I'm close to the end of the present book right now. Most of it, as I've said before, takes place in Venice during carnival. One of the key characters is seen throughout, but always in disguise, behind a mask. At the end, of course, that mask is removed.

So what do we see?

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People have a horrible habit of judging others by their appearances. Not just other human beings either. We had a crow wandering round the garden and someone said, 'I <em>hate</em> crows.'&nbsp;

Why?
<ul>
	<li>Because they walk with a gait we interpret as a swagger</li>
	<li>Because, being bigger, they will steal food over smaller, 'nicer' birds</li>
	<li>Because they have a reputation as bird killers</li>
	<li>Because they're black and we associate the colour black with the night, with death and with 'evil'</li>
</ul>
For a couple of millennia human beings <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crow#In_culture_and_mythology" target="_blank">have had a thing about crows</a>. This anthropomorphic approach makes not the least sense, of course. They walk that way because they're built that way. They're bigger because they're bigger. If you're judging them in 'niceness' terms you perhaps ought to look at woodpeckers, which will tear open tits' nesting boxes to snack on live chicks. Or that loveable robin, the male of which is so territorially aggressive it will habitually peck to death other birds -- including other species -- that happen to stray onto its patch.

<a href="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/rimg0088.jpg"><img style="float:right;" src="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/rimg0088-tm.jpg" alt="RIMG0088.jpg" width="250" height="187"></a>But woodpeckers and robins aren't big and black and 'strutting'. Appearance matters. We coo at butterflies and shriek at moths. We admire ladybirds but recoil at a flying beetle. All of these creatures are, in our terms, 'wearing masks'. The reality of their 'nature' -- which isn't nature at all as we know it -- is disguised by how they look. Our attitude to towards them is determined not by reality, but by nothing more than an arrangement of feathers or a differently coloured carapace.

Do we treat human beings this way too? You bet. People recoil from the disabled and the disfigured. In some countries -- Italy among them -- disability is associated by some with evil. There's a belief that the disabled have somehow 'earned' their condition, either by sins in another life or the sins of their parents. It's karma, dude. We fear the different and try to avoid it.

In writing this sometimes manifests itself in predictable ways. The bad guy is the one with a scar, a limp, some condition -- being an albino say -- that sets him or her apart from the rest of humanity.

It's entirely up to others how they approach this issue. But I try to avoid it like the plague. I deliberately gave Peroni a scarred face when he came into this series in <em>The Villa of Mysteries</em> to try to get away from associating physical appearance with character. Peroni is a good guy, kind, sensitive, perhaps the most 'emotionally intelligent' of the regulars. He also looks like a scarred thug. Live with it. Scars don't equal evil.

The flip side to this argument is equally interesting. Evil, when you see it in real life, is extraordinarily ordinary. As a reporter I've been very close to some evil people. They weren't <em>all</em> politicians either. A few were real-life murderers. What usually links them is how very unremarkable they look. See them on a bus and you wouldn't look twice. That's how it is.

So, at the end of my book, when we take the mask of this man, what does he look like?

Here's a spoiler.

<em>He looks like the rest of us.</em>