There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.
- Maya Angelou
At 15, my world was upended. This was a lesson I’ll never forget
An English teacher taught me three simple rules. In the age of fake news, they have served me well.
George Kemp
A high school is a bonkers thing. Teenagers (at my school, solely males) are learning privately about social order, sex and acne medication, while being publicly tested on Pi, Jane Austen and the seemingly ever-present question: igneous, sedimentary or metamorphic? Every day is a whirlwind during which one is rolled, awkwardly and roughly, in all the glittering elements of life, in the hope that something sticks.
I remember precisely the moment that the glitter stuck.
Sitting in English class among two dozen 15-year-old boys, flushed red from a beep test an hour earlier in PE, I learned how to read. And the whole world cracked open.
Of course, I already knew how to read. I was working my way through Harry Potter with the speed of a Seeker in a game of Quidditch. But in this moment, an enormous adult-sized door opened just a crack, and I walked through wide-eyed. There were two people holding that door open for me: the writer Graham Greene and my Year 10 English teacher.
He was teaching us The Quiet American, Greene’s 1955 exploration of foreign interference, democracy and war in Vietnam, told through the cynical and sardonic eyes of Fowler the journalist. That book still sits on my bookshelf more than 20 years later, full of fading highlighter and pencil markings. In studying that book with my teacher (who resplendently displayed the quality most anathema to the teenage boy – passion), I learned that fiction is akin to a sedimentary rock: it can inspire awe at a glance, like the ancient city of Petra, but is even more magnificent up close when its layers are studied in detail.
In that classroom, I learned three things about reading a novel: characters can say one thing and mean another; setting and context create meaning; and ambiguity is something to be treasured, not feared.
Looking at that list in 2026, and after recently re-reading Greene’s book, I can’t help but feel that those three things could be the most important lessons I learned in 13 years of schooling. The teacher offered a warning. He read, out loud, Fowler’s declaration: “I have never thought of myself as a correspondent, just a reporter. I offer no point of view, I take no action, I don’t get involved. I just report what I see.” We were cautioned, challenged, to keep an eye out for any moments when this statement might be untrue.
It meant that I read with a purpose, like a detective gathering clues – a thrill every time my highlighter found a new piece of evidence proving Fowler wrong. What a trick Greene was playing. Asking us to trust his narrator, while laying down banana skins all over Vietnam.
Without knowing it, I was critically thinking. If we can’t trust our protagonist, can we even trust its author? How can we trust anyone? In a world full of “fake news”, redactions, clickbait, podcasting prophets, AI slop and a handpicked White House press room, we are neck-deep in a murky media morass like never before. Thanks to that English class, I try to move through the world on guard for Fowler-esque hypocrisy, all thanks to that ardent and tartan-clad teacher imploring a bunch of teenage boys to think.
The novel follows two characters, representing two possible futures for a country – neither of them actually from the place – and both fighting for power over someone who actually is. Sound familiar? It should. As one of my fading 23-year-old highlighted passages states: “it’s not the most powerful rulers who have the happiest populations”.
As Greene writes in the book: “Suffering is not increased by numbers. One body can contain all the suffering the world can feel.” Over this past Christmas, and thanks to that English class, I have been thinking about this book in relation to the countless images beamed to us from Gaza, Sudan, even Bondi.
It requires work to remain sensitised to that barrage of images. I believe that the English teacher is primed to help young people train their minds for that work. The empathy coach. My life experiences couldn’t be further from the characters in Greene’s book. I don’t share a single given circumstance with any of them. But an English teacher gave me permission to think: what if I did?
And what of our dying friend, ambiguity? The idea that two things can be true at once seems to be gasping for air. It’s constantly bashed by the gotcha grotesqueness of the Twitter-verse, the insistence of the Murdoch media to pit two sides against each other, the hardened hypocrisy of the MAGA mindset, and god forbid a politician change their mind about something. But English teachers treasure ambiguity; all good literature is dependent on it: to be or not to be? Did Offred remember The Handmaid’s Tale wrong? Is Gatsby a dickhead? English teachers send young people out to the tuckshop line thinking in two parts while they wait for their toasties. Has that ever been more important in our lifetime?
While writing my debut novel, Soft Serve, I would regularly see the spine of Greene’s book staring back at me from my bookshelf – a spine that told me to straighten my posture when I was tired and lost. To keep writing in the hope that I might create a work that perhaps a reader, either pushing through their post-beep-test slump in a classroom, or looking back through their overstuffed life of creative memories, might think of something they were taught by an English teacher, one who made them see that, as Greene writes in The Quiet American, “human nature is not black and white, but black and grey”. That they might find the glitter in that grey.
Soft Serve is published by UQP on February 3.
