Finding Klarissa is my next Sgt. Clanner and Insp. Bezukhov mystery, the second in the series. It’s due out later this year. Visit Amazon.com for my current titles.
Liars abound in fiction and also in the sphere usually not thought of as fiction. They inhabit Finding Klarissa. In our era lying has been elevated to policy in both realms. Young people are being schooled in it, where once they were schooled in the hard labour of telling the truth. Boy scouts cheer liars and their leaders egg them on.
In the former sphere — the fictional — authors provide more or less satisfactory revelations and resolutions, and author and reader move on. The latter — the public sphere — is open-ended, revelations and resolutions rarely satisfactory, and moving on is done for one or to one — it is not a partnership. It is not usually a choice, although choosing can become a spiritual discipline. Either that a pathology, to wit, the conspiracy theory.
What is a lie? The philosophers tell us it is bad faith, double-heartedness. We have two hearts. When we are children we trust. We are astonished when others lie, when we ourselves lie. We are born to tell the truth and to tell lies. Our double-heartedness always brings pain.
The temptation is to avoid pain, to live the Biedermeier life, enjoy the homely comforts. Not so bad an option. It has produced its art, its cosy homes, its defence against the abstraction of the larger polity. It is a relatively benign lie. But the abstraction must be acknowledged, must be engaged. Our double-heartedness can never be ignored. For when the abstraction metamorphoses into the concrete, it will crush us.
J. B. Thompson 