Story structure is hard work

The last couple of months...

I've been spending what writing time I have on my fourth children's fantasy, so blogging has gone a bit on the back-burner.

The biggest difficulty with this latest book is not only that I'm doing it on my own without the help of my usual co-writer, but that for ages there was a big hole (and I'm talking ginormous) where there should have been the bulk of the story.

The First Act, as you might call it, was mostly fine. In fact it was fine through versions 1, 2 and 3 each of which took a different tack, with a different main character as the focus.

But the Second Act? So so. And the Third? Practically non-existent, except that I had a minuscule idea about how it would finish. Probably.

Because structure is always a bugbear for me, I have to work really hard at it, and I have a brain that says, Nah, let's just give up on that for today, when I've only just sat down to write.

So what made the difference? 


I enlisted some help. First I went back to a book written by Libbie Hawker - Take Off Your Pants! - which I'd read before and hadn't felt was quite as helpful as I'd hoped. However, I persisted with it this time, since it's primarily about structuring, and made some real progress.

Hawker doesn't work to a three act structure particularly; it took me a while to realise that she's focusing on character arc as her main structural approach. Nevertheless it proved useful, because it made me focus on where my main character was going to go as she journeyed through the book.

Then I turned to an old favourite: Blake Snyder's Save the Cat, with its fifteen 'beats' that point out the way in which many movies (and a number of novels) are structured to give the viewer/reader the greatest satisfaction.

Snyder is more of a three act structure man, which is fine. I needed that in conjunction with Hawker's character arc approach.

Now the thing is...

Both these books helped enormously this time round - aided by the fact that I was determined I wasn't going to be beat.

But I need to say that neither of them quite mention the fact that you really have to know quite a lot about your story before you try to work out things like character arcs and fifteen beats.

In spite of the way it reads in the books, you can't actually start out by sitting down and just doing a synopsis. At least I can't. I have to have piles of stuff written in order to know who the characters are, and in order to figure out at least something of what the story is actually about.

Consequently I now have a large bunch of separate files: various incomplete drafts, piles and piles of notes (to the point that no matter how hard I try I can't quite get them in any sort of order) and all sorts of notes on top of notes. What this process does is give me ideas enough to move forward on a synopsis. It stops me from believing that what I've written first time round is going to be enough, and that I need to keep digging deeper and deeper and asking Why until I'm blue in the face.

One result has been that the two main male characters in version one became one main male character in version two who eventually became the sidekick to the female main character - in the current version. Other characters came and went; whole scenes ended up in the bottom of the pile; fantastic plot moments were abandoned.

And then came Janice Hardy...

I pulled together the Hawker and Snyder synopses (such as they were, still incomplete). And then discovered a third book which I hadn't read before: Janice Hardy's Plotting Your Novel [also published as Planning Your Novel].

Hardy provides us with a series of workshops, taking you right back to the beginning, the place where I'd been months before when I was writing drafts and notes galore. You can skip some of the workshops, or you can - as I did - force yourself to answer the questions she provides, and see if there are other things that you should consider. (If it sounds like hard work, it is, but it was also satisfying because of the sense of progress.)

So now I had three 'assistants' on the case, and in spite of my brain threatening overload, I also had an increased sense of where the story was going. And wonder of wonders, as I pulled the various synopses together, I began to see that big hole that had been such a bugbear filling up at last with real content.

The job isn't finished yet. But I now have a real sense that completing a decent synopsis is possible. And once that's on the page, the real - and enjoyable - part of the writing can begin.

To be continued...

Review Tales reviews The Disenchanted Wizard

Another review of The Disenchanted Wizard, this time by Jeyran Main, on her blog, Review Tales.  Here's an extract from it:

This children’s book has everything suitable to engage and intrigue the young mind. It is full of action, thrills, educational and positive messages, as well as the fun and exciting adventure one normally looks for in a tale.

The plot and the characters were very well aligned together, eliminating any loopholes or questionable events. The paragraphs and the layout of the work were in good standing and the pace of the story was not fast or slow enough to challenge the young mind. I believe this book will be a great addition to the series and I look forward to reading more from this author.

I'm pleased to see that the we'd eliminated loopholes with this book: that was one of the reasons it took so long to write. Every time we'd fix something, something else would fall over!

How to lose your reader and/or your viewer

My wife and I watched the first half of a movie the other night: Small Crimes, which is streaming on Netflix. It's based on a book by Dave Zeltserman which gets mostly rave reviews on Goodreads. (Usually with Goodreads, I find, you have to ignore half the positive reviews in order to get a real balance of views on a book, but that's by the by.) 

So it sounds like the book is worth reading, if you're into noir, and unreliable narrators, and subtle characterisation. The movie has a reasonable amount of noir, but beyond that - and you have to bear in mind I only watched half of it - it treats its viewer very badly. How so? By giving him or her so few clues as to what's going on that the viewer can barely keep up. 

An ex-cop, Joe Denton, who's just leaving gaol at the start, seems a bit hard done by. In the opening scene a prison chaplain empathises with him, and you think: Okay, let's hope it goes well out there for him. But then there's a scene with a detective who abuses him verbally, before some other guy (a D.A, we eventually figure out) walks in and seems to be on Joe's side. Except that in the next scene it's the cop who's on his side - though with some provisos - and in a later scene the DA not only turns out to be one of his victims from the past, but is definitely not on his side. 

And then there's a scene where the main character goes to visit an old Mafia guy who's on his deathbed. After some pleasantries, Joe tries to suffocate him - as you do - until interrupted by the old man's nurse. And then not long after he's chatting with the nurse in a coffee bar - until some stranger comes along and spits in his food. No explanations are given for any of this, or why he gets beaten up outside the old man's house, or why a young girl picks him up and traps him into yet another beating. 

What's this got to do with an author losing his reader? I'm guessing that Zeltserman made a better fist of explaining things in his book. I hope so. Although many authors currently take the line that not introducing anyone in a story is a great idea (movies do it too), and that the reader should expect the book to be like a cryptic crossword, where nothing makes sense until twenty pages in. If you're lucky. 

I enjoy cryptic crosswords, frustrating as they can be. I don't mind books where I have to figure some things out. But I do get a bit peeved when the author is so concerned to hide information that you have to read and read...and read...before you understand who's doing what, when and why.

Last year I read I'm Thinking of Ending Things. By the time I had finished it (which was an achievement in itself), I was wishing the author had thought of ending the book long before he published it. I wrote on Goodreads at the time: 

I thought at first maybe I'd been a bit dense about the thriller aspect of this book, until I had a look at the reviews on Goodreads to see what other people thought. The majority thought it was rubbish...not even well-written rubbish. The story has long sagging bits where nothing is really happening. It attempts to make us feel scared and creeped out but pretty much fails because what the main character does is so stupid you can't believe she'd do it. The other character isn't any better. There are odd bit-players floating in and out giving strange warnings, and probably if I went back and re-read it some of these might make sense. Worse, by 3/4 of the way through you've guessed what's going on, pretty much (at least as far as it's possible to tell what the heck is going on), and from then on it's a matter of the author trying to maintain a scary story that hasn't really ever been scary in the first place. 

It was fine that the author in this case hid a major plot point from us; that was meant to be the surprise. But pages with someone else's voice on them tossed in at random and chapters in which the woman narrator rambles on about stuff we're not even sure happened or is happening just makes the reader tired. Especially when you have to keep asking Why, Why, Why?

I understand perfectly that an author has to reveal the secrets behind the story bit by bit, and that this gives the readers surprises and a reason for wanting to read on. This is a major part of structuring a story. But making everything incomprehensible is testing your reader's endurance and patience to no good end, as far as I can see. 

I review quite a few books in a year, and increasingly I'm refusing to read past a certain point in the book if I have no idea what's going on and if the author doesn't seem to want to tell me. I don't mean after a chapter, but after fifty or a hundred pages. Basically by that time he or she has had their chance. If they want to keep making it difficult for me, it's very probable I won't be reading any more of their books. Which could be a pity. 

So, in summary: if you want to grip your reader's attention - and keep on gripping it - let them have enough information early on to know who's who, and where and when things are set and something of what this story is going to be about. This doesn't mean going back to the old approach of laying everything out as though the reader was some dolt - exposition is best scattered throughout the story - but it does mean offering your reader a chance to get involved, because they have some idea of what's at stake in the story.

If it's good enough for an expensive TV series

What I like about writing music is that you don't need to work out a plot. Of course you need some structure, but you don't need all the endless tinkering with action A so that it fits in with action B and so that it doesn't unravel action C, or leave unexplained loose-ends.

I'm still trying to finish The Disenchanted Wizard, which may soon be renamed The Disenchanted Author (though that doesn't have quite the same ring about it). I've probably said before in these blog posts that I always knew, somehow, that this would be a complicated story. I didn't know that it would be a story that required the author to lose much more of his hair than is compatible with keeping warm on top. My co-author/editor/jack-of-all-trades person keeps finding that having done something here causes problems there. I'm at the stage where I'd quite happily drive ahead and hope no one notices, but she doesn't work that way.

A typical publicity shot from Fortitude: note how
serious everyone looks. And cold. 

Apropos of that we've watched the first three episodes of Fortitude, a TV mystery series set on an island off the mainland of Iceland. The scenery is magnificent, especially if you like everything to be white or gray, and the cast are top notch. But even they must have some moments of bewilderment in regard to plot holes.

As so often happens with TV series, or even movies, you wonder why no one bothered to tidy up things that were left hanging. For instance, in Fortitude, a girl goes missing at one point early on. We weren't even sure which girl this was. It looked as though it might have been a child, because the story went from this girl getting her supplies from the supermarket pretty much onto what seemed to be a full-scale hunt for the missing person. Except that it wasn't the little girl, we eventually discovered (about an episode or two later). It was a woman, and she wasn't really missing anyway.

But what was weird about all this was the big missing-person-woman-hunt that was shown in one scene, with the main police character telling everyone 'We're paid to do this work, but you're not, so don't take risks.' Or something along those lines. People headed off with guns (because there are polar bears at large on this island - the first episode began with some poor fellow being eaten by one; yuk) and that was the last we heard about the woman-hunt. Next thing the police are back in their warm headquarters and the populace is back to their daily tasks, and the woman is apparently still missing but everyone seems to have forgotten this.

In another scene, the same policeman (who's a very dubious, and bullying, character) helicopters up the glacier with the search and rescue bloke (who spends more time making a fool of himself with a woman who isn't his wife than doing any search and rescue) in order to confront a couple of arrogant guys who've gone up there on snow-enabled-motorcycle-thingees. They confront them all right; the policeman takes the arrogant guy's handgun, leaves him his rifle (in case of polar bears, of course, because a handgun won't do any damage to a polar bear) and leaves them there on the glacier. Umm?

The handgun is then locked in a metal drawer in the policeman's office, and forgotten about. Until the arrogant guy turns up when everyone is conveniently out of the police station (there are at least four police people working there), breaks open the drawer (how he knows the gun is in there is something the writer never tells us), takes his gun and is off. The policeman never notices that his drawer has been broken into.

So with these sorts of things happening in highly expensive TV series why should bother me or my compatriot what happens to the plot holes in my book, which is basically costing nothing but my free time? I sometimes wonder.

*******
Update, 21.8.16 I decided to give up watching the rest of the series (we were about 2/3 of the way through) last night because it had become increasingly violent and sadistic. Fortitude is like hell on earth: brutality is the order of the day, along with ambiguous behaviour, adultery, rape, you name it. This is apart from the spooky stuff as a result of which two violent murders take place by people apparently under the influence of - something. I guess it's revealed eventually what's behind all this, but I don't think I can hang on to find out. I had a particularly nasty nightmare last night. No doubt Fortitude isn't entirely to blame, but I'm not going to feed the flames any further...!

Dance to the Music of Time

I've been reading A Buyer's Market over the weekend. It's the second book in Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time, that astonishing twelve-book series produced over twenty-four years. 

Wonderful writing, though seemingly without any kind of plot. So how does Powell keep the interest up? Sheer word power, pulling us along by making us willing to hear a very interesting person writing about his experiences and the people he meets. Apparently a number of things do come together in a kind of plot in the last three books, but that’s quite some way down the track yet. 

Though it’s helpful to have read the first book, which I have done but can’t remember in much detail, I don’t think it’s essential. By reading on Kindle I can at least refer back and see which characters are referenced in the first book. It doesn’t seem to make much difference really. Once you understand that the books are primarily about four main characters, then all the other stuff is secondary. The way people come alive in these books is marvelous. 

The book is compared by a number of people on Goodreads to Proust’s famous book (variously entitled in English as Remembrance of Things Past or In Search of Lost Time; some prefer Proust, some Powell, some like both. Whatever the case, the vividness of the world created here is extraordinary. 

How not to plot a story

I know that European filmmakers have long seen themselves as anti-story, anti-plot and the like, and sometimes this has produced some wonderful 'art' movies ('art' here meaning the film successfully does its own thing regardless of the rules of storytelling). More frequently it produces films that meander, that lose the plot at the very moment they should be maintaining the plot and that, as a result, lose their audiences.

Two such movies in the last week: one starring Michael Caine and Clémence Poésy in a film set in Paris. The other, also French, is about a girl who wanted to become a great pianist, was foiled, and then takes revenge. More on this later.

There will be spoilers...

The Michael Caine movie is called Mr Morgan's Last Love, though you may also find it listed simply as Last Love. It concerns an American philosophy professor, Matthew Morgan - Caine, with a varying American accent - whose wife died a couple of years ago. He still talks to her, and seems to have been deeply in love with her; in fact he was so in love with her that his two children, now adults, suffered from neglect. Apparently. He spends his days in a lonely state, refusing to learn even the most basic French, and hating any change to his routine.

Of course Pauline (Poésy) comes along. She's a young dance school teacher, and Matthew falls in love with her, but very quietly, almost trying to avoid saying what he's feeling. She accepts him as he is, just as a friend. When he accidentally (?) overdoses on his sleeping tablets and winds up in hospital, his two American children, Miles and Karen, turn up (Justin Kirk and Gillian Anderson - she has a very brief time in the film, regrettably). Miles is perpetually angry - he's the one who's felt most neglected by his father as a child - and furthermore, his own marriage has just gone down the tubes, though he has custody of his young son.

The usual argy bargy ensues, the children claiming that Pauline is a bimbo about to take away everything their father owns - which, of course, is rightfully theirs. (Poésy as a bimbo? Hardly.) So far, all fairly predictable. But then the writer/director, Sandra Nettleback, gets herself into a plot-hole, and never quite makes it out. Don't read further if you want to watch this movie. 

Miles, surprisingly, falls in love with Pauline. Yup. Which totally wipes out Pauline's integrity as a character. Miles and his dad have a reconciliation, which is good, but it's not good in terms of what's just happened. Matthew commits suicide. Sorry? (Incidentally, this film is billed as comedy and drama on IMDB.) This awful crunching of gears comes as a result of the thing being forced into a corner by the writer. Did she think that the story needed a bit of pepping up at the end? Did she write herself into a corner because she didn't know how the Matthew/Pauline relationship could work? Who knows. The movie got made, and it leaves an odd taste in the mouth.

Caine, incidentally, is very good, as are the two main women - Anderson strides all over the place and should have been given a lot more screen time. Perhaps it would have been better to have made her the main third character, instead of the dull and boring Miles. She would have dealt properly to Caine and Poésy's situation. She certainly livens up what is often a quite slow movie.

The other movie is The Page Turner. It's a tale of revenge, a perfectly acceptable genre, even if we do wind up on the side of the one doing the revenge.

The main character of The Page Turner (or La Tourneuse de Pages)  is Mélanie (played with a cold-eyed sweetness by Déborah François). As a child she goes in for an exam in order to enter some music academy. Rather remarkably (from a musician's point of view) she's playing a fairly straightforward piece, one that might get her through a grade in Trinity College exams, but probably wouldn't get her into an academy. She has five examiners. Yup, five. One of them is a famous concert pianist. Ariane - played by Catherine Frot - she begins with arrogance, but later has an increasingly bemused look about her, which may not be surprising, given what her character goes through. Ariane, in an extraordinary piece of plot nonsense, allows another parent into the room while Mélanie is playing, and signs an autograph. It puts Mélanie off. As one reviewer said, 'If something as little as that puts her off, she probably shouldn't be going to the academy anyway.'

Mélanie goes home, shuts up the piano, locks it and never plays again. Hmm. Flash forward a few years and she gets an intern's job in a law firm. Hang on! The lawyer in charge just happens to be the husband of Ariane. Does Mélanie know that when she applies for the job? It's not clear, but she then offers to look after the lawyer's son during the holidays - someone else couldn't do the job. Two coincidences in a row. Okay...passable.

Mélanie recognises Ariane; Ariane never, never, never during the course of the film recognises Mélanie. Nor does Mélanie ever tell her who she is. Consequently Ariane, from now on, presumably wonders why this cold-eyed young woman seems to be doing some very odd things.

Mélanie ingratiates herself into the household: she gets on with the young boy, who also plays piano. She not only offers to turn pages for Ariane at a concert that's coming up, she makes herself indispensable. Ariane has been the victim of a hit and run accident some time before, and is 'fragile' according to her husband. Fragile is putting it mildly. She can barely hold herself together. Furthermore, she starts touching Ariane in what can only be described as in an oddly inappropriate way. Yes, we know what the French are like, but this is a bit over the top. Ariane, at first confused, responds, although it's all low-key.

All goes well at the concert. Okay, you think - because there is a deal of suspense being set up - the next concert will be the one when she doesn't turn the page at the right moment, and laughs maniacally - as an old friend of mine used to say - at her employer's distress. But there isn't a next concert, What were the writers thinking?. Instead there's an audition for an American, presumably a promoter of some sort. No audience, but him, and the agent.

What does Mélanie do? As the audition is about to start she just wanders off somewhere, and can't be found. Ariane makes an absolute hash of playing (even though another page turner is brought in), and the American walks out in disgust. And not surprisingly either: Ariane's playing is ridiculously awful; no career pianist would make such a mess of things however fragile they were. Plainly the director thought if it wasn't obvious to a non-musical audience that Ariane was making mistakes, then the scene wouldn't work.

But the scene doesn't work because the Page Turner isn't there! Surely this was a scene in which Mélanie should have once again done her duty effectively, and built up the tension still further. Instead Ariane, by now somewhat besotted with her, just lets her off with a 'sorry.'  Good grief.  Ariane is super fragile, don't forget.

Where is the big climax in a concert hall full of people, with the will-she-won't-she-turn-the-page scene? The scene where Ariane is ruined for life? It could be done so simply: turning a page at the wrong moment (as anyone who's done it knows) can be seen as an accident. It doesn't have to be deliberate. There's the opportunity in the film for it to be seen as an accident by the concert audience, but deliberate by Mélanie, and yet this scene never happens. 

Instead, a couple of other things that have been set up, things that are secondary to the main revenge plot, work themselves out in the last scene, and Mélanie walks off into the sunrise. (She'd got up early that morning.) Ariane and her family are in a mess, but not one of them knows why this invaluable young girl has done what she's done. HUH?

Yes, I know we can become too used to a plot working out according to the normal lines. But an audience also needs to see logic and suspense building to a certain point - think The Man Who Knew Too Much with Doris Day and James Stewart, where no item of suspense is missing, and where even though the audience knows how it will work out, they\re still kept guessing till the last minute. Audience expectation is a great deal of what makes a suspense movie work. Denis Dercourt (again, a writer/director) builds up the tension well, with several suspicious scenes (the discussion of how to kill a chicken, the boy being nearly drowned but it being taken as a joke) but none of these come to anything. At the end we're left with a plot that picks up all the wrong pieces and leaves behind the vital ingredients.

Why am I making such a fuss? Because my co-writer and I are currently working on a very difficult story, the third children's book we've written in the last couple of years. All the bits of the plot have to fit neatly, or something else will fall apart. We know how difficult and frustrating it is to make a plot work, and yet at the end of the day it's very satisfying for the reader to see things click into place. What's the point of building up the suspense if you're going to let it all dissipate?

Dercourt has the directorial touch to have made a suspenseful movie that would build to a solid climax. Instead he lets himself down with an ill-plotted script. Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian called this film 'a treat for lovers of intelligent cinema.' Plainly I'm not intelligent enough.

Doing the nanowrimo

At the beginning of the month I suddenly decided to take up the National Novel Writing Month challenge, normally abbreviated to nanowrimo, an abbreviation I have to look up every time because I can't remember it.

For those who don't know about this challenge, the idea is that you write what is basically the draft of a 50,000 word novel from the 1st to 30th of November (inclusive). That's the goal. I'm sure a lot of people start off intending to get there, and wind up some 1000s of words short. Or give up.

Having started I decided I'd be content with doing a thousand words a day, since that's about the length of my two previous children's novels. But now that I'm close to the finishing mark, with 34845 words in the can, I'm inclined to want to get to the 50,000 word mark just to prove I can do it. Tonight has been a real slog; the characters have no idea how they're going to get past the latest problem (well, actually it's a problem that's been looming for a while because I wrote a section the other day that came much later in the story, and now I'm trying to work out how we got there.)

This has been a common issue throughout the book. Because you're not supposed to plan or do a structure in advance, you're writing blind, and while this means things arrive out of the blue that you wouldn't have otherwise thought of, it also means you put your characters in situations they struggle to work their way out of. It doesn't help that two of the characters seem to be intermingling, and we're never quite sure which one is which. (By 'we' I mean 'me', of course.)

The story is a kind of prequel to the other two books I've published this year, Grimhilda! and The Blood Secret. And that's also meant that there has to be a scene in it in which two of the characters (a married couple) wind up permanently attached to each other - attached in the literal sense, unable to separate themselves. Quite why this should happen, how it's going to happen, and what will be the consequences, is all in the future at this point.

Ah well.

Wodehouse - and deaths in books

I became a fan of P G Wodehouse's books when I was still in my teens, and have read most of the ones I have on my shelves.  I'd never read French Leave, and since it had been sitting on my shelves since I got it at a sale somewhere - it has Rental stamped inside the front cover in two places - and since I have marked it with a code that I used when I was still in the aforesaid teens, that sale must have occurred a long time ago.

I'd thought it was one of his later books, but the title page says it was published in 1955- Wikipedia, curiously, insists it came out in 1956 - which makes it about two-thirds of the way through his very large canon.   Because I thought it was one of his later books, I assumed that was why it seemed a bit weak in places.  The plotting is intricate, and yet there are some very loose ends (what does happen to the dossier Quibolle, for instance?).  The metaphors are superb in many places and unusually clichéd in others.  It has some slow patches, and some brilliant ones - and for some reason, at the end of chapter 11, we skip nine months, arrive in chapter 12 and discover that most of the cast have been ditched (no matter at what point they were still trying to unravel themselves from the plot) and everything has been sorted out for a very small number of the main actors.  Having expected a good deal of unravelling, it's surprising to find almost none.

It takes some time to figure out who the main two lovers are (they survive into chapter 12, at least), since a variety of other characters get plenty of room to show off their nonsense.  There's a typical Aunt - mostly known as Mrs Pegler, but also by two or three other names - but she's dismissed around chapter 10 after making her presence seriously felt throughout most of the story.  It's a puzzle how she suddenly loses all her fire.  There's the hero's father, a Frenchman with a ridiculous title (Marquis de Maufringneuse et Valerie-Moberanne), who was Mrs Pegler's husband at one point; his first appearance is a delight, in which he deals with the boredom of an office job, and he has several funny scenes.  There is the French policeman, a Commissaire, who is always behind the eight ball because he knows no English and refuses to learn any.  In fact, some of the best parts of the book include scenes in which two people are talking to each other in two different languages without either having much idea what the other is talking about.  But Wodehouse also manages to make the scenes in which people are speaking the same language amusing, especially those which include only French characters.  There are a bunch of other characters, some of whom (the young ones in particular) are virtually indistinguishable, even though they seem vital to the plot.   

Looking back on it, and having got over the shock of it seeming to end so suddenly, I'm more in favour of it than not.  There are much better Wodehouse books, but this one obviously pleases a vast number of his fans, so why should I knock it any further?

And talking of shock endings: the last scene of the 2012 Christmas special of Downton Abbey Iwhich we watched last night) came across to me as inconsiderately brutal.  Julian Fellowes, the writer, had already killed off a major character in the middle of the 2012 season.  Killing off yet another seemed arbitrary and only done for the sake of making people miserable.  Yes, it leaves lots of questions to be answered, which is no doubt part of the reason for doing what he did, but the death came out of nowhere, in the dramatic sense, and damaged what had been an otherwise interesting episode.

I find such deaths can put me right off a story: I remember reading A J Cronin's Hatter's Castle in which the young man who makes one of the main characters pregnant is killed in a train crash not long after.  I put the book down, unable to read any further.  He hadn't done anything to justify such a death.  In the second book of Philip Pullman's trilogy His Dark Materials, (The Subtle Knife) the boy has finally met his father, who's been missing up until now.  Towards the end of the book, the father is killed in what seemed to me at the time to be a quite off-hand fashion.  I almost stopped reading the trilogy at that point, so angered was I by what had happened.  I'm sure authors take the deaths of their characters seriously - there's usually a reason for what they do - but such seemingly random deaths can affect their readers in ways the authors never intended.  Perhaps I get too emotionally involved with characters, but I suspect I'm not the only one.  After all, stories are intended to affect our emotions.

Monsoon Wedding

I mentioned this movie quite some time ago, but didn't say very much about it. There was a DVD of it in the library the other day when I was there, so I picked it up to have another look at it.
A good deal of it came back to me, but I'd virtually forgotten the strange, beanpole of a man who's the 'event organiser' (played by Vijay Raaz). His story is treated in the way Shakespeare used to treat his humorous, down-to-earth comics: as counterpoints to the main play. Here, in a setting that's nearly all middle-class and full of extravagance, we have a man who's also well-off, but who's impoverished in something that matters: his heart. His mother has been nagging him for years to find a wife and give her grandchildren, but whether because he hasn't bothered or just hasn't found the right person, we don't know. Anyway, within ten minutes of the movie's beginning, he's fallen head over heels in love with the servant of the house. And she with him - although she manages to hide it rather more successfully. The man is fairly ugly, to put it mildly, and isn't the sweetest of personalities, but in the end he gets his girl, and you feel as good for him as you do for any of the other characters. Better, perhaps. It takes some work holding himself together, but he manages.
The film, on the whole, is a cheerful piece, with few dark corners. However, there is an underlying sub-plot about a family 'friend' who has been helping fund the family in past crises, but also secretly molested the niece (whose own father is dead - she lives with the family). When I first saw the movie, this aspect came as a surprise (as is probably intended), but this time round the warning signs are obvious throughout the film.
The story is full of all sorts of other complications, some of them trivial, some of them important to the people concerned; and there are several relationships running at various levels throughout the movie. It's a little hard to keep up with all the characters, but perhaps that doesn't really matter: this is a film about community, both within and without the extended family, and it's a film about the joy of being alive, and the enjoyment of all that weddings mean, and how they bind people together in amazing ways.

On another tack altogether, I'm listening to Philip Glass' Violin Concerto - yup, I did say Philip Glass. This is another Glass altogether to the man who wrote that interminable opera I mentioned a while ago. Here is a wonderful soaring piece of music with a constantly throbbing accompaniment that varies as instrument after instrument picks it up, or moves it suddenly along at twice the speed. It's coupled with John Adams' Violin Concerto, which, apart from its Chaconne movement, is taking quite a bit of getting used to.

Saving Your Life

Finished another book the other day, while tenting around the UK.

It’s This Book Will Save Your Life, by A M Homes. An odd book, there’s no doubt, and the saving side of it relates to a man called Richard finding his way from a life which is nothing to a life that’s worth something. The book is full of quirky characters, and even more quirky behaviour. This may be in part because it’s set in California, but not entirely. Homes has a way of making even fairly ordinary people seem extraordinary.

I’m not sure that I entirely enjoyed the book, and I found the ending came suddenly out of nowhere. (I was expecting several more pages, and then discovered they were filled with advertising for Homes’ other books.) The book doesn’t seem to move forward very fast, and there’s certainly nothing that could be called a plot. Some characters that are shown as difficult and unpleasant turn out to have a soft side, a side that’s almost unreal, and other characters are too unreal altogether.

And the book is full of loose ends – at least in my reading of it. I’d like to know a bit more about how some things turned out, but Homes leaves a lot of stuff unfinished as far as the reader is concerned. You could say that they’re ‘finished’ in literary terms, but this isn’t entirely satisfactory.

Anyway, it was worth reading generally speaking, and certainly I wanted to finish it. That’s a plus!

And there's a very good and sensible review of it by Frank Cottrell Boyce on the Guardian Unlimited site.