The book A Song in a Strange Land is not just an exercise in vanity, nor in masochism, given that it's never pleasant to revisit some of the most painful experiences in your life, nor is it just to revisit my 1970s school years. It is at least partly a walk through the thought processes of an adolescent, and particularly one who descends into a negative spiral, having once experienced a relatively normal upbringing. It seeks to shine a light on how some young people can descend into self-destructiveness, and of course how they can come back from that. Being a Christian, it should be no surprise to anyone that I see personal redemption as first and foremost in that restoration, but there is also a role for education and hopefully wisdom, all of which I profoundly believe are linked together.
The protagonist is in keeping with Bigger Thomas of Richard Wright's Native Son, but perhaps a closer parallel would be John Grimes in James Baldwin's Go Tell it on the Mountain. One particular scene in Chapter 12 in which Lennox loses faith in authority.
So, I made a choice. No longer would I trust men like this as being honest brokers of right and wrong, being so self-evidently flawed, focussed so heavily upon my demeanour, more so than anything that might precipitate it.
... Whatever he or his small coterie of followers now advocated was null and void, lessened, tainted.
It's very much part of growing up for young people to question the world in which they live. One of the more enjoyable aspects of writing the book was taking my mind back to how I thought as a fourteen year old, and found many similarlities with myself in my late fifties and now early sixties, and as such tried not to portray the young Lennox as not being serious in thought, but rather lacking in experience and wisdom, trying to make sense of the world.
I'm acutely conscious how, in trying to make sense of the world, disillusionment and cycnicism can overtake young people, especially if they believe there to be little evidence of positive role models in authority. The above excerpt references a point in time in which a young person can disengage with those in authority in the belief that 'the baby be thrown out with the bath water' as the saying goes.
For thirteen years or more I've been a volunteer for Prison Fellowship UK. It gives me opportunity to talk to young, (and sometimes older), people who are at a similar crossroads in their lives to the one which I found myself in, ever mindful that I could so easily have gone down a route that led to incarceration. Being able to speak from direct experience can affect people profoundly, just as it once affected me.
A word spoken in season can resonate, if it is spoken (or, in this case, written) in authenticity. That makes going back to painful places worthwhile if it helps others to see the way forward from when their lives are in desperate straits.
The role of caring, consistent, loving individuals can play a profound role in steering a young person's life in the right direction at critical junctures. It certainly did in mine, again, as illustrated in the book
That's why I believe this book is not a vain exercise, but a hopeful one.