Dangerous Corner

Robert and Freda Caplan are entertaining guests at their country retreat. A chance remark by one of the guests ignites a series of devastating revelations, revealing a hitherto undiscovered tangle of clandestine relationships and dark secrets, the disclosures of which have tragic consequences. The play ends with time slipping back to the beginning of the evening and the chance remark not being made, the secrets remaining hidden and the ‘dangerous corner’ avoided. —Wikipedia.

This is the outline of a play by J. B. Priestley, premiered in 1932. The idea of a ‘dangerous corner’ has many applications. It’s even a familiar experience in our personal and national lives.

Over the past few years, while my pleasantly routine and predictable life has rolled on each day, I’ve occasionally had the thought that this road cannot go one indefinitely. At some point it will come to an end, or there will be a sharp turn. When will that be? And what will it be like?

Well, in February we unexpectedly arrived at such a corner and were soon on our way down a dark side alley. This isn’t the place to go into the details. It’s enough to say that we seem, mercifully, to have reached the end of the alley and have turned back on to the high road for a while longer.

What causes these dangerous corners? In Priestley’s play, one character insists on making an issue of a small thing, and this leads ineluctably to disaster; while in his time-slipped rerun of scene 1, she is interrupted, the risky subject is dropped, and harmony prevails. When no one was expecting it, in April 1917, the German government allowed Lenin to travel from Switzerland through Germany to Russia where he turned nascent democracy into terror. In January 1933, despite their lack of a majority, the National Socialists were suddenly handed political power in Germany. In September 2001, seemingly out of nowhere, aeroplanes were crashed into the Twin Towers in New York. In June 2016, millions were stunned to learn that a slim majority had voted to take the UK out of the EU. On 8 November 2016, Donald Trump unexpectedly defeated Hillary Clinton to gain the US presidency, even though he lost the popular vote. Where do these unexpected turnings on the road of life, these dangerous corners, come from?

I am certain that they do not come from heaven. I am old-fashioned enough to believe in the reality of evil as a force in the world with the power to tempt human beings, to blind them, and eventually to bind them. Something very strange and sinister has happened to us, and especially to the politicians, media tycoons, and other powerful people who direct our fortunes. In my youth, you could regard with respect even those whose politicians you vehemently disagreed with: on the whole they spoke the truth and used straightforward tactics to advance their policies, and on the whole they lived reasonably decent lives. But the people who have replaced them live lives that exhibit avarice, lechery, and pride; they tell blatant lies and resort to secret corrupt practices to obtain their ends; they foster hatred, envy, and greed. Suddenly, for Christians, the lines have been very starkly drawn. A great proto-Christian writer might have foreseen our times when he wrote:

Justice is driven back, and righteousness stands at a distance; truth has stumbled in the streets, honesty cannot enter. Truth is nowhere to be found, and whoever shuns evil becomes a prey. —Isaiah 59:14–15

We now live in a world that has turned the dangerous corner. It should not now be difficult for Christian writers to find a theme for their work. Surely that theme can only be the battle between good and evil. It should be so, even if that battle is set in Cosy-crime-ville. Not that the theme has to be worked out simplistically and naively. Good need not be made to triumph. It does so rarely enough in the real world! But good ought to be visibly vindicated, even if it fails to win the battle.