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2007-01-26 - 9:27 p.m. Sometimes, just sometimes, I do think that things seem to come to me rather serendipitously. There's this book that has been germinating in my head for, oh, at least a decade now. Sometime before Christmas I got one little image in my head one morning between sleeping and waking and I've been trying to write towards that image for several weeks now - at the rate of about a sentence every few days. But even that little, little bit of writing keeps the story percolating through my brain cells. Right from the start I've known that there was some mystery about my heroine's father - that she very clearly does not have the same ancestry as the rest of the country. I also knew her mother refused to discuss her "real" father with her. Then it gradually became borne in upon me that my heroine is the product of a rape. And not some individual back alley sort of rape, but the sort of mass rape that occurs after a war. This has been a fruitful topic for musings. What sort of war? What sort of feelings would that create in a person? What sort of man does this? How would you react meeting this father later? How does a mother feel about this child? And dozens of others. Since reading The Red Queen I don't view a lot of human sexuality in the same way. Mass rapes after a war, for instance, make perfect sense to me now. Not pleasant sense, but sense. Some say it's about violence; some say it's about sex, but I suspect it is part of all that as well as some instinct so much deeper and older that impels men to make their best attempts to impregnate the conquered females and make sure their genes are the ones that survive. What's more - and I hesitate to even write this out loud - I suspect that a lot, if not most men, are fully capable of this when caught up in blood and lust and herd instinct. Perhaps not as much now, but certainly in earlier ages. I know, I find that a very disturbing thought too. Anyway, back to the serendipity. First I started reading Poland by Michener and found that there's a good bit of raping and pillaging in that. Then, over Christmas, a friend in Nova Scotia wrote to me and highly recommended A Woman in Berlin: Eight Weeks in the Conquered City without telling me anything about it at all. But it is the diary of woman who lived through the Russian invasion of Berlin in 1945. The introduction says that it is estimated that some 2 million women throughout Germany would have been raped by the advancing armies. I don't expect it to be a pleasant little read - though I already love her writing - but I expect that it is going to give me a lot more to muse about.
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