feat of being both cool and compassionate with consummate ease:
Why it took me so long to make the connection between my situation with my mother and the writing of THE DETAINEE, I don’t know. Maybe it was just a given: the elephant not so much in the room, as relaxing on the couch.
In the (not too distant) future world of The Detainee, old people who are unable to support themselves, who have no-one to take care of them, are taken out to live with the rest of society’s garbage on the Island: a landfill site where the ‘economically unviable’ endure the most wretched and inhumane of existence, held captive by the threat of instant death and frequently terrorized by the other dwellers of this chilling hellhole. Whereas – thank God - my ninety four year old mother sleeps easily in her own bed, and with me now living back at the family home, has someone to look out for her.
I’m not going to tell you that was an easy decision – not for one moment. Prior to moving back to my modest home town, I’d lived in London for twenty years, a city I will probably always think of as my ‘real’ home; a place where I have friends, where there’s always something happening, that constantly pulses with inspiration and life. And yet, two and a half years ago, I came to one of those little impasses we all occasionally encounter in life: I was tired of my day job and soon would need to start looking for a new apartment, at the same time I realized that my mother, then aged ninety one and living alone, was desperately in need of some help.
I can’t tell you how many people have said to me, ‘I’ve gotta say, I admire what you’re doing - but I couldn’t do it’. Dozens. I also have to admit that there have been many occasions when I’ve regretted the move myself. I have no family of my own, no partner to lean on; if my mother lived in London, if I’d been able to continue some of my old life, it would’ve been so much easier. But no, it had to be a complete break, the fish voluntarily forsaking the water: to try to reacquaint myself with country ways, sometimes succeeding, more often not. Culture does exist here, but it’s mostly of the grey-haired variety. The occasional classical concert is attended by no-one under the age of fifty and always starts late because of the logistics of getting an audience in where so many are in wheelchairs or there’s been yet another Zimmer pile-up in the foyer. Not that adjusting to country life has been my only problem: I love travelling, there’s so much more of the world I want to see, but here I am, a bird on a wire – no, make that, a bird attached to a cord – unable to fly south, north, east or west.
But you know, one day it occurred to me that maybe there were times when my mother had wanted to fly? When we were kids, did she ever feel the urge to run from the raucous, and no doubt selfish, demands of four men (one husband, three sons)? … Maybe. I guess what we’re talking about here is a word we don’t hear too often these days, a word that makes a lot of us feel instantly uncomfortable: ‘duty’ – the sacrifice of our own demands for others. Just as my mother once dutifully cooked and cleaned for me, mended my jeans when I failed to realize that climbing down a tree is a lot harder than climbing up, and a hundred other little jobs, now I cook for her, or put up another grab handle to help her negotiate her way around the house, or a hundred other little jobs. And by the way, this may be an Age of Convenience, but not for the elderly. To see her struggle with milk cartons, tin cans, jar lids, anything with a safety top, anything so-called ‘modern plastic-wrapped’ is quite heart-breaking. She’s actually been known to make her way to the front door and call out to a passer-by to help - otherwise, she’s just going to go hungry.
And I guess that’s part of what’s gone wrong in the world of The Detainee. A neglect of family duty, the passing on of problems, has contributed towards many seniors serving out their final years in the most terrible of circumstances. And you know something? … There’s that snoring elephant again. Is the Island some dark representative of a retirement home? Did my dread of my mother ending up in such a place cause me to write about the very worst fate an old person could suffer? Or maybe it was my mother’s own aversion to homes, her frequent dismissal that ‘they’re full of old people’. The intellectual, rather than emotional, motivation was this growing unease I have that old age is going to become a problem that will affect us all. The populations of the developed world are getting older and older. Directly or indirectly, the younger generation supports the older one; with the seniors mushrooming, those young, employed and paying taxes, shrinking, where is that going to lead us? Will we be made to work till we drop? Like old time agricultural workers out in the field? What would that mean to those young, freshly educated and looking for a job? Why would they bother? Okay, so what if we were compelled by law to provide for our futures? Well maybe, but what if we don’t? Or what if something goes wrong? Another crash, an even bigger one that bankrupts the state, as it does in The Detainee? You can see why so many people have said that one of the book’s strengths is that it’s such a disturbingly believable future.
But I didn’t set out to write yet another book about the meltdown of civilization, the end of the world as we know it, but of Hope - a story of the human spirit. How, no matter how difficult the situation, we will always find a way to prevail. And maybe that’s the whole point of The Detainee, and indeed, my personal situation: perhaps many of us will have to ask ourselves some searching questions over the coming years, about family versus state, taking back some of the responsibility for our lives, and no matter how difficult that might be, how painful the adjustment, I still feel utterly confident that we’ll find a way – after all, we’re the Human Race.
The Detainee was never meant to be a prophecy - merely a warning.
The Detainee by Peter Liney was published in hardback in North America on March 11th, 2014, and will be published in paperback in the UK on July 3rd, 2014.
Why it took me so long to make the connection between my situation with my mother and the writing of THE DETAINEE, I don’t know. Maybe it was just a given: the elephant not so much in the room, as relaxing on the couch.
In the (not too distant) future world of The Detainee, old people who are unable to support themselves, who have no-one to take care of them, are taken out to live with the rest of society’s garbage on the Island: a landfill site where the ‘economically unviable’ endure the most wretched and inhumane of existence, held captive by the threat of instant death and frequently terrorized by the other dwellers of this chilling hellhole. Whereas – thank God - my ninety four year old mother sleeps easily in her own bed, and with me now living back at the family home, has someone to look out for her.
I’m not going to tell you that was an easy decision – not for one moment. Prior to moving back to my modest home town, I’d lived in London for twenty years, a city I will probably always think of as my ‘real’ home; a place where I have friends, where there’s always something happening, that constantly pulses with inspiration and life. And yet, two and a half years ago, I came to one of those little impasses we all occasionally encounter in life: I was tired of my day job and soon would need to start looking for a new apartment, at the same time I realized that my mother, then aged ninety one and living alone, was desperately in need of some help.
I can’t tell you how many people have said to me, ‘I’ve gotta say, I admire what you’re doing - but I couldn’t do it’. Dozens. I also have to admit that there have been many occasions when I’ve regretted the move myself. I have no family of my own, no partner to lean on; if my mother lived in London, if I’d been able to continue some of my old life, it would’ve been so much easier. But no, it had to be a complete break, the fish voluntarily forsaking the water: to try to reacquaint myself with country ways, sometimes succeeding, more often not. Culture does exist here, but it’s mostly of the grey-haired variety. The occasional classical concert is attended by no-one under the age of fifty and always starts late because of the logistics of getting an audience in where so many are in wheelchairs or there’s been yet another Zimmer pile-up in the foyer. Not that adjusting to country life has been my only problem: I love travelling, there’s so much more of the world I want to see, but here I am, a bird on a wire – no, make that, a bird attached to a cord – unable to fly south, north, east or west.
But you know, one day it occurred to me that maybe there were times when my mother had wanted to fly? When we were kids, did she ever feel the urge to run from the raucous, and no doubt selfish, demands of four men (one husband, three sons)? … Maybe. I guess what we’re talking about here is a word we don’t hear too often these days, a word that makes a lot of us feel instantly uncomfortable: ‘duty’ – the sacrifice of our own demands for others. Just as my mother once dutifully cooked and cleaned for me, mended my jeans when I failed to realize that climbing down a tree is a lot harder than climbing up, and a hundred other little jobs, now I cook for her, or put up another grab handle to help her negotiate her way around the house, or a hundred other little jobs. And by the way, this may be an Age of Convenience, but not for the elderly. To see her struggle with milk cartons, tin cans, jar lids, anything with a safety top, anything so-called ‘modern plastic-wrapped’ is quite heart-breaking. She’s actually been known to make her way to the front door and call out to a passer-by to help - otherwise, she’s just going to go hungry.
And I guess that’s part of what’s gone wrong in the world of The Detainee. A neglect of family duty, the passing on of problems, has contributed towards many seniors serving out their final years in the most terrible of circumstances. And you know something? … There’s that snoring elephant again. Is the Island some dark representative of a retirement home? Did my dread of my mother ending up in such a place cause me to write about the very worst fate an old person could suffer? Or maybe it was my mother’s own aversion to homes, her frequent dismissal that ‘they’re full of old people’. The intellectual, rather than emotional, motivation was this growing unease I have that old age is going to become a problem that will affect us all. The populations of the developed world are getting older and older. Directly or indirectly, the younger generation supports the older one; with the seniors mushrooming, those young, employed and paying taxes, shrinking, where is that going to lead us? Will we be made to work till we drop? Like old time agricultural workers out in the field? What would that mean to those young, freshly educated and looking for a job? Why would they bother? Okay, so what if we were compelled by law to provide for our futures? Well maybe, but what if we don’t? Or what if something goes wrong? Another crash, an even bigger one that bankrupts the state, as it does in The Detainee? You can see why so many people have said that one of the book’s strengths is that it’s such a disturbingly believable future.
But I didn’t set out to write yet another book about the meltdown of civilization, the end of the world as we know it, but of Hope - a story of the human spirit. How, no matter how difficult the situation, we will always find a way to prevail. And maybe that’s the whole point of The Detainee, and indeed, my personal situation: perhaps many of us will have to ask ourselves some searching questions over the coming years, about family versus state, taking back some of the responsibility for our lives, and no matter how difficult that might be, how painful the adjustment, I still feel utterly confident that we’ll find a way – after all, we’re the Human Race.
The Detainee was never meant to be a prophecy - merely a warning.
The Detainee by Peter Liney was published in hardback in North America on March 11th, 2014, and will be published in paperback in the UK on July 3rd, 2014.
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