In the case of his new novel The Devil and The Dark Water, which takes places on an eight-month sea voyage from Batavia to Amsterdam in 1634 at the height of power of the infamous Dutch East India Company, people are all too keen to blame a demon known as Old Tom for all kinds of terrors that befall them out on the wild surrounds of the untameable ocean. Stuart Turton, who brought us a searing life lesson in the searing bleakness and also reassuringly the redemptive possibilities of humanity in his first supremely successful novel The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, knows more than a thing or two about humanity’s proclivity for blaming things beyond ourselves for the great evils we seem able to commit with far too great an ease. So we invent religions, fairytales, creatures that lurk in the bleak shadows or swim in the murky depths, anything to take us away from the fact that we are, at heart, not as pretty or laudable as we would like to be. You could be forgiven for thinking so when you look at the dizzying amount of literature, music, film and on and on devoted to exploring the darker and lighter parts of humanity’s inner self, but the truth is, very few of us are in favour of taking too close at what lies deep below our socially acceptable surfaces nor of taking any responsibility for the terrible acts committed by whatever rises from the deeper reaches of our often unknowable souls. Humanity is not, by and large, a fan of looking deep into its soul.
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