Almost 10 years ago a story emerged detailing a particularly sickening crime. The version I read was a short report, of a rape and murder in the US, with enough imagistic detail to make an already horrific narrative lodge in the mind. Confirming my worst suspicions about the depravity of mankind, I privately resigned to read less news – with little success. Then, late last year, watching a documentary that seemed to confirm my worst suspicions about mankind, I discovered that the story was untrue.
This was the case of Teresa Halbach, the subject of Netflix's absorbing Making a Murderer. Whatever about the ethics of such documentaries, it's now impossible to see that initial news story as anything other than a fiction, painfully coerced and laboriously contrived, then presented by the prosecutor as compelling evidence. Some stories appeal to the emotions, not necessarily to reason. I felt duped.
It’s unlikely anyone felt similarly conned by the former property developer Kevin McGeever, given a suspended sentence this week for wasting Garda time with an elaborate fiction: the story of his own kidnapping. When McGeever was discovered in 2013, after an eight-month disappearance, he had clearly committed to the part: barefoot, emaciated and unkempt, with the word “thief” (mis-spelt “tief”) inked or carved on his forehead. But even the earliest responses were sceptical, noting McGeever’s debts and impending legal proceedings. Some stories are too elaborate to persuade, too poorly plotted or cast. Why would people make up such things? Who are they trying to fool?
The need for stories is an essential part of human nature, some say the most essential part. We tell them about ourselves, we find them in others, we seek them out to make sense of the world, and we devour them through any number of media for entertainment, education or escape.
By now we should all be good critics. We're told exactly what a story should contain (a beginning, middle and end, not necessarily in that order; a protagonist; a reversal of fortune; a car chase, perhaps); what they should avoid (overdetailing, inconsistencies, clichés, the car hitting a fruit cart); what separates good stories from bad ones. "The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily," Miss Prism says of her book, in The Importance of Being Earnest. "That is what fiction means."
Aristotle, an earlier literary critic, says the opposite. But from Aristotle's Poetics to EM Forster's Aspects of the Novel ("The king died and then the queen died is a story. The king died, and then the queen died of grief, is a plot") or the equally indispensible website TV Tropes, the mechanics of storytelling have been overexamined. You don't need to be a postgrad student to spot a quest narrative, a Cinderella story, Chekhov's gun, or a bottle episode.
Perhaps that’s why there has been, in the past century at least, a creeping distrust towards stories themselves, as though anything that imposed too considered a shape on the mess of existence is either co-optive (religious narratives), artificially glib (the well-made play) or banal (genre fiction, soaps, the Marvel universe). Literature began to fragment and self-cannibalise into the complicated shards of modernist fiction after the first World War, the grab bag of quotes and jokes of cynical postmodernism, the metafictive games of this self-aware new century.
At least that's the impression you may get at the moment. The recent TV drama American Crime Story: The People v OJ Simpson supplied an attentive retread of the "trial of the century" in which stories themselves seemed to be on trial. "We're here to tell a story," the lawyer Johnnie Cochran says at one point. "Our job is to tell that story better than the other side tells theirs." Famously, they did. That story was more persuasive than DNA evidence. The truth stayed largely out of the way.
In the theatre at the moment, stories are actively breaking down or losing their conviction. Pan Pan's new staging of a Beckett radio play, Cascando, is a disintegrating account of a man trying to complete a story to end all stories: "If you could finish it . . . you could rest." Rough Magic's new staging of Stewart Parker's Northern Star is a man giving his life story through the structure and voices of several other writers. Meanwhile the Gate is reviving Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, where a couple's very existence hinges on the fictions they sustain.
When we're immersed in a story we let our guard down, writes Maria Konnikova in The Confidence Game, recounting the story of "GPO Girl", a 15-year-old eastern European found lost in Dublin, a victim of human trafficking. But that girl was Samantha Azzopardi, a 25-year-old Australian scammer with 40 other aliases.
Azzopardi was deported. If you remember that story, its emotive appeal and moral panic, you may have felt duped. But stories will always be enchanting things. Six months after GPO Girl another young woman went to be au pair for a family in Leitrim, who marvelled to discover that she was the illegitimate daughter of Princess Madeleine of Sweden. At least that’s the story Samantha Azzopardi told them.
