Torture. Not the writing, the act of extracting information from an unwilling person. It is not a pleasant thought. I suppose, unless you have prior experience of being a torturer, then that is exactly how it should be. However, the act of torturing someone does appear to be something of a staple in thrillers. The use of a dentist’s drill in ‘The Boys from Brazil’ has got to be one of the most famous and infamous torture scenes, probably because most people hate the sound of the dentist’s drill to begin with! A point has come in Mephistopheles where a character finds themselves captured by the enemy who want to know what they know and, as they are unwilling, torture is the obvious answer.

There were two ways to go with this; physical torture or mental torture. As the character is a woman I decided on the latter. Am I being sexist? I may well be, but the thought of writing about the physical torture of a woman by a man really did not appeal to me. I could not change the gender of either character but I suppose that I could have introduced a female torturer, however, that raises other issues, such as their backstory and a logical reason for a woman torturer existing in the 1930’s. I also wanted the man in the scene because his presence links back to an event at the beginning of the book and provides motivation for the protagonist.

I read a book sometime ago that was mostly forgettable, but there was one character that I found very interesting. He was a Soviet intelligence officer who was very good at getting people to talk without any use of violence of intimidation. His method was very simple, put him in a dark room with the subject, just the two of them alone. It might take several hours, I seem to remember that he referred to one case that took days, but he always succeeded. This is one of the reasons why I chose mental over physical torture. Anyone can inflict physical pain on someone else, but to reduce someone’s will by psychological means it not so easy. Also, the unfortunate character that was to suffer this ordeal was, by their very nature, much better suited to this kind of mental deconstruction.

This was not a case of torture for the sake of having a torture scene. One of the themes of this book is things not being all that they seem. As I have mentioned in one of my earlier posts in this series, I want to write all of the characters in a more believable fashion. There are no clear boundaries such as good and evil; all areas are grey. I asked myself what if the positions were reversed. Would any of the other characters behave any differently? Well, some, I think, would be more prone to inflicting physical pain, but that’s not the point; the real point is that any action can be justified but a justification alone does not make any action right.

From the victim’s point of view torture is wrong. They do not want to suffer the pain and humiliation, obviously. They are scared. Their entire world has suddenly shrunk to this one moment, sat on an uncomfortable chair under a blinding light in only their underwear. They know that they are in the power of a man who will decide if they live or die and that there is nothing that they can do about it. Yes, that is a situation to be avoided. For the torturer this is necessary. An important undertaking appears to be at risk and the fate of many could depend on the information that this individual might have. As that person is unwilling to confirm or deny the said information then torture offers a means of resolving the situation reasonably quickly. The need justifies the end, but it does not make it right.

This is an important consideration because the man who is the torturer at this point is not necessarily a bad man in himself. He is not a cliché. So often in television dramas tortures are presented as physically inferior to their victim and with a sadistic tendency that can only be satisfied by their licenced occupation, licenced that is by the government or organisation that employs them. I do not know much about torture, there may well be people like that out there in the world, but it still seems like a cliché to me. My torturer is well educated and not given to sadism. He has a job to do and a pressing need to achieve a result. Using torture is expedient to him and nothing more.

Although I have written the scene now and I am quite happy with it there is more work to be done. The dialogue is satisfactory, but it could be better. I think that whole account could be pared down as well; it would better reflect the physical situation which is pretty minimalist to begin with. I like that thought. It seems to help isolate the victim even more. Everything that they thought they valued, everything that they knew up to that point, has been removed from them. They are very much on their own and any thought of assistance from other people has been challenged, dissected, and discarded by the interrogator. When the victim reaches the point where they are expected to break they are truly alone, confined by the reality that the torturer has created for them, a stifling, depressing, hopeless reality where self-destruction appears as the only form of salvation.