Free JF02 - Brother Grimm by Craig Russell Page B

The fact is, the danger has always been there. The child-killer, the rapist, the insane murderer have all been constants in the human experience. All that is different is that, where we used to frighten ourselves with the spoken tale of the big, bad wolf, of the wicked witch, of the evil that lies waiting in the dark of the woods, we now scare ourselves with cinematic myths of the super-intelligent serial killer, the malevolent stalker, the alien, the monster created by science … All we’ve done is reinvent the big, bad wolf. We just have modern allegories for perennial terrors …’
    ‘And that gives you the justification to malign the reputation of a great German?’ asked the academic. His tone was stretched between anger and incredulity.
    Again, the voice of the author remained calm. Disturbingly so, thought Fabel. Almost emotionless. ‘I am aware that I have infuriated much of the German literary establishment as well as the descendants of Jacob Grimm, but I am merely fulfilling my duty as a writer of modern fables. As such, it is my responsibility to continue the tradition of scaring the reader with the danger without and the darkness within.’
    It was the show’s host who asked the next question. ‘But what has particularly infuriated the descendants of Jacob Grimm is the way that, although you have made it clear that your portrayal of Jacob Grimm as a murderer is totally fictional, you have used this novel to promote your theory of “fiction as truth”. What does that mean? Is it fictional or not?’
    ‘As you say,’ answered Weiss in the same, level,emotionless tone, ‘my novel has no foundation in fact. But, as with so many works of fiction, I have no doubt that future generations will probably believe that there was some truth in it. A less educated, lazier future will remember the fiction and accept it as fact. It is a process that has been at work for centuries. Take William Shakespeare’s portrayal of the Scottish king Macbeth. In reality, Macbeth was a well-loved, respected and successful king. But because of Shakespeare’s desire to please the then British monarch, Macbeth was demonised in a work of fiction. Today, Macbeth is a monumental figure, an icon for ruthless ambition, avarice, violence and bloodlust. But these are the characteristics of the Shakespearean character, not the historical reality, of Macbeth. We do not simply progress from history to legend to myth – we invent, we elaborate, we fabricate. The myth and the fable become the enduring truth.’
    The academic responded by ignoring the author’s point and repeating his condemnation of how the novel impugned Jacob Grimm’s reputation and the debate was curtailed by the expiry of the programme’s airtime. Fabel switched the radio off. He found himself thinking about what the writer had said. That there had always been the same evil amongst men; that there had always been the kind of random, cruel violence and death. The sick monster who had strangled the girl and dumped her body on the beach was just the latest in a long lineage of psychotic minds. Of course, Fabel had always known this to be true. He had once read about Gilles de Rais, the fifteenth-century French nobleman whose absolute power over his fiefdom meant that he had been able to abduct, rape andmurder young boys with impunity for years; the estimated body count was in the hundreds, and could even have been in the thousands. But Fabel had also tried to convince himself that the serial killer was a modern phenomenon: the product of a disintegrating social order, of sick minds forged by abuse and fed by the availability of violent porn in the street or on the Internet. In that belief, somehow, there lay a faint hope: that if our modern society created these monsters, then we could somehow fix the problem. To accept that it was a fundamental constant in the human condition seemed almost to give up hope.
    Fabel slipped a CD into the player. As Herbert Groenemeyer’s