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lobelia321I have just finished re-reading Mr Wakefield's Crusade by Bernice Rubens.
• What I liked and disliked about the novel:
It was interesting to read this for the first time since I started posting fic and getting seriously into thinking about writing. The first thing that struck me was how badly written it was. She misuses verbs and prepositions ('I did not appraise him of it', 'I availed myself to it') and repeats words within the same paragraph -- and the repetition does not seem deliberate as it serves no rhetorical purpose.
So why did I love this book so much when I first read it in the 1980s? Two things: the intriguing mystery at the beginning, and the slashy ending. Within the first few pages, Mr W, the first-person protagonist, steals a letter from a dead man which causes him to suspect this dead stranger of having killed his (the stranger's) wife. He then embarks on a crusade to find the dead woman's relatives. But it is the initial mystery that grabs you.
And then it is the slashy endings. I was surprised to find that I could still remember entire sentences off by heart from that ending. Because in finding the solution to the mystery, Mr W also finds love, and it is man-to-man love, and of course, my heart thrilled to this (as, it appears, did Bernice Rubens's). Phrases such as 'my boyish tremblings', 'he did an extraordinary thing', 'his brown and beautiful thigh' stuck in my memory. And the happy ending is so very happily satisfying.
The ending is also rather funnily done, as the first-person unreliable narrator's voice continues on its unreliable way, even when the reader has already cottoned on to some of the truth.
• What I learned from the novel:
- Good pacing in the final dénouement. Not to hurry things on but to make them linger.
- Build up a gradual image of the man in readers' minds so that Mr W's final attraction to him seems to come out of the blue but actually doesn't and so is convincing. Going back, I can see how clues were strewn, incl. unobtrusive ones of very early on simply referring to the man's 'tall' stature. We are prepared to find this man attractive.
- Interweave swoonishness with humour.
- Clipped sentences in the climactic moment of anagnorisis (Aristotelian recognition: yes, I have been teaching this, and yes, I love to throw in a Greek noun every now and again). The importance of timing in the climax. The importance of not telling the readers what to think but let them catch their breath and go 'omg'. No need for the protagonists to do it. Their reactions can be quite muted.
- Tell the protagonist's reactions in the moments leading up to the climax. 'I was in a state of extreme excitement'. This is not showing. It is telling of the very effective kind. The word 'excitement' triggers excitement and anticipation in the reader (or it did in me). This activates the power of words to produce responses.
So, just as an aside to hammer on about one of my favourite hammering-on topics (yes, everybody who's heard it a million times before, just yawn on but indulge me during these times of institutional woe), it just goes to show that it's words that matter and not whether the words do any 'showing' or do any 'telling'. This is miring the discussion in Platonic niceties (Plato rewrote the opening of Homer's Iliad because for him there was too much 'showing', i.e. mimesis, i.e. dialogue, and he found this totally inappropriate for something that was not played on the stage. I borrowed Plato's Republic last week in order to read up on this. It's nice to know that an authority like Plato was all for 'telling'; it puts the boot in the more modest lights of Mr Percy Lubbock who, in the 1920s, coined the whole 'show vs tell' red herring). I learned this when writing Half-time, my fun football fic of this summer. I actually scribbled words I wanted in there and that conveyed the atmosphere I wanted in the margins of my text, and then worked them in. I like this as a strategy; I may try this again. For the follow-on football fic of anger and hate, Nemesis (Rooney/C. Ronaldo) I had a bunch of phrases from 'I hate Cristiano Ronaldo the fucking diver' youtube comments, and they were the words that fuelled the hate power of that fic. So it's a strategy that's worked well for me in the past.
• What I liked and disliked about the novel:
It was interesting to read this for the first time since I started posting fic and getting seriously into thinking about writing. The first thing that struck me was how badly written it was. She misuses verbs and prepositions ('I did not appraise him of it', 'I availed myself to it') and repeats words within the same paragraph -- and the repetition does not seem deliberate as it serves no rhetorical purpose.
So why did I love this book so much when I first read it in the 1980s? Two things: the intriguing mystery at the beginning, and the slashy ending. Within the first few pages, Mr W, the first-person protagonist, steals a letter from a dead man which causes him to suspect this dead stranger of having killed his (the stranger's) wife. He then embarks on a crusade to find the dead woman's relatives. But it is the initial mystery that grabs you.
And then it is the slashy endings. I was surprised to find that I could still remember entire sentences off by heart from that ending. Because in finding the solution to the mystery, Mr W also finds love, and it is man-to-man love, and of course, my heart thrilled to this (as, it appears, did Bernice Rubens's). Phrases such as 'my boyish tremblings', 'he did an extraordinary thing', 'his brown and beautiful thigh' stuck in my memory. And the happy ending is so very happily satisfying.
The ending is also rather funnily done, as the first-person unreliable narrator's voice continues on its unreliable way, even when the reader has already cottoned on to some of the truth.
• What I learned from the novel:
- Good pacing in the final dénouement. Not to hurry things on but to make them linger.
- Build up a gradual image of the man in readers' minds so that Mr W's final attraction to him seems to come out of the blue but actually doesn't and so is convincing. Going back, I can see how clues were strewn, incl. unobtrusive ones of very early on simply referring to the man's 'tall' stature. We are prepared to find this man attractive.
- Interweave swoonishness with humour.
- Clipped sentences in the climactic moment of anagnorisis (Aristotelian recognition: yes, I have been teaching this, and yes, I love to throw in a Greek noun every now and again). The importance of timing in the climax. The importance of not telling the readers what to think but let them catch their breath and go 'omg'. No need for the protagonists to do it. Their reactions can be quite muted.
- Tell the protagonist's reactions in the moments leading up to the climax. 'I was in a state of extreme excitement'. This is not showing. It is telling of the very effective kind. The word 'excitement' triggers excitement and anticipation in the reader (or it did in me). This activates the power of words to produce responses.
So, just as an aside to hammer on about one of my favourite hammering-on topics (yes, everybody who's heard it a million times before, just yawn on but indulge me during these times of institutional woe), it just goes to show that it's words that matter and not whether the words do any 'showing' or do any 'telling'. This is miring the discussion in Platonic niceties (Plato rewrote the opening of Homer's Iliad because for him there was too much 'showing', i.e. mimesis, i.e. dialogue, and he found this totally inappropriate for something that was not played on the stage. I borrowed Plato's Republic last week in order to read up on this. It's nice to know that an authority like Plato was all for 'telling'; it puts the boot in the more modest lights of Mr Percy Lubbock who, in the 1920s, coined the whole 'show vs tell' red herring). I learned this when writing Half-time, my fun football fic of this summer. I actually scribbled words I wanted in there and that conveyed the atmosphere I wanted in the margins of my text, and then worked them in. I like this as a strategy; I may try this again. For the follow-on football fic of anger and hate, Nemesis (Rooney/C. Ronaldo) I had a bunch of phrases from 'I hate Cristiano Ronaldo the fucking diver' youtube comments, and they were the words that fuelled the hate power of that fic. So it's a strategy that's worked well for me in the past.