A lasting impression I could do without.

Have you ever read a book or watched a film that you know is extremely good, but you still wish you’d never gone anywhere near it? I’ve done it twice now. The first was when we watched Grave of the Fireflies. Studio Ghibli has a body of work that pretty much nobody can touch for quality, save maybe Pixar. Grave of the Fireflies is a 1988 animated film directed by Isao Takahata which forms part of the Ghibli collection. It brings home the devastating cost of war by focusing on two children in Japan near the end of the second world war, who lose their parents and have to try to survive together in the face of starvation and the antipathy of a population numb to tragedy. Studio Ghibli films are not afraid to focus on hardship, loss and grief, but they are generally optimistic. When I had finished watching, I felt something I’d never felt in reaction to a film before or since; a physical pain. My heart was broken and I felt like I’d been kicked in the gut. The film is incredible; told with the same gift for character and astonishing artistry that is par for the course for Ghibli, but I don’t ever want to see it again and I can’t bring myself to recommend it to anyone. It was like having my heart stomped on by the one person I can usually expect to make it soar. I was in a funk for weeks afterwards, unable to shake the feeling of desperate hopelessness it left in me. Art that can do that is undeniably powerful, but all the same, I’d rather not feel like that.

I recently read Random Acts of Senseless Violence. Written by Jack Womack and published in 1993, it tells the story of Lola, a young teenage girl living in a in a well-to-do area of New York, while the world around her falls apart. When her parents can no longer find work and have to move to a more dangerous area, we follow Lola as she changes from private school girl to ruthless gangster, and it makes for such a depressing read. It’s very well done, but it is so infuriating to see this innocent girl have her life taken from her and her potential lost. Not just Lola, but a society that could’ve been so much more devolve into shadow of itself, beset by riots and greed. It felt the same way reading High Rise felt, this chilling feeling of a society making the decision to let itself topple from the cliff edge, and the sense of everything slowly going to hell, when with just a little more will, it might’ve pulled itself back from the brink. A bit like living in a UK forcing itself to leave the European Union even though it knows full well what the consequences are going to be, or like I would imagine living in the U.S. under President Cockwomble feels like.

This book has stuck with me not just because of that though, but because of something specific, and that’s the death of Lola’s father. No longer able to make ends meet as a screenwriter due to the volatile world the book is set in, he has no choice but to work extremely long hours in a job in which he is constantly under pressure and screamed at and berated for barely enough money to afford the rent on the crappy apartment the family have had to move to. There is a truly haunting scene in which poor Lola finds her father dead having had a heart attack in the middle of the night, and eventually, this is the thing that pushes Lola beyond the point of no return.

I’m not saying that the world in which I live and work is anywhere near as bad as the unfortunate Lola’s. But I am on that borderline between just managing financially and not managing. And I do work overtime. Since reading that book, the only thing on my mind when I get up at 6:15 on a Saturday morning to work overtime to supplement my wages while my family sleeps is that dreadful scene of Lola discovering her father’s body, after he worked and stressed himself to death trying play a rigged game just to keep his family safe and alive (he’d already given up on happy).

If this strikes you as overly melodramatic, well you’d be right. I actually quite enjoy my job. My family are, relatively speaking, safe and happy. While I do always feel like I don’t have enough money to get by, the truth is, we’ve managed it so far, so I expect we’ll be fine. But that’s the effect of well-made art on the psyche. We are going to have to deal with major crises over the coming decades because nobody has got the will to do a damn thing about climate change, but instead of the biggest emergency our species has ever had to deal with dominating the news and the political stage, we’re arguing about whether or not it’s a good idea to rip up the fragile Northern Ireland peace agreement so Lord Snooty (how can you not look at that snivelling weasel Rees-Mogg and think of anyone else?) can keep hold of his unearned, inherited, offshore tax-free millions and withdrawing from the agreement that ended the Cold War (good job America. Well done).

So it feels like, as in Random Acts of Senseless Violence, we are also a society deliberately deciding to step off into the abyss, and that’s why Lola and her father struck such a chord with me; forced to narrow their view and look out only for themselves, and as far as her father goes, eventually die trying.

Still. Chin up, eh?