Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
This is a schoolboy story really. It should have been a children’s story. That’s his genius, of course. His genius is as a storyteller. You hear the great academics saying even now that Dickens was not really a great writer. It’s sheer arrogance! But we all consider him to be a great storyteller. I think it’s partly his skill, which Shakespeare does as well, of imbuing the minor characters with as much wit and making them as sensational as the major characters. You fall in love with so many of the lesser lights because he paints them so well.
What about your final book, A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens?
I started a paper about the historical reality in this book. And as I studied it more deeply I got depressed because the things that were happening were similar to Iraq. How the mob could be turned against people by devious minds. They just killed people without even knowing them. The people who were killed were probably very good people, you never know. You just can’t kill haphazardly, heads rolling everywhere for nothing. There must be a way to check these things. You can’t allow mob anger. There were people behind the scenes subconsciously motivating them to do all these terrible things without really thinking about it.
I was looking at this thinking, well, this reign of terror ended in France, but in Iraq it is still going on.
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May Witwit is an Iraqi who is now living in the UK. She was forced to flee Baghdad when her life became too dangerous – leaving her job as a university lecturer in literature behind her. She has recently published a book about how she managed to escape Iraq with the help of a gutsy BBC journalist.
