It’s as famous a sentence as there is in 20th-century American writing. Joan Didion wrote it: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” Yet sometimes the stories that get told can serve an even greater purpose. In such instances, narrative can not only describe and explain past events but shape and determine future ones.
Didion you’ve likely heard of. Renfrew Christie? Unless you know much about apartheid-era South Africa or nuclear proliferation, chances are you haven’t. He died last month, in Cape Town. He was 76. Christie is a reminder that fame, let alone celebrity, rarely has much to do with moral value. He was a true, if improbable, hero, and at the heart of that improbability was a stunning demonstration of the power of narrative.
The story he told — the narrative he assembled — was ostensibly juridical, implicitly directive, and explosively effective, literally so. The truly remarkable twist was that the success of the story Christie put together depended for its success on its being told by someone else. Also, as important as telling ourselves stories can be, telling that story to others — an audience — can matter vastly more. An understanding of that importance was central to what Christie accomplished.
But before hearing his story, take a moment to ponder that word “narrative.” It’s become one of those inescapable, indispensable terms that get thrown around to the point of meaninglessness — except that all narratives, even failed ones, have meaning of one sort or another. Sometimes the meaning lies in the failure.
Political campaigns used to have platforms and programs. They still do, but they’ve been overtaken in importance by the need to find or construct narratives. Once elected, leaders have policies — but now those policies are as much about letting those leaders create a narrative around them as they are about the specific actions or goals the policies entail.
It’s not just in the public sector. Marketers and business executives seek narrative control, too. In 2021, an author with the rather enchanting name Lida Citroën published a book with the rather less enchanting title “Control the Narrative: The Executive’s Guide to Building, Pivoting and Repairing Your Reputation.”
Narratives of the political and business sort are aspirational. Certain facts, or interpretations of those facts, are put out there, and the hope is that they get stitched together in such a way as to persuade voters or consumers of their coherence and appeal. Politicians and marketers tell us stories in order to get elected, or reelected — and rich, or richer.
Understood vocationally rather than aspirationally, narrative is good old-fashioned storytelling — a plot — something that has driven epic poetry and movies and plays and television series and novels from Homer to Christopher Nolan (the release for Nolan’s film version of “The Odyssey,” speaking of Homer, is July 17). So many elements go into the success of those works; almost inevitably, though, the axial element is plot. It’s the straw that stirs the storytelling drink. Yes, character, style, theme, topicality — the list of elements can be very long, and happily so; the better the work, the longer the list — but the motor that drives any narrative enterprise is plot. Filmmakers and playwrights and show runners and novelists tell us stories in order to entertain and edify (and, of course, make a living).
Perhaps the purest example of narrative as engine is the spy story or thriller. More than anything else, eagerness to find out what happens next is what most matters to viewer or reader. (With detective stories, the character of the detective is as important as the plot, or even more so; and with mysteries, the resolution of the plot overwhelms all that proceeds it.)
Which brings us back to Renfrew Christie, whose particular narrative combines spy story and thriller — technical manual, too. The story has the further advantage that it actually happened and marked a victory for real-world good over real-world evil.
In online interviews, Christie appears amiable, impassioned, and impressively articulate. He was also unprepossessing in appearance: bald, pudgy, moon faced. Brad Pitt or Daniel Craig he was not. If Hollywood made a movie about him, a good casting choice would be the English character actor Jim Broadbent. Most recently, Broadbent played the director who discovered George Clooney’s title character in “Jay Kelly.”
That movie might begin when Christie was 17. Already opposed to apartheid, he’d been drafted into the South African army and assigned to guard duty at a large munitions facility. “I saw something which told me that the apartheid state was getting involved with nuclear weapons,” he recalled in a 2023 speech. “From the age of 17, I was hunting the apartheid atom bomb,” he said in a 2005 interview.
Once out of the army, Christie earned several degrees in South Africa and won a doctoral fellowship to Oxford. He chose as his subject the history of South African electrification — “so I could get into the electricity supply commission’s library and archives,” Christie said in a 2018 BBC interview, “and work out how much electricity they were using to enrich uranium.” He passed along his findings to the African National Congress, the anti-apartheid organization whose imprisoned leader was Nelson Mandela.
Returning to South Africa in 1979, Christie was betrayed by a government double agent. He was tortured for 48 hours, then put into solitary confinement. Here is where Christie constructed his narrative. Forced to sign a confession, he made it as detailed as possible, right down to including instructions on how the South African nuclear program could be sabotaged.
From a government perspective, such information underscored the extent of Christie’s guilt; and he was sentenced to 30 years in prison, 20 to be served concurrently (he’d be pardoned after seven years). The judge read out the entire confession in court and had it placed in the trial record.
That was just what Christie had hoped. “I was able to use my so-called confession as a way to communicate with my African National Congress control,” he wrote in 2013, “to pass on the results of my spying. I put into my “confession” exactly how I believed the Koeberg Nuclear Power Station [where weapons-grade materials were being produced] could be attacked with explosives without endangering the people of Cape Town.”
Christie’s confession and the narrative he had constructed within it was also a set of instructions. Two years later, four ANC bombs exploded at the station. Placed where Christie had specified in his confession, the explosions caused more than half a billion dollars in damage and set back the program many months.
Actually, there’s a further Hollywood-style flourish. Some ANC lawyers were faxing a copy of the confession to London when the South African Special Police raided their office. One of the lawyers stuffed the pages into his shirt and hung from a fire escape while the premises were being searched. Once they left, the faxing resumed. Good as the story is, it gets better. The lawyer, Penuell Maduna, later became South Africa’s minister of justice.
Sometimes we tell ourselves stories in order to shake our heads.
Mark Feeney can be reached at mark.feeney@globe.com.