Dave Appleby's Blog

Classics: good and bad

I've just finished the American classic The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne. The plotting is predictable, the dialogue dreadful, the characters stereotyped. A Goodreads review describes the sentences as the sort that contain three or four points within them so that you lose all sense of what the author is trying to say long before you have reached the end. Another felt as if the author was looking over his shoulder proudly pointing out the good bits, such as the repeated symbolism of redness.

And it's a 'classic'.

Moby-Dick is another classic. It may be a masterpiece but it is tremendously flawed. It seems as if Melville forgot, half way through, that Ismael is the narrator and dragged in scenes which Ismael could never have observed.

Most classics are great. But some aren't. One is left wondering why anyone suggested they were.

The technique of reprise.

I've just finished 'Fingersmith' by Sarah Waters, a remarkably Dickensian book (for my full review see https://davesbookblog-daja.blogspot.c... ) In it she describes a large section of the plot from the perspective of one of the protagonists and then reprises this (with added material later) from the point of view of another protagonist.

Famously this was done by Ian Pears in 'An Instance of the Fingerpost' in which the story is told four times, from the perspective of each of four characters. (If you use this technique is there some sort of rule that the title must include the word 'finger'?)

It is fascinating to see how a sequence of events can be interpreted in different ways and of course it is a tribute to the author's arts of inhabiting the head of different characters so perfectly that the reader can see things through different eyes.

The problem is that this means that the same story is told again. In the Fingersmith I found that this dragged.

Like all techniques, it has advantages and disadvantages, I suppose.

Prose that overflows

I've just finished Deacon King Kong by James McBride and been bowled away by the way words pour out in a flood of wonder. Moments like:

"Sister Bibb, the volutptuous church organist ... ] was coming off her once-a-year sin jamboree, an all-night, two-fisted, booze-guzzling, swig-faced affair of delicious tongue-in-groove licking and love-smacking with her sometimes boyfriend Hot Sausage, until Sausage withdrew from the festivities for lack of endurance."

"If your visiting preacher had diabetes and weighed 450 pounds and gorged himself with too much fatback and chicken thighs at the church repast and your congregation needed a man strong enough to help the tractor-trailer-sized wide-body off the toilet seat and out onto the bus back to the Bronx so that somebody could lock up the dang church and go home - why, Sportcoat was your man."

"The young white social worker with bog boobs who couldn't clap on beat and wouldn't have known a salsa rhythm if it were dressed up like an elephant in a bath tub, but whose wide hips moved with the kind of rhythm every man in the Cause could hear a thousand miles away."

I think he achieves this breathless effect by taking an idea and then elaborating it and refusing to be satisfied with just a short, succinct exploration. But I bet it's harder than it looks!

Unnamed characters

In Hamnet, Maggie O'Farrell chooses never to name her central character's husband, though most people will instantly know he is William Shakespeare.

Why did she do that?

In 'The Kids of God' (the provisional title for my soon-to-be-published novel), I decided not to name my narrator-protagonist's wife. This was to emphasise his self-centredness. But O'Farrell's heroine is a strong wonderwoman. That can't have been the reason.

Did she fear that the myth behind the man might overshadow her heroine and turn her intense domestic drama into something else? But we all know who the husband is! So in the end this 'no-name' technique had the effect of drawing my attention away from Stratford and towards the theatre.

I'm not sure I understand this.

Rather dated attitudes but a classic children's adventure story

Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


The book that started it all, for me. I read all twelve books in this series, which starts with this one, when I was a child. If anything turned me on to reading, these did. And now, returning after more than fifty years, what do I find?

The children are all carefully characterised; they are real and individual. You have the adventurous boy, the home-maker, the dreamer, the comedy character, the tom-boy and the talkative one. But the gender roles reflect the expectations of people at the time (it was written in 1929). John says that he and Roger will one day join the Navy; this is assumed as inevitable. The girls will be home-makers. The children are from privileged families: Nancy and Peggy have a cook at home; when they encounter a policeman (Sammy) they tell him off and boss him around (he is working class). The boats are hierarchically arranged; there are a lot of 'Aye Aye Sirs'.

A lot of the imaginary adventures involve the implicit assumptions of racist colonialism. Thus, the children are intrepid explorers; adults are referred to as 'natives' or 'savages' who might be cannibals.

My pre-teen self in the early 1960s noticed none of this.

There is a surprising amount of technical detail in the book. Very early on, well before the adventures proper have started, the children have to learn how to step the mast and hoist the sail of Swallow and this is explained in detail. As a writer I would hesitate to start the narrative so slowly. As a young reader I don't think I even noticed this bit; I certainly didn't understand it (I still don't). I suppose it adds verisimilitude; it makes me feel that Ransome is talking about a particular dinghy whose idiosyncrasies were known to himself; it grounds the story in undeniable authenticity and it lends a sort of depth to the narrative that a musician might achieve with a bass line that nobody apart from fellow musicians would notice.

But it is a big book and it starts very slowly. The first chapter involves them getting permission (by a telegram from absent father containing the immortal words 'better drowned than duffers if not duffers won't drown'; words I have remembered for over fifty years) to go on their adventures; the second the details about preparing the ship and the tents and the stores, so they don't actually set sail until 10% of the book is already finished. In terms of the Hero's Journey this gives the 'ordinary world' of the heroes, the status quo ante, which grounds the heroes in reality and makes the reader identify with them. But it is a slow start.

The structure of the book is classic. The Swallows encounter the Amazons almost exactly at the 25% mark, the adventure that acts as the focus of the book begins at the 50% mark; the resolution of the problems with 'Captain Flint' starts promptly at the 75% mark; the culminating discovery is almost precisely at 90%.

One of the main stories (the Captain Flint subplot) is beautifully foreshadowed. The final few pages also seem to foreshadow several of the other books in the twelve book series.

So it is surprising that it gripped me the way it did. I suppose it enchants primarily because of its subject. Like all classic children's adventure stories it promptly gets rid of the grown-ups. And what could be more exciting than camping on an island and sailing your own boat.




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Intellectual dishonesty from C S Lewis

The Problem of Pain by C.S. Lewis

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


I hated this book.

n Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, the hero Yossarian gets angry at the thought of a God who has created a world in which there is pain: "Good God, how much reverence can you have for a Supreme Being who found it necessary to include such phenomena as phlegm and tooth decay in His divine system of creation? What in the world was running through that warped, evil, scatological mind of His when he robbed old people of the power to control their bowel movements? Why in the world did He ever create pain? ... Why couldn't He have used a doorbell instead to notify us, or one of His celestial choirs? Or a system of blue-and-red neon tubes right in the middle of each person's forehead? Any jukebox manufacturer worth his salt could have done that. Why couldn't he?”

In this book C S Lewis argues that God uses pain to shake us out of our complacency. When we are happy and content, we tend not to think of God. But when we are suffering, we seek God as a comfort. “God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.” (Ch 6)

Fundamentally CSL believes that the ultimate human happiness lies in submission to God. He uses the analogy of a man with a pet dog: “The association of (say) man and dog is primarily for the man’s sake: he tames the dog primarily that he may love it, not that it may love him, and that it may serve him, not that he may serve it ...man interferes with the dog ... In its state of nature it has a smell, and habits, which frustrate man’s love: he washes it, house-trains it, teaches it not to steal, and is so enabled to love it completely. To the puppy the whole proceeding would seem ... to cast grave doubts on the ‘goodness’ of man: but the full-grown and full-trained dog, larger, healthier, and longer-lived than the wild dog ... would have no such doubts.” (Ch 3)

Another analogy, often used in Christianity, is of God as father. But CSL's ideal father is fundamentally authoritarian: “Love between father and son ... means essentially authoritative love on the one side, and obedient love on the other. The father uses his authority to make his son into the sort of human being he, rightly, and in his superior wisdom, wants him to be.” (Ch 3)

Pain is therefore the way God whips us into obedience, using the pretext that it is good for us in the long run. Presumably to a man like CSL, an Oxbridge don, cocooned in multiple privileges, this is the perfect God because he is the perfect excuse for authority, the authority of the master over the slave, the man over the dog, the father over the child, the husband over the wife, the boss over the worker. Pain and suffering can be justified because it props up the status quo. The only true sin is rebellion. This sounds like a classic justification for tyranny.

It wouldn't be so bad if I could feel that CSL's arguments were unanswerable. After all, he was an Oxbridge don. His arguments should be powerful.

But they are shoddy.

He has a habit of introducing hypotheses as if they were fact. For example, he states: “Now the proper good of a creature is to surrender itself to its Creator” (Ch 6) This statement is unevidenced. But he never makes clear that it is an assumption that could be challenged. He then bases his arguments upon this statement. But there are alternatives! You could instead say: ‘The proper good of a creature is to fulfil its potential’. This would lead to radically different conclusions. Such a use of unacknowledged hypotheses suggests either that he is insufficiently imaginative to conceive of alternative points of view, or that he is using rhetoric in place of reason, to manipulate the reader into agreement.

He also enjoys offering dichotomies. This is another rhetorical technique which allows a propagandist to bolster a weak argument. For example, he describes Jesus and says “only two views of this man are possible. Either he was a raving lunatic of an unusually abominable type, or else He was, and is, precisely what He said. There is no middle way.” (Ch 1) Which is an absurd statement. There are lots and lots of middle ways. Jesus might have been sincere but mistaken, for example. He is deliberately narrowing down the reader's choices to two alternatives so that by demolishing one, you are forced to accept the other. And notice how the work of demolition is packaged into the choice by his description 'unusually abominable'.

In another example he says that our experience of the Numinous (eg dread as opposed to fear) can be explained in only two ways: “either it is a mere twist in the human mind, corresponding to nothing objective and serving no biological function ... or else it is a direct experience of the really supernatural.” (Ch 1). Of course this is not the only choice. And again, he blackens the path he dislikes, with the adjective 'mere' and the qualifier 'nothing objective and serving no biological function'. (I would argue that dreams are natural but potentially numinous and that dread and wonder could easily have a biological function, as does curiosity.)

I was appalled at the attitudes revealed in this book and even more shocked at the lack of academic rigour in the arguments. At least it was short.



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The end of the American Dream?

I've read a couple of books recently which are set in American towns which have lost their way; where the optimism that has for so long seemed a hall mark of the USA has been replaced by pessimism and despair.

The narrator-protagonist of Shampoo Planet by Douglas Coupland is the son of hippy parents who has rejected their way of life. He has ambition: it is to become an entrepreneur. And yet he lives in a West Coast town whose nuclear power plant that was its raison d'etre has closed; his grandparents have lost their life savings; the man after whose family the town is named lives alone but for his pets. In one paragraph he contrasts the shopping mall of his childhood with how it is now:

"The Ridgecrest Mall was where my friends and I, all of us hyper from sugar and too many video games, feeling fizzy and unreal - like products that can't exist without advertising - shunted about in our packs: skatepunks, deathcookies, jocks, psueds, Euros, and geeks. ... I'm almost too old for malljamming now, and to be hoest, there's not much mall left to malljam in. Today around us I see wounded shoe stores, dead pizzerias, plywooded phone marts, and decayed and locked-up sports stores."

The mother of the narrator-protagonist of The Lovely Moon by Alice Sebold lives in an American suburb at the end of its life, filled with old people at the end of theirs. This town also has had a major industry closed down. It is a bleak portrait of failure and waste and futility.

I wondered whether there are any other books like this and thought of The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt in which the narrator-protagonist spends some of his youth in a suburb of Los Angeles where most of the house are unfinished and the road peters out into desert, and Paper Towns by John Green in which the narrator hides in an abandoned shopping centre. No doubt other goodreads readers can think of many more.

Of course there are European equivalents. Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart is a bleak portrait of a Glasgow suburb whose pit has closed. In Carry Me Down by M J Hyland the narrator spends part of his boyhood in a dreadful Dublin block of flats. The Spinning Heart by Donal Ryan is a series of stories set in an Ireland following the economic crash of 2008. But somehow these have less impact because the European zeitgeist is not so wildly optimistic as the American dream.

Another indictment of consumer culture

Shampoo Planet by Douglas Coupland

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


It took me a little while to get into this book but having finished it I am impressed. I think it is better than his debut novel whose title caught the zeitgeist and labelled a culture: Generation X.

Tyler, the son of hippy mother Jasmine, wants to become an entrepreneur (his first memories are of Ronald Reagan). But he is growing up in Lancaster, an American town whose raison d'etre has been its nuclear processing plant, now closed. He studies hotel management at the local community college; his friends have dead-end jobs. His rich grandparents become homeless after their investment fund goes bankrupt; they start pyramid-selling a cat-food scheme. Nutrition involves the by-products of the oil industry or the processing of the unwanted and unmentionable bits of animals. This is a critique of American consumer culture by a narrator-protagonist who wants to be a part of it.

What helps is that the narrator is himself conflicted. He scorns the "sand candles" and "rainbow merchandise" of his Mum's hippy past. A visit to his natural father, living with two women and ten children in the wilds, has elements of nightmare. When visiting Europe he castigates Europeans for having no ambition. But when he goes to Hollywood he ends up working in a chicken reprocessing plant and then becomes a sidewalk artist. He is seduced by the future but all the time he lives among the wreckage of consumer culture. His descriptions of an American town past its best-before date reminded me of the town in The Almost Moon by Alice Sebold.

On the other hand, the way in which the narrator describes his world using detailed lists of consumer items reminded me of American Psycho by Brett Easton Ellis. And another bit made me think of William Burroughs (the author of eg Naked Lunch). So Coupland is in some good company.

He can certainly turn a phrase, frequently adding modern concepts to describe something in an original way:

"an auto-mall rezoning both deleted and reformatted the landscape." (Ch 7)
"Monkey-suit cocktail parties with the fashion-android wives." (Ch 9)
"Monique and her libertarian sexual mores, while not exactly sluttish, have a kind of unclean tinge, like a pack of white sugar that has burst, and is overflowing onto a supermarket aisle." (Ch 36)
"Parisians visibly wincing with anticipation for their August holidays, like a man who has to pee badly." (Ch 22)
"unplugged computers dreaming of pie charts." (Ch 61)

I loved this book for the way the author set up the hippy vs consumer culture clash, enabling him to critique them both. His hero is a true Colin Wilson Outsider, being both seduced and alienated by a world that holds out so much false promise while delivering such a squalid reality.

He writes well too!



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The Almost Moon by Alice Sebold

The Almost Moon by Alice Sebold

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


"When all is said and done, killing my mother came easily." (first line)

The protagonist/ narrator (a life model at a local college) murders her mother at the end of the first chapter. From there until the end of the first quarter, she is alone with the body. The police get involved almost exactly at the half way mark; the narrator goes 'on the run' with about ten per cent of the story to go. The plot is therefore mostly a classic three act structure plot.

The book is written in the past tense, from a consistent first person PoV. There are repeated flashbacks, mainly to the narrator's childhood: a large part of this book is an exploration of her relationship with her mother, a woman whose wants and needs dominated and controlled the lives of her husband and daughter. There is a huge amount of sadness here, in the portrait of an American suburb at the end of its life, filled with old people at the end of theirs, and the particular horror of the stifling atmosphere inside this family home. It is a bleak portrait of failure and waste and futility and the situation of the narrator, who has spontaneously murdered a woman who would soon have died anyway, seems inescapably grim.

The book is written in the typical American style with huge amounts of detail which works beautifully when she is murdering her mother; it certainly adds verisimilitude though it can be a little exhausting.

Although this is much less of a page-turner than Sebold's The Lovely Bones (another book with a murderous hook) the depressing portrait of the world is compelling. February 2021; 290 pages



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Narrative Distance

This post uses ideas developed by Avtandil Chachibaia, Emma Darwin, and John Gardner.

In a movie there is a spectrum of shots available to a cameraman ranging from the panoramic world-view down to extreme close-up. Chachibaia suggests there are thirteen of these but the most important are the Long Shot, a "zoomed out view" often used at the start of a movie as an Establishing Shot designed to "capture 'the big picture'", the Medium Shot “used to display characters’ actions or objects acting on a character”, the Close-Up, and the Extreme Close-Up.

In the same way, a novelist can use different styles of narration. This is, of course, a spectrum but Gardner identifies a number of regions on this spectrum. It is important to realise that each of these can be done in the first or third person.

Remote
The narrator is in control. It feels objective. It is an economical way of imparting information. Importantly, it offers a context to the characters in the story.

Narrative
In cinematic terms, this might be done with a voice-over. The narrator is still in charge, giving information, but there is more detail. We can start exploring emotions and personalities.

Subjective
The narrator is diving deeper into the world, tackling individual characters and usually quoting their speech directly. This is the standard narrative distance for most fiction.

Inside the head
For the first time we can explore a character's thoughts, although they are usually reasonably coherent and treated as if they were reported speech. You can't do inside a head in a movie so the equivalent is a close-up of a face so the viewer can 'read' the emotions.

Stream of consciousness
Much more like true thought, this consists of fragmentary and jumbled mixture of thoughts and sensory perceptions.

References
Chachibaia, Avtandil "From Long Shot to Close Up: The 13 Camera Shots Everyone Should Know" available at https://blog.pond5.com/4676-from-long... accessed 20th February 2021
Darwin, Emma: "Psychic Distance: What is it?" available at https://emmadarwin.typepad.com/thisit... accessed 20th February 2021
Gardner John 1991 The Art of Fiction ISBN-10 : 0679734031