No, I’m Liberty!
What is liberty? It appears a simple question with a simple answer, but the more you explore, the more complex it becomes. Imagine a world of unlimited freedoms: no rules, no boundaries. This is chaos and anarchy. Where one freedom meets another, contradictions and conflict flourish, the rights of one individual impinging on another’s. Therefore, what we understand as a free society is one with balances between liberties and governance. However, there is no definitive measure to determine that balance.
Time and changing cultural attitudes affect it. Written in the early 18th Century by James Thomson, the words of Rule Britannia referenced Alfred the Great but soon became adopted as an anthem, with the music of Thomas Arne, for Britishness and freedom. Yet this was the same era the British industrialised the slave trade and sent prisoners to Australia for stealing a loaf of bread. Not what we would describe as a land of liberty by today’s standards.
Wealth and poverty can also impact on our freedom. Choice comes with wealth. A poor country, with its inherent instability, has more corruption and fewer freedoms than a rich, stable one. But ask whether an unhappy millionaire is more liberated than a content and happy pauper and again you find a definition harder to pin down.
We currently find ourselves amidst a unique period of imposed lockdown designed to limit the spread of the Coronavirus, restricted to our homes, our freedom curtailed. But this is to protect our own, and our loved-ones’, health and well-being. To lose one’s good health and well-being can rob us of our liberty.
Limitations and fluidity exist everywhere in liberty, making it a wonderful topic to explore through literature.
In writing Liberty Bound, I began with the simple premise of a society thinking itself free but imprisoned by fear. However, as the story and the characters developed, I realised there were so many other elements to explore. Here were a people trapped within their time, stuck at the end of civilisation. Did they have a future: a hope of liberty? They populate a world encircled by mountains and deserts, barriers to freedom but also veils to a tantalising freedom beyond. The climate, hot, dry and unforgiving, provides an oppressive, restrictive backdrop to life but also a place for a miracle of nature, an oasis fed by glacial water, allowing life its precious foothold. Even their history, of incomparable past generations reaching for the stars, is imprisonment for a generation devoid of the skills and knowledge to innovate, while offering a beacon of hope for how things might be.
At the individual level, each character battles for freedom. Sometimes to maintain the status quo, sometimes to survive. There are the emotional prisons built by losses and traumas, and the metaphoric breaking of walls through love and discovery. Each is bound by an addiction to Jumblar, the drug ‘holding’ people together, helping them through the day. It is a reliance most may dismiss as belonging to the underbelly of our own society, but can any of us say there isn’t something in our life as damaging as it is helpful or deemed essential: our reliance on cars, the internet or in some countries, guns.
For the savage Ferrals, a people with no laws or fear, imprisonment takes the form of ignorance/innocence and vulnerability to the whims of the natural world. They have none of the trappings of civilisation, not the safety nets that exist in a complex society. As an allegorical element, they represent our children and childhood of today. A group that may claim others have betrayed their future, be it the legacy of global warming or the abandonment of standards and values that provided discipline and structure for the next generation.
I dedicated my novel to my grandparents and their generation for the sacrifices made for freedom during the Second World War. But they lived in an era when women gave up work on getting married, landlords put signs up in their window saying ‘no Irish’ and it was illegal to practice homosexuality. Let us not be complacent in our own time or assume we are custodians of a definitive liberty. After all, ours is an age where the internet allows anyone to say and do whatever they want, with no rules and no boundaries…