We seem to be talking about universal matters this week. The last two posts argued the case that all story-telling -- be it apparently about rabbits, distant galaxies or strange supernatural characters -- actually concerns the nature of the curious creature known as <em>homo sapiens.</em>

Here's another universal truth. It's very easy to pinpoint the moment at which human beings discovered the need to tell themselves stories. It's the instant we became self aware, conscious of our capacity for beauty and ugliness, good and evil, alert to, most of all, the eternal truth that we're frail, mortal creatures, here for a blink of time, most of which will be spent frantically looking around asking ourselves, 'What the hell happened there?'

In the Bible it begins with chapter two of Genesis.

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<blockquote>16 And the LORD God commanded the man, saying: 'Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat;

17 but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it; for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.'</blockquote>
A million parents implicitly understand what God never knew. You don't stop people doing stuff by pointing at things and saying, 'Whatever you do <em>don't</em> touch that!'

The birth of storytelling concludes in chapter three.
<blockquote>4 And the serpent said unto the woman: 'Ye shall not surely die;

5 for God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as God, knowing good and evil.'

6 And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat; and she gave also unto her husband with her, and he did eat.

7 And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig-leaves together, and made themselves girdles.</blockquote>
You have to love that woman. Without her we'd still be stuck in some celestial zoo patting the scorpions and rattlesnakes and going, 'Ah, how cute...'

Eve brought about the Fall of Man and with that happy event came self knowledge, the opening of Pandora's box, understanding, the birth of knowledge, reality<em>.</em> The ability to question who we were, why we existed, what possible purpose there could be to our small lives.

Stories were born as a way of framing and exploring those questions in a communal environment, a form in which everyone could participate, young and old, educated and illiterate.

Some of the earliest are paradise myths: why exactly did we get kicked out of there in the first place? How do we get back in? That search for home, for the place we truly belong, a place of security and justice and happiness among friends and family, is still one of the most common motifs in popular narratives, in everything from Harry Potter to something as seemingly modern as a cartoon like <em>Finding Nemo.</em>

These common threads cross faiths, cultures, races. <em><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_of_Gilgamesh" target="_blank">Gilgamesh</a>,</em> one of the earliest literary works still with us, came from the Sumerian culture of modern-day Iraq and is a fable straight out the Fall, a tale of one hero's search for immortality -- the return to the Garden -- after the death of a dear friend. The same themes permeate through the <em><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iliad" target="_blank">Iliad</a>,</em> the <em><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mah%C4%81bh%C4%81rata" target="_blank"><span style="font-style:normal;">Mahabharata</span></a> <span style="font-style:normal;">and scores of other classic works.</span></em>

An equally popular motif is the need to define, explain and confront evil. In simple horror stories this may be external evil -- a monster or something from another world. With more sophisticated stories the evil is often from within -- the flaw in ourselves that saw us expelled from the Garden in the first place. Our dawning, guilty consciousness that the obstacle to regaining our lost state of grace lies within us, not in others, is a wonderfully complex and rich seam that writers will be mining for as long as we have the power to invent stories.

Crime fiction fits into this narrative mosaic very easily. We may think we like it because we admire stories in which good guys bring bad guys to justice. But the reality is more subtle. Crime is an outward manifestation of evil, of the reason we went 'bad' in the first place. By confronting that evil we confront our enemies and, sometimes, ourselves. Crime fiction codifies the internal argument about blame and responsibility and works as a metaphor for our natural desire for a fractured universe to be restored to some kind of order.

In this way storytelling is a means by which we imbue our own small existences with the quality of heroic myth. I'm always aware when I write my stories that, in a sense, I'm trying to portray ordinary characters striving to be something greater than they are, struggling to face and embrace the big and difficult questions most of us hope to avoid in 'real life' because we know we're unlikely to find any answers. Narrative is a stage, and on a stage even the bit part players are actors, part of something that must, by definition, be bolder, bigger, brighter or darker than the monochrome life we know. It's important, I think, to remember that. Why write a story confined by smallness when the same words can express and embrace something greater?

This too. There are many faiths and cultures out there that tell of some kind of paradise. But I've yet to meet a single one that says a library is waiting for us there, provided, of course, we meet the strict entry criteria.

There are no books in Paradise because no one inside that cost little prison has any need of stories. Sounds a boring old place to me.