Crime fiction is usually organised around a single violent hour. Something is done, and everything after it is the pursuit of the person who did it. That is a good shape for a thriller. It is not much like the shape of the thing itself.
In All God’s Kids the attack on Bridget Rawnsley occupies very little of the book. What occupies the book is the next morning, and the morning after that: the drive to the station, the room she is asked to undress in, the swabs, the forms, the officer who has been on shift for nine hours and asks the same question a third time in a flatter voice. None of it is malicious. Most of it is necessary. All of it lands on somebody who has already had a very bad night.
Nobody in the room means her any harm. That is precisely what makes it unbearable.
The decision Bridget eventually makes, to withdraw the charges, is not a plot device and it is not a statement about whether she was telling the truth. It is what exhaustion looks like when it is given enough weeks to work. She is not persuaded out of it by anybody. She simply reaches a point where stopping costs less than continuing, and she stops.
Procedure is character
There is a temptation, when you have worked inside a system, to put the system on the page for its own sake, the correct form number, the correct rank, the correct wording of the caution. Readers do not want a training manual. But procedure earns its place when it tells you something about the people carrying it out.
A young constable eighteen months into his probation wants a serious case the way a junior doctor wants a difficult admission: not out of cruelty, but because he needs to find out whether he can do the job. A sergeant who has taken a hundred of these statements has learned to keep her voice level, and the level voice reads to the woman opposite her as disbelief. Both of them are behaving reasonably. Neither of them is helping.
That is the sort of thing procedure is good for in a novel. Not accuracy for its own sake, accuracy that shows you the gap between what an institution intends and what a person actually receives.
Writing it without exploiting it
The manuscript carries an author’s note at the front making a plain point: rape is a very serious crime, and the attitudes expressed by the characters are the characters’, not the author’s. That note is there because a novel that lets its people speak freely will inevitably let some of them speak badly.
The line I tried to hold is a simple one. The crime is never written to be enjoyed. The consequences are given more pages than the act. And the judge, when he finally speaks, says the thing the book has been circling for four hundred pages: what a woman said in a pub, and what a woman does for a living, have no bearing whatsoever on whether she consented to what happened in that car.
