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The celebrated crime writer Richard Osman has been committing crimes of his own recently. He’s outraged ornithologists because a scene in his latest novel depicts a swift catching a worm. Swifts don’t catch worms, apparently; they hunt insects and spiders in mid-air. That’s him told. But who really cares about such trivial slips? Novels are, after all, labelled as fiction. My favourite example of fiction getting its facts wrong comes from William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, when the character named Piggy, who’s otherwise pretty useless as a hunter-gatherer, suddenly becomes very useful indeed. Because his glasses can make fire. It’s a nice plot twist, except that Piggy is short-sighted, so the lenses in his glasses would spread the sun’s rays apart, not bring them together. But I’m glad Golding got his optics wrong. Piggy’s myopia is one of the novel’s most potent symbols: the boy who sees least has, it turns out, the greatest moral vision. Today is the feast of St John Paul II, marking the day his papacy began, 48 years ago. It’s a good moment to remember the letter he wrote to artists in 1999, which reads even more sharply now, in the age of AI. He saw human creativity as a way of sharing in God’s moral vision: trying to give form to a beauty that always exceeds us. What we make never quite matches what we glimpse, and in the effort to express it, we sometimes get things wrong. Yet there’s a dignity in that effort. If, as Christians believe, God Himself was content to take flesh and be heard in a human voice, then humans can surely risk their voices too, flaws and all. The takeaway here is not that it’s okay to be slapdash. James Joyce, for instance, spent great pains mapping the streets of Dublin for his novel Ulysses, so that readers might follow his protagonist through the real city. But it was also Joyce who wrote that the mistakes we make can sometimes be ‘portals of discovery’. Errors might prove more suggestive than what’s technically correct. As a society, we’ve long prized the hand-carved object over machine precision. Perhaps it’s time to extend that generosity to language. Even the best books aren’t perfect; they’re distinctive of the author’s style. By the same logic, all of us might seek distinctiveness over generic correctness in our everyday letters and emails: trusting our own words over what supposed perfection a computer might generate, while remaining open to those accidental portals of discovery. And so, I say: let the swifts have their worms. Our words, like Piggy’s glasses, may not always work as we imagined, but they might yet light a fire.
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