The new book brought this time is called "The Republic of Light", douban score 8.7, from the recent Spanish hot writer Andres Barva, he also won the Herald Award for fiction with this novel, and the scenery is unique.
The story told in the novel is actually very simple, the streets of the fictional city of San Cristobal suddenly appeared some strange children, they appeared in groups of threes and twos, but there was no leader. They did nothing wrong, unleashing fear and violence in the city. Until one time, when the act crossed the line, they killed people, and in order to avoid being pursued, they first hid in the forest next to the city, and then built their world in the sewers, and this world is the "Republic of Light".
Although the story is very simple, what the author wants to express is not something that can be clearly explained in two words, so now I will take you into this sewer world, into the children's Republic of Light, and see how these children sacrificed themselves in the city of San Cristobal.
01
Children vs adults
First of all, allow me to quote a passage on page 95 of the book to start the scene -
For children, the world is a museum, and the adult caretaker in it may be loving most of the time, but it is not unruly: everything is solid and exists long before they are born. They must maintain the myth of innocence in exchange for love. Not only must they be naïve, but they must also be symbols of innocence.
The meaning of this passage is actually quite understandable. Children know the rules of the world better than they think, and under the appearance of cuteness and innocence, they have their own world, but adults are very easy to ignore the world, because they believe that they have absolute control over children.
Not only that, they always love to project what they have lost to the children, as if believing that the child's simple eyes can have an inexplicable connection with their own childhood, and this connection is beautifying themselves as children, thus lamenting that they were once so innocent and lovely. At the beginning of the book, the leader of the social office as a narrator has already felt the oppression of the city brought by the wandering children, but he will still turn his head and ignore them.
The book also cites stories and experiments to support this: the narrator reads a book in which the author describes a character looking at the sea and suddenly realizing that the word "sea" in his imagination does not correspond to the real sea, and whenever he says "sea", he thinks only of its insignificant blue-green sea, with bubbles floating on it, and never thinks of the true nature of the sea: the unfathomable water is full of fish, undercurrents, and– especially – darkness.
One biological experiment he had read had done so, putting six flies and six bees into a long-necked glass bottle, placing the bottle horizontally, with the bottom of the bottle facing the window, to see who escaped first: the flies escaped from the opposite direction to the window, but the bees crashed into the bottom of the bottle again and again, and eventually crashed to death, and they could not believe that the exit was not in a brightly lit place.
Speaking of which, it is necessary to explain the cause of death of the thirty-two children: after killing people, they hid in the sewers, and the government searched the forest again and again, until the last largest search found a child who had separated from the team, and he confessed the children's hiding place. After a group of people sneaked into the sewers, the children hid in an old warehouse to escape, but their weight caused the sluice to crack and the river to pour in. It's suffocation.
In fact, they have a perfect chance of surviving, as long as they give in to the adults and obey the trial, most of the children will return home safely. However, they chose to hide and explore the reasons, not just the panic of the criminal law after the killing, after all, only a minority of the offenders. Back to the title, "The Republic of Light", a utopian "self-founding", may be the highest ideal in the minds of children, living through the rules of the world they have formulated, and not being bound by the adult world.
- Stills from the Mosquito Coast movie
But when it comes to utopia, I have to say another word. I recently watched a movie called "Mosquito Coast", which is about the rise and destruction of a utopian self-built world. Everyone has the desire to escape from this world of magic realism, but the utopia established by the actual society will eventually end up in a fiasco, because human nature is unchanged, and once the utopia begins to function normally, power and money will urge the birth of strife. And is the Republic of Light built by the children bright? Let's take a look.
02
The Road to the Crash of the Republic of Light
When I think of the collapse of the Republic of Light, the first thing that comes to mind is not the death of the children, nor the atrocities they committed for no reason, but the word on the niches of the sewers — prostitutes.
The word's association with children is undoubtedly shocking. As we said earlier, adults have been projecting to children something that has disappeared from their own world, including innocence and purity. In turn, children have always been exposed to the radiation of the adult world. The word "prostitute" is just a wake-up call, there will be impurities in the light, and there will be evil engraved on the back of innocence. No matter how much justice and fairness are emphasized, there will always be people who fall into the abyss and some who climb to the top of the mountain on the shoulders of others.
You can say that the Republic of Light is a civilization pioneered by children away from adult society, but you cannot ignore that when those children are still living on the streets, they rob, destroy public property, and even kill people, and these confrontations and violence are the introduction to the birth of a new civilization, which is enough to herald the collapse of the Republic of Light.
Like those bees that hit the wall of the bottle, they can only see the light in their eyes, and they blindly crash in one direction until their heads break and bleed. Of course, living is not the will of the light, but death means never seeing the light again.
03
Violence comes from fear
"Fear of the other is human nature and one of our basic survival instincts... If we doubt or try to analyze this fear, it dissipates; but if we don't, we inflame a social mood of mutual hatred, which also means allowing politicians to manipulate us. ”
This is a passage that the author says in an interview about the book, explaining the series of panics caused by children that begin in the book. At that time, people could not hunt them down, and rumors spread that they were children of the forest or from the psychedelic world.
Losing your mind in the face of fear will fuel atrocities. Just like the story in the book, if the events caused by the children are seriously dealt with at the beginning, then the subsequent death will not happen. Diffraction into life, whether it is small within the family, large to between races, to eliminate violence, only to face the fear of the heart, we have no reason to fear the fist that is waving, nor do we need to fear pain.
These are the things we should do in the face of fear, but the party that releases the fear, in fact, how they treat the vulnerable and how to reduce their hostility to others is a more necessary topic to discuss.