I was <a href="https://davidhewson.com/2010/08/08/do-you-have-to-be-shocking-in-order-to-shock/" target="_blank">wondering here the other day</a> whether I might be getting inured/bored by/allergic to violence in my impending dotage. It’s slightly amazing no one has yet come on and said, ‘Hang about. Didn’t you skin someone in the first Costa novel? Haven’t you left a big trail of bodies in your books over the years? Who are <em>you</em> to talk?’

Good point. Here’s who I am: someone who’s done all those things and started to question them. The early ones anyway. There’s one particular murder in <em>The Sacred Cut</em> I regret. It was there because I thought a certain body count was expected of me. A few years after I was involved in one of those fruitless discussions with a movie producer about turning the book into a film and the producer rightly asked, ‘Did you need that?’

No. In fact it would have been a better book without it. So the later books have cut down on the violence, been less descriptive and, I hope, more effective as a result. What did I learn? This…

<!--more-->For the most part I write about evil, of which violence is simply a part. And evil of itself is a pretty tedious subject, faceless, with no more shape or form or character than a cancerous cell, something capable of wreaking great harm but oddly inert and remote, even when it’s inside you. What fascinates me – and do not take this as advice to copy or as an admonishment for anyone who feels otherwise – is cause and effect. Where does evil come from? What legacy does it leave?

That’s it in a nutshell. <em>Seeing</em> evil – whether it’s some lingering graphic description of a murder or, as in the movie of <em>The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo</em>, a sexual assault – tells me nothing about either. So why push this into the face of the audience? Why not simply tell them, succinctly and with sufficient detail – no more – what has taken place?

Let me put it another way. Imagine the Tardis was real and you could pop back in time and take tea with Hitler. Yes, there would be many interesting things to learn from a conversation with the wicked old bastard, but primarily from an inquisitive, psychological point of view. What the man himself would think important – his ridiculous opinions, the dreadful ‘values’ that fired him – would surely be as tedious as hell, like being trapped next to some bore on an endless train journey.

What made Hitler and what Hitler left us are subjects that will fire works of fiction for eternity. But the man himself is good for little more than a never-ending Youtube meme. Who cares about the old monster? Why would we?

I don’t have to see some detailed recreation of the gas ovens working in Belsen to understand that inside this man, and his ability to fire an entire nation into a brief bout of insanity, lay something evil. I simply need to be reminded that Belsen took place.

Here's a clip from that great movie <em>Rome, Open City</em> (Roma, città aperta) which makes, I think, the same point. It's one of the most agonising yet crucial points in the story, the revelation that one character has been tortured to death by the Nazis, leading to the execution of the key player, the priest Don Pietro. It's shocking, extraordinarily moving, and yet scarcely explicit. This film <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rome,_Open_City" target="_blank">was shot under the most extraordinary circumstances</a>, begun two months after the Germans had fled Rome. Watch how Don Pietro, the priest, briefly loses his temper -- and his religion -- when he realises the enormity of what has taken place, and then recovers his composure, and his faith. Would more brutality have emphasised the point or weakened it? The latter, for me anyway. Don't worry -- there is sound by the way. It just takes a little while for the dialogue to start.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64MEeMYPT78]