why i love david mitchell

[lobelia321]

Nuggets like this thrown into a scene (quotes from Black Swan Green:

"Fabulous to earn your stamp of approval, Uncle Brian."

A cow of an awkward pause mooed.

"Hurrah!" Uncle Brian scoffed. "She insists on the last word."

I love the madcap play with imagery of the cow of an awkward pause mooing. Also, it pulled me up short; it was a nick in the narrative and made me pay attention to the words. I read it around three times and laughed in inward delight. It is also ingenious because it is the narrator's voice, intruding so effortlessly and wonderfully. The 'I' character in this story is a 13-year old boy who would not use metaphorical language like this; he also wouldn't be able to report other characters' dialogue so word-for-word accurately, either, of course, but we notice that less because it is more of a literary convention.

Also this:

Dad's Rover 3500 lives in one garage, but Mum usually parks her Datsun Cherry on the drive, so the second garage is spare. The bikes live along one wall. Dad's tools live in neat racks above his workbench. Potatoes live in a bottomless sack. The spare garage is sheltered, even on blowy days like today. ...

Now what I want to draw attention to is the bottomless sack. This is pure delight in word play. There is the repetition of 'lives in' and the potatoes, the kind of thing to be found in this space but the 'bottomless sack' is imported from a different kind of metaphor, and I just love the deadpan introduction of it here.


I realised that I have sometimes written like this, and then I remembered that reading Number9Dream just predates my introduction to fanfic and that when I first started writing fic, I would sometimes read the first page of that novel again to get a grip on the kind of thing I wanted to be doing. I aspire to that ease of metaphor and wit. And the brilliance at sketching in even 'flat' characters as rounded, located and, especially, very nuancedly classed - fantastic dialogues. The next thing I want to learn is how to plot, but that I can only learn once having read the entire book because plot works backwards -- it is only when you've read the last line, that the narrative falls into place retroactively and the beauty of the pattern becomes apparent.