Ed Cooke's Blog
August 7, 2024
April 11, 2017
Better to travel hopefully
When I get to the end of a book, I'm always surprised how much of it I've already forgotten.
This is especially the case with spy thrillers and whodunnits, where long chains of incidents are used to keep the plot moving and never referred to again once they've achieved their immediate purpose: to find the next clue, interrogate the next suspect. In these genres the skilled reader probably doesn't even try to remember everything, since most of it will turn out to be red herrings.
Incidents in fiction are chosen not just because of what is happening, as in action films, but because of what might happen next.
Once I finish reading a book, I find it hard to recreate this sense of expectation, or even to remember what I thought might happen but didn't. Everybody is wise after the event, even me.
So I thought it might be interesting to record some of the expectations that have arisen in books I haven't yet finished, or put down for long periods.
Our first example is Bad Company. I put this one down and only picked it up again to read on the train. What were my expectations around the halfway point? Captured heroine + more books in the series = heroine escapes. Despite a few feints in this direction, ultimately captors release heroine. Much less fun, and by the same token Anna's friends' effort to locate her also turns out to have been mostly a waste of time, structured as interviews with a string of disposable characters. It's hard to raise any expectations using this framework.
Worse, in retrospect Anna turns out to have been rather shrewish towards the girl she was imprisoned with, who is only fourteen. My expectation here was that young Verity might prove plucky in an escape attempt—always watch the quiet ones. Is Verity being set up to grow into a sidekick in future adventures? It doesn't seem so, since her parents give Anna the brush-off at the end.
The book feels like a string of the half-plots TV writers use to fill up an episode. One scene for the setup, another for the resolution and little in the middle except the passage of time via other threads. Anna is vaguely unhappy with her American boyfriend, doesn't think about him much during her incarceration and breaks up with him to no-one's disappointment upon her release. Inconclusive.
I've yet to finish War for the Oaks. This seems to be a book people get through very quickly. By the midpoint, we're behind the heroine all the way, as she struggles with highly realistic dating and career woes, no less relevant thirty years on.
The trade-off is that the world of Faerie has hardly been built at all. There must be some deeper reason why Eddi's presence is needed on the battlefield, but the battle scenes are much less compellingly drawn than the account of love and friendship and playing in a band.
Contemporary readers might have been more in the dark about the identity of Eddi's new lover Willie Silver (paging Dr. Freud…). Post-Twilight, we know that a love triangle is being set up between the phouka (a downmarket werewolf) and Willie, which makes Willie… a vampire? No, apparently he's a knight among the Folk. So the stage is set for Eddi to have to choose between a rich but flighty lover and a poor, worthy and utterly dependable lad.
Why should either of them care about her? For 150 pages, Eddi's decisions have taken the form: this or not this? Either she takes what she's given and likes it, or she rejects it, folds her arms and waits for somebody to make her another offer. Any more of that will turn her into an irredeemable wet mess.
Let's hope this is all part of her arc, and she takes charge of her own destiny before the end. If so, the lesson is to design a character flaw into the structure of a novel, say nothing about it, let it ride, make the reader worry.
What the reader worries about, the reader remembers.
This is especially the case with spy thrillers and whodunnits, where long chains of incidents are used to keep the plot moving and never referred to again once they've achieved their immediate purpose: to find the next clue, interrogate the next suspect. In these genres the skilled reader probably doesn't even try to remember everything, since most of it will turn out to be red herrings.
Incidents in fiction are chosen not just because of what is happening, as in action films, but because of what might happen next.
Once I finish reading a book, I find it hard to recreate this sense of expectation, or even to remember what I thought might happen but didn't. Everybody is wise after the event, even me.
So I thought it might be interesting to record some of the expectations that have arisen in books I haven't yet finished, or put down for long periods.
Our first example is Bad Company. I put this one down and only picked it up again to read on the train. What were my expectations around the halfway point? Captured heroine + more books in the series = heroine escapes. Despite a few feints in this direction, ultimately captors release heroine. Much less fun, and by the same token Anna's friends' effort to locate her also turns out to have been mostly a waste of time, structured as interviews with a string of disposable characters. It's hard to raise any expectations using this framework.
Worse, in retrospect Anna turns out to have been rather shrewish towards the girl she was imprisoned with, who is only fourteen. My expectation here was that young Verity might prove plucky in an escape attempt—always watch the quiet ones. Is Verity being set up to grow into a sidekick in future adventures? It doesn't seem so, since her parents give Anna the brush-off at the end.
The book feels like a string of the half-plots TV writers use to fill up an episode. One scene for the setup, another for the resolution and little in the middle except the passage of time via other threads. Anna is vaguely unhappy with her American boyfriend, doesn't think about him much during her incarceration and breaks up with him to no-one's disappointment upon her release. Inconclusive.
I've yet to finish War for the Oaks. This seems to be a book people get through very quickly. By the midpoint, we're behind the heroine all the way, as she struggles with highly realistic dating and career woes, no less relevant thirty years on.
The trade-off is that the world of Faerie has hardly been built at all. There must be some deeper reason why Eddi's presence is needed on the battlefield, but the battle scenes are much less compellingly drawn than the account of love and friendship and playing in a band.
Contemporary readers might have been more in the dark about the identity of Eddi's new lover Willie Silver (paging Dr. Freud…). Post-Twilight, we know that a love triangle is being set up between the phouka (a downmarket werewolf) and Willie, which makes Willie… a vampire? No, apparently he's a knight among the Folk. So the stage is set for Eddi to have to choose between a rich but flighty lover and a poor, worthy and utterly dependable lad.
Why should either of them care about her? For 150 pages, Eddi's decisions have taken the form: this or not this? Either she takes what she's given and likes it, or she rejects it, folds her arms and waits for somebody to make her another offer. Any more of that will turn her into an irredeemable wet mess.
Let's hope this is all part of her arc, and she takes charge of her own destiny before the end. If so, the lesson is to design a character flaw into the structure of a novel, say nothing about it, let it ride, make the reader worry.
What the reader worries about, the reader remembers.
