Different genres have different attitudes towards change.
When I think of science fiction/fantasy, it is often about moving change forward. Balance is restored when change happens. In Dune*, the order is broken down by the war between the House of Atreides and the House of Harkonnen but order does not come by restoring the House of Atreides in their original glory- instead, change is propelled forward by the introduction of Paul and his mother to the Freman, and something new emerges.
In LOTR, it seems that order will be restored by destroying the ring but that act will actually destroy the remnants of the glorious past that we see hints of as the fellowship travels through middle earth: Lothlorien, Imladris – even The Shire has been preserved by Gandalf’s elven ring, a little slice of heaven. When the one ring is destroyed, the power of the elven rings is also destroyed, and those preserved areas are protected no longer from change. LOTR is one big farewell letter to the glorious and magical past of middle earth. A sort of Goodnight Moon: Good night, Elves; Good night, Ents; Good night, Red Balloon.
Star Wars is about fighting the empire, breaking it down so the rebels can establish something new. And how often did Kirk, Bones, and McCoy break down frozen civilizations and force them to change?
Mysteries, however, are often about restoring the previous order. Everything is limping along and then – bang! – a murder happens. The detective is there to restore order, bring everything back to balance, remove the dead body(s) and the murderer, so that civilized life can continue.
And yet – and yet – the people most affected by the murder are often changed by the revelations that occur during the detective’s sleuthing: hidden passions become revealed, secrets are exposed, people are forced to face facts that they had been avoiding. Some change has to happen, otherwise the story would be boring and the book would fail. But that is often incidental to the exposure of the murderer and the restoration of law and order.
At Bertram’s Hotel is one of my favorite Agatha Christie books. Miss Marple, feeling run down and a little depressed, is reminiscing about a hotel she used to stay at in London, before life in England had changed. Life in England, based on what I’ve read, changed quite a bit between WWII and when this book was published in 1965: economic changes made it challenging for the aristocracy to live at the levels they had been used to before the war; and the war shifted the social power, mixing classes in the military, sending inner city children to the country to protect them from the bombings, giving people who otherwise would have been pigeonholed into neat little class boxes a chance to move up, forcing others down, sending others sideways, and generally causing people to associate with people they otherwise would have otherwise avoided coming into contact with.**
At first, Miss Marple is pleased to find Bertram’s is still Bertram’s. The doorman is still the same, the level of service is still the same, even the pastries she gets with tea – and the quality of the tea – is like a breath out of the past. Sitting in the lobby, she can indulge in the light gossip and people-watching that she enjoys most, while outside the hotel, law and order are breaking down: banks are getting robbed and witnesses are identifying the most upstanding citizens with impeccable credentials as being involved. When the chaos reaches even in Bertram’s – the doorman is shot, a guest goes missing – Miss Marple, noticing what others have overlooked, puts the pieces together and restores order by unmasking what’s really going on.
To paraphrase what Miss Marple says towards the end of the book: Bertram’s was too good to be true – to find it so unchanged in a world that no longer had the circumstances that allowed it to be successful before, was an indication that something else was going on. As much as she longed for the Bertram’s that she had known as a girl, Miss Marple is, above all things, a realist. She often says gently to people at the end of her books, that they mustn’t take the things that people tell you about themselves at face value: people often lie. It’s what makes Miss Marple such a good detective. She doesn’t let what she wants to believe get in the way of cold, hard, fact. It’s true about Bertram’s – and it’s true about the murderer she unmasks in this book.
Right now, I’m reading Misbelief, a book about how the author, Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist, found himself sucked into a conspiracy rabbit hole during Covid, and chose to explore how human nature makes us susceptible to misbelieving how the world works and what is going on around us. I’m only partially through the book, at the point where he has described how certain emotional conditions can make us vulnerable to misbelief – stress, scarcity, and injustice, for example, making us vulnerable to misinformation and more likely to want to believe that misfortunes we are experiencing have been caused by someone in particular who is doing deliberate things that cause us harm – and am just starting the section where the author describes the various cognitive biases that contribute to misbelief that we form about the world.
I haven’t finished the chapter yet, and I am wondering if he is going to touch on the form of memory bias called, Euphoric Recall. This is a type of bias that causes you to remember past experiences in a positive light and forget the negative aspects of that experience. If you think for a moment, you’ll probably be able to find some aspect of your life where you’ve experienced this bias for yourself.
For example, I had a long and successful career at a company; I held many interesting positions there and did a lot of good work that I enjoyed and that was interesting to me and helped me grow; I worked with people that I really liked and, for the most part, enjoyed spending time with. When I decided to leave, I tended to wax nostalgic about my time there – aside from the last year, which was a year of hell. However. As I was working on my resume, I reviewed my journals from earlier years and realized that I had been unhappy before that last year. In fact, I went through a roller coaster of happiness and unhappiness there throughout my entire career.
Sometimes, when we mourn the things we miss about the past – the exciting work assignments where we made a real difference in people’s lives; the friendly colleagues who we clicked with – we overlook the jerks who said and did dumb things or the time our assignments were a little too exciting because they kept failing over and over again.**** The past is never something to long to go back to: remembering the good times can help us find something positive to move toward; remembering the bad times can help us avoid those things in the future.
You can’t – as Agatha Christie says in At Bertram’s Hotel, and again in her other books, like Cat Among the Pigeons – go back again, no matter how enticing the past is and how much politicians promise – you can only go forward. Perhaps that is why I like Christie so much: as creaky as some of her plots can be, she is still worth reading, because she helps you understand the nature of change.
*I’ve got a copy kicking around here somewhere, I think, unless it was lost in the flood. Not a big fan. Read it once or maybe twice but not going to review it.
**You can see this in mysteries and in the work of authors like Angela Thirkell. It also shows up in non-fiction that I’ve read about serial killers and the like. Even in books that are not intended to be about the changing nature of the British culture, it shows up.
***Studies have shown that fear and anger, for example, make people more prone to vote conservatively – something the morally indignant at MSNBC should be concerned about.
****One of my bosses once threatened, in a letter to 40,000 employees, to take an axe to the mainframe, after an enhancement to a program he had promised kept getting delayed again and again and again. (Anybody from my past remember that?)
Change+Management 