Counterculture Blues - a Fable, by Danielle de Valera

 

In what may seem, at first-sight, to be a charming yarn for children - all of the characters are animals living human lives - there is wisdom and in-sight. Life is tough for most people because a cunning few wield the will-to-acquire like a dragline excavator, and accumulate much more of the world's resources than they need and hoard it for their private benefit. It’s unfair and someone is to blame. If you’re a have-not you have options: you can be ruled by resentment and play the blame game; or you can get on with looking for opportunities to exercise your agency - which, if I am not mistaken, is what counterculture was all about.

The family in this fable abides humbly in hope, eschews the urge to blame, and responds resourcefully to a run of mishaps that they brought not upon themselves; until a reversal of fortune, owing nothing to anything they have done, restores them to modest prospects and a future as secure as anyone should count on in a world rigged in favour of the already-haves.

Danielle de Valera is no stranger to suffering. She plots the intervention of serendipity with the authority of experience. Her characters engage with rather than merely endure poverty with a complete lack of resentment. When Claude loses his job it never occurs to him to think, let alone say out aloud, “What about me? It isn’t fair!” Intriguingly, Sylvia's late partner used to read Schopenhauer, the first western philosopher to “get” that life is suffering.

The message is: we can better than merely survive: we can thrive in ways unseen to most other people; which is not to be confused with the self-help fantasy that the Universe will look after us, and that all we need to do is believe it to find ourselves rolling in abundance.

Fables and fairytales are not about people who don’t suffer. They are about people who know that their suffering does not define them; and that by staring down the source of their suffering, they can know and celebrate who they really are - which, if I am not mistaken, is what the blues is all about.

For the first three quarters of the book, I kept visualising the story as if seeing it in a cinema, thinking that as humans, the characters would be totally credible. I wondered why they were cats, dogs, snakes, echidnas, rabbits and more; and began to suspect that the moral of the fable might be blessings of multiculturalism. It can certainly be read that way. It wasn’t until I reached the resolution of the crisis that drives this story that I realised why the characters had to be animals. No one would have trouble with the parts of the story that dwell on hardship: but happy endings, that’s another matter. We don’t like to see happy humans! Which, unless I am mistaken, is why counterculture got the blues.