When you read, does an annoying
voice in your head give commentary?
One part of my brain simply reads and enjoys (or doesn’t enjoy). Another part breaks down why the book works
or doesn’t work for me, and how applicable this is to my writing.
Here’s the background music for my
January’s reading. Not reviews, but things
I learned while reading the following books.
Beautiful
Child by Emma Tennant
The
Hours by Michael Cunningham
Apple
Tree Yard by Louise Doughty
The
Detective’s Daughter by Lesley Thomson
The
Dying Hours by Mark Billingham
Two books have patiently waited on my
shelf because they were connected to classic literature – Beautiful Child by Emma Tennant and Michael Cunningham’s The Hours. The postponement in both cases was
unnecessary and regretable as both these books
(as does Louise Doughty’s Apple Tree Yard) have great
prose. In fact, the first chapter of The Hours (which describes Virginia
Woolf’s death) is so excellent, I put the book down and didn’t go back to it
for months.
Do you ever do that? A book is so well written, I can’t risk being
disappointed if it doesn’t keep its promise from start to finish. I needn’t have worried. Cunningham has a wonderful pacing and turns
sentences into stand alone works of art.
He reminded me that a writer must read and continue to read really good
writing to nudge us forward in our craft.
Tennant’s voice is a different kind of
good. She writes with a familiar tone,
as if I were the narrator’s long time friend with whom scandalous observations
could be made in confidence. Liberating,
is how I thought of it. A courageous
voice that says, this is how you jump off buildings and fly.
I do find fault with Tennant’s over use
of humour, such as the ever changing nicknames for the characters. A tutor once warned me about this in my own
writing, and I found it difficult to gauge when enough was enough. Meeting this same flaw in Tennant’s book was
an Aha moment for me. I think I’ll more easily season delicately
with my own humour because of this.
Beautiful
Child is meant to be scary and for me, was. In fact, I had to parcel the book out so I
could sleep at night (but I'm a wimp). However, the narrator
has an intense experience later in the book and when reading it, I felt
distanced from what should have been the most powerful passage so far. Can you imagine the let down?
The frightening aspects of the scene
were written as visual distortions. I’m
not a visual person, even have difficulty mentally visualising, so distorting
vision isn’t that frightening to me. The
way the human brain processes information differs among people and for a writer
to effectively communicate with a wider
range of readers, we should educate ourselves on those differences. While I don’t claim to be an expert on the
brain, remember the writing tutors who’ve told you to be aware of all five
senses. It’s
a great place to start, if you want to pull more readers into your narrative.
Then Louise Doughty. The book has a great concept, and her writing is seductive, her prose makes continuing
to read an imperative like continuing to read, and kept me interested in people I didn’t particularly like (both main characters).
For the first three quarters of the
book, her pacing is organic, but unfortunately falls apart near the end, as though she doesn’t know how to stop writing. I skimmed passages that seemed to come from nowhere and kept thinking,
where’s her editor? Why didn’t someone
help her fix this? Apple Tree Yard warned me that whatever standard I've set in the beginning of the book, I have to keep it up to the bitter end.
Interestingly, Doughty lost more than
her pacing in the latter part of the book.
She puts a big effort into an intelligent concept, then reached out for
a gimmicky ending by doing a Gotcha! For
me, that type of thing breaks the contract between reader and writer, because
doing an abrupt and unanticipated about-face is only for the purpose of fooling
me. A writer as gifted as Doughty could’ve
come up with a clever twist, and I would’ve admired that.
One last complaint about Apple Tree Yard. The narration is coloured with science, which
for the most part is done well, but then enter stage left, the psychologist. Trying hard here to
avoid spoilers, I’ll say that both technically and for continuity purposes, her
psychology is unbelievable to anyone in the field and perhaps to readers who
don’t have psych degrees and who haven’t been expert witnesses. Big red flag here to all of us – don’t skimp
on your research. Have everything
checked and rechecked by people in the field you’re writing about or risk
blowing the illusion for a certain percentage of your readers.
So then I read two not-so-well written books,
The
Detective’s Daughter by Lesley
Thomson and Mark Billingham’s The
Dying Hours. Billingham himself is a lovely guy, but not a writer I’d take notes from. The crime genre is irresistible to me, like
those nights you pull out a bag of crisps and eat the whole thing, only to
wonder what craziness took hold of you. That
itch scratched, I won’t go back to Billingham for a long time.
But The
Detective’s Daughter is billed as intelligent crime writing. Although her concept intrigues, both her
writing and characterisation fall short.
Again, I wondered about who edited this book, because it reads like an
early draft rather than a finished product; there’s also several typos in the
printed version.
Along the same vein, Thomson’s narrative,
in some instances, reads like the notes taken from her research, rather than prose. I’ve done this myself, forget to dress up the
research into a story, into fiction. No
matter how interesting we find our own research, reporting it isn’t the purpose
of the novel. You sneak it into the
story, like the conniving person that a writer has to be.
The book also reads as if Thomson were
beating several drums at once, and not in rhythm. As a writer who has multiple themes going in
my work, I know this is a tricky thing, and not one I always do well. But no matter how strong our passion for a
social injustice, it has to be distilled into art. Fiction first and
foremost is to make us believe a lie. Whatever social change comes
of it is secondary.
So that’s January’s fiction reading and
I learned something from all five of them.
If you’ve read any of these books, let’s discuss them.
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