Kris Ashton

Attempting to appease the diversity police is a no-win situation.

While I very much enjoyed Liane Moriarty’s latest novel Apples Never Fall, along the way one thing kept pulling me out of the story: nearly every minor character is ethnic.

Christina Khoury, the detective investigating Joy Delaney’s disappearance, is of Middle Eastern descent. Her partner, Constable Lim, is presumably Asian. The champion tennis player peripherally tangled up in the investigation is Harry Haddad. The kid across the road is Jacob Azinovic. And on and on it goes; nearly every incidental character in the novel has a non-Anglo name.

It wasn’t something I’d noticed in Moriarty’s books before and I assumed she’d done it at the behest of her publisher, but then inadvertently came across what I suspect is the real culprit: articles such as this one in The Guardian.

The core problem, of course, is that Moriarty’s a rich white woman living in a rich white suburb in the leafy streets of northern Sydney, and hasn’t a clue what life is like for Hussein Hussein in Granville. So she is reduced to sticking ethnic-sounding names on minor characters to satisfy the diversity police.

Attempting to appease such folks is a no-win situation. If you do write characters outside approved ethnic boundaries, you’ll be accused of ‘cultural appropriation’, or ‘insensitivity’ or whatever buzzword is popular among the woke set this week. If you don’t include minority characters, then your book will be accused of being ‘too white’.

The only real answer is to write whatever the hell you like and refuse to participate in the Guardian’s diversity litmus test. (Unless of course you are from an ethnic minority, in which case your fiction will be labelled ‘brave’ or ‘insightful’ no matter what you write because the racism of low expectations is now doctrine among what a Spiked columnist recently dubbed the ‘counter-Enlightenment’.)

I must confess to some experience in this. I’m about 20,000 words into a new novel set in the US. One of my characters is a female police officer and, at some point early on, I considered making her black. Not for a particular reason; only to appease those agents and editors who would read my manuscript down the line and apply a diversity check. The result? Everything to do with Charlene’s character stalled. No matter what I tried to write, it felt forced and fake. So in the end I forgot all about her skin colour, and soon enough her character began to blossom again.

You can’t bullshit the muse. She won’t play along if you’re not being honest about what you see and hear. I have no issue at all with diversity in fiction, but if you’re drawing attention to a person’s colour or sexual orientation or whatever, it had better serve the story. Otherwise, it’s gratuitous tick-a-box pandering – the literary equivalent of Oscar-baiting.

Another novel I’m shopping around at the moment features a gay character. I included him in part because I’d never written a gay character before and thought it would be an interesting and enlightening experience (“willed understanding” was how Stephen King once described writing about a Jewish character), but also because during my occasional intersections with the gay scene I’d observed that party drugs often featured highly, and addiction is a key theme in the novel.

Adding a character to your book because someone else thinks you should is really pre-emptive censorship – and censorship always makes writing worse. Always. Censors have been with us since the invention of the printing press, but in the past thirty years or so the literary world has betrayed its own principles. It used to be transgressive, the victim of censors. Today, too often, it censors itself or tries to censor others.

Many self-appointed experts now pooh-pooh the ‘write what you know’ doctrine, but for genre writers especially there’s no better way to ensure your more fantastic elements are couched in believable reality. So if you grew up in an all-white suburb and all your peers are middle-class professionals, don’t let anyone make you feel bad about using that milieu in your fiction.

It sure beats tacking ethnic names onto minor characters in a feeble attempt at ‘diversity’.