Gates of Languor

The more historical fiction I read, the more I come to admire those who write it well. It is one of those disciplines, like tightrope-walking, where what appears effortless to the expert reveals its true perils only in the work of the less proficient. Steven Pressfield's Gates of Fire, a historical novel acclaimed by many good judges, certainly displays all its labours on the page.

There is much to admire in this stirring story of the three hundred Spartans who defied the Persian hordes in their doomed defence of Thermopylae. Pressfield is at his best in the battle scenes, where the horrors of warfare at close quarters are all too graphically realised, and the heroism of the Spartan warriors rings down to us through the ages. But for all that, I finished the book with a lingering dissatisfaction. The feeling of immersion I get from a really good historical novel was not there. So why didn't it work for me?

The book failed for me on two separate levels, the philosophical and the technical. Historical novels seem to me to operate in one of two ways: they can either embed the reader in the period addressed, or they can use that period as a means of commenting on the present. (I oversimplify for the sake of argument). As a matter of taste I prefer the former - the novels of Patrick O'Brian, say, or Cecelia Holland's Jerusalem which I reviewed recently. If I want to think deeply on contemporary events, I'd rather read a novel which explicitly addresses those themes. If I'm reading history, don't pull me out of the period.

Gates of Fire, is very much in the second category. It reminded me more of Full Metal Jacket, Stanley Kubrick's 1986 Vietnam film--particularly the early bootcamp scenes where the recruits are systematically brutalised to prepare them for combat--than any other novel about classical antiquity. The elegiac tone of much of the book(one of its best features) is for a way of life--but it's not, except indirectly, for the Spartans. What Gates of Fire is truly lamenting is the decline of a certain aspect of America's perception of itself (a reading admittedly conditioned by post 9/11 events, but nonetheless perceptible before that). Pressfield thanks in his acknowledgements the historian and commentator Victor Davis Hanson, and it is precisely Hanson's brand of libertarian self-reliance which Pressfield so admires in American culture. I'm indebted to Paul Rhoads for quoting Hanson's recent observations on the American officer class on his blog: relics of an American past who believe in honor, duty, country, God, sacrifice, and the continuation of the American experiment. America, of course, is a country which deliberately modelled its governance on Greek and Roman models, and by taking us back to Thermopylae Pressfield is returning to the root of the 'American experiment'. I don't have any quarrel with the position articulated by Pressfield (or if I do, it's not to the point in a literary review) but I do have rather more difficulty with it being smuggled in under the guise of historical fiction.

On an artistic level, the hazard of Pressfield's philosophical approach is that it requires him to present the lives of the Spartans as a hagiography. All the main characters have been forged in the Spartan school of adversity, and though they feel understandable fear, keep it largely to themselves, a price they pay for the peerless esprit de corps of their brethren. Dienekes, the novel's moral exemplar, at times outlines his thoughts on the nature of fear for his disciples '(and of course the reader's) benefit. But because the Spartans all think alike, and all unhesitatingly follow the Code, all the conflict in the novel is external.

My other dissatisfactions with the book are around the prose itself. Pressfield has done an immense amount of research--and boy, is he going to make sure the reader knows it. He can't bring out a chamber pot without telling us the Greek for it; or he drags in an indifferent pun which only works if you know that the Greek words for "friend" and "foreskin" differ by only one letter. The truly great novelists who treat the classical period--Mary Renault or Allan Massie--don't let on to the reader that they've done any research: they just tell you the story. The result of Pressfield's scholarship is not to underwrite the narrative, it's to delay the flow of the story. Pressfield's voice is wildly variable; at one moment he will give us the argot of the common soldier (Full Metal Jacket time) while at others we are given prose of Homeric portentousness. Some writers can get away with this, but the narrative framework Pressfield has given himself, a retrospective first-person account by one of the grunts, makes the job almost impossible. The modern American idiom of the soldier-talk grates, while the high falutin' stuff doesn't sit well with the purported narrator.

I very much wanted to like Gates of Fire, if only to impress my swanky Macmillan New Writing pals; but although the book had many virtues, they were not enough to lift it above the mediocre, for this reader at least. But at least it's reminded me just how surpassingly good Mary Renault is...

The Trouble with Fanny

::Acquired Taste doesn't spend all its time reading genre fiction. Sometimes we turn our attention to The Canon as well, and over the past couple of weeks I've been re-reading Mansfield Park. I read Austen primarily for her voice: cool precision occasionally counterpointed by a thrust so deft the reader doesn't see it coming, or realise at first how deeply it has struck home. This is a pleasure which never cloys.

I've read and loved all the Austen novels many times; Mansfield Park is not my favourite (Pride and Prejudice most perfectly unites all Austen's virtues) but it is by some distance the most interesting of the six. That's because the book just shouldn't work. The heroine, Fanny Price, is timid and introverted to the point of psychosis; her amour, Edmund, is priggish and humourless. And having strung us along for 600 pages, Austen doesn't even show us their final understanding. Instead the last chapter is told--told, not shown--at such an astonishing height of authorial omniscience as to make the gods themselves seem fallible bunglers.

And yet, for most readers, including this one, it works. Maybe only just, but Austen manages to pull off a novel in which the two leading characters are not immediately sympathetic and the ending is chucked in almost as an aside.

There is no disguising that Fanny is a trial to the reader, especially the modern sensibility which expects its heroines to be feisty and spirited. Fanny is neither, although she has an inner strength which makes her interesting to the attentive reader (and indeed this process of being persuaded of her merits against our wills is exactly the one experienced by her suitor Henry Crawford). Both she and Edmund have highly developed moral sensibilities (a kinder obverse of "priggishness") and Edmund, particularly, has to fight the temptation to compromise. The modern reader may struggle to see why Edmund prizes being a country clergyman above the charms of the witty, lively and beautiful Mary, but in a 19th century context it's more easily understandable. Because Austen isn't writing a historical novel, she can assume a shared culture with her readers which simply isn't the case today: a modern writer telling the same story would need to dramatise the appeal of the church to the morally-minded, rather than taking it as read.

Even those who find Fanny and Edmund rather dull--indeed, especially those--will warm to the liveliness of Mary and Henry, all the more stimulating because they are not moral exemplars. Mary is catty and unguarded; Henry enjoys nothing more than breaking young ladies' hearts. The depth and richness of the supporting cast--not just the Crawfords, but the hateful Aunt Norris, even the indolent Lady Bertram--go some way towards offsetting the reader's frustration with Fanny's perpetual snivelling.

It would be hard for a writer to get away with the final chapter today. At long last everything has come to a head, and the reader hunkers down for a final scene like the one between Elizabeth and Mr Darcy, where errors are confessed and feelings declared. Instead Austen plays a point-of-view tour-de-force of the sort our resident POV expert David Isaak could only marvel at:

Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery. I quit such odious subjects as soon as I can, impatient to restore everybody, not greatly in fault themselves, to tolerable comfort, and to have done with all the rest.

The rest of the novel is played out in this astoundingly distant third-person. We aren't going to get Edmund declaring his feelings for Fanny after all. What we get is a wonderfully wry paragraph that is almost post-modern in the way it steps outside the novel to remind us of the conventions of the genre:

I purposely abstain from dates on this occasion, that every one may be at liberty to fix their own, aware that the cure of unconquerable passions, and the transfer of unchanging attachments, must vary much as to time in different people. I only entreat everybody to believe that exactly at the time when it was quite natural that it should be so, and not a week earlier, Edmund did cease to care about Miss Crawford, and became as anxious to marry Fanny as Fanny herself could desire.

I don't know about you, but I'd rather have that than listen to Fanny grizzle her way through Edmund's proposal (the reader will realise by now that Fanny will not face the moment with sangfroid). Austen's voice is the dominant element of the novel, and at the end she turns the camera on herself, to tell the reader what happened to everybody, and what to think about it. A writer needs to have the most compelling voice, not to mention considerable chutzpah, to pull this off. Could you do it today? Maybe you could make it work, but only if you could get it through your agent and editor.

Mansfield Park is a difficult novel. More than any of Austen's other works, it reflects a cultural sensibility now long vanished, and the reader has to work uncommonly hard to mesh their own preconceptions with the author's world. Luckily we are in the hands of a master guide, who may be moral but is never moralistic. Her wry humour remains, even at a distance of two hundred years. Settle back and enjoy the ride.

Comparison with a bestseller

I'll blog at more length on my experience with Gates of Fire once I've finished it (although for now I can only hint darkly that my pleasure is not as unalloyed as I'd hoped...). For now I'll pause only to observe the similarity between the cover and the paperback of The Dog of the North.


It's an interesting illustration of how Macmillan are trying to pitch my book - that while it's fantasy, they are trying also to convey an 'epic historical' flavour too. For those readers who judge a book by its cover (which, let's face it, is just about all of us when we're browsing in a bookshop), the similarity between the Pressfield cover and mine tells us a lot about the 'contract' Macmillan are offering the potential reader of The Dog of the North.

Now, if only the sales figures were correspondingly similar...

Recommended Reading

A book with the personal endorsement of three of Macmillan New Writing's finest--Matt Curran, David Isaak and Aliya Whiteley--has to be good, doesn't it? Tastes will always differ, so nothing in life is certain, but this is a pretty heavy-hitting panel.

I am, therefore, starting Steven Pressfield's Gates of Fire with great optimism. If I don't like it, you guys are to blame...

Chichester Writing Festival 2009

I've spent a very enjoyable weekend at the latest Festival, run by Greg and Kate Mosse in the sublime surroundings of West Dean, just north of Chichester. Greg and Kate have been very supportive of The Dog of the North since before it was published (as they are with all aspiring writers) so I'm delighted to go along to anything they run; but even without that connection the Writing Festival is an occasion to delight, with an array of stimulating panels and panellists. And it's always good to catch up with old friends and make some new ones (quite aside from the fact that some of them might buy my book...).

The panellist who seemed to make the biggest impact on the audience was Roger (R.J.) Ellory, whose novel A Quiet Belief in Angels was picked up by Richard & Judy last year. The book epitomises the "classy commercial" fiction which is currently the publishing industry's Holy Grail, but what really impressed about Roger is that he wrote 22 unpublished novels before making the breakthrough--all the time while carrying on a demanding day job. His hard work and astonishing self-belief will inspire and daunt the aspiring writer in equal measure.

If there was a common theme among all the many writers on display it was that passion and a commitment to hard work are the essentials without which publication will never happen. From my own example, minor as that may be, I'd say that's a perfect message to take away. The bottom line is that you really do need to put in the hard yards.

The next Chichester Writing Festival is scheduled for November 2010 and I'm looking forward to it already.

Bite-Size Reviews

Since submitting The Last Free City I've had a bit more time on my hands which I've been using to catch up on my reading.

First on my list was Cecelia Holland's Jerusalem. Holland is a highly-regarded historical novelist, although new to me, and while some aspects of the book failed to please, I can see why she is so well thought of. Jerusalem takes place at the time of the Second Crusade. It encompasses the final years of the crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, with some well-realised court intrigue with a particular emphasis on the Templar Order. Holland is first-rate in economically conveying the feel of the period, even if her dialogue is a little too modern-American for my taste. There was also a tendency to switch point of view, even within conversations, which I also found offputting. Set against this, the characterisation was subtly nuanced, with the protagonist Rannulf especially interesting. What hinted most at Holland's mastery of the form was the ending, however, which it is hard to discuss without spoilers. Suffice it to say that, in refracting what could have been a downbeat resolution through a twelfth-century lens, Holland firmly anchored the book in its period. I will certainly be reading more of her work.

Next I turned my attention to one of my favourite Jack Vance novels, To Live Forever. Vance, to my mind, gave up writing true science-fiction in the late 1950s, and this is the best of his core sf novels. It explores the practical consequences of a treatment bestowing immortality--a treatment that must be rationed if a population explosion is to be avoided. The novel follows the fortunes of Gavin Waylock, who has been cheated of his own immortality and is determined to win it back by any means at his disposal. It's one of Vance's earliest forays into the crime-fiction format he later developed in the Demon Princes and Alastor series, and is a good starting point for the science-fiction reader who wonders whether Vance will be to their taste. Published in 1956, it is the first novel to showcase the precise and pared-down style which was to become his hallmark. To Live Forever shows Vance's facility for creating bizarre but plausible societies and then pushing them to breaking point. The novel is hard to find these days and unjustly neglected. Why not track it down?

The Church of MNW

As you will all know, The Last Free City is with Macmillan at the moment, while my editor decides if it's right for them. You might view it as disingenuous in this context to review, very favourably, two MNW titles acquired by that selfsame editor. The fact is that L.C. Tyler's A Very Persistent Illusion and Doug Worgul's Thin Blue Smoke are both such very fine novels that they are sure to attract the attention of readers who do not have a vested interest in keeping their editor sweet.

Len Tyler is one of my favourite Macmillan New Writers: more to the point, he's one of my favourite writers, full stop. He lists P.G. Wodehouse among his favourite writers, and his highly distinctive voice is reminiscent of Wodehouse on a very, very heavy dose of downers. A Very Persistent Illusion is the kind of book for which the much-abused term "black comedy" was coined. His narrator, Chris Sorenson, is at once dislikeable while embodying many of the characteristics we will recognise in ourselves. His unusual pathology plays out to an unexpected ending with a sureness of touch and a facility with the devastating one-liner which will be familiar to readers of The Herring Seller's Apprentice. If your taste in humour runs to the dark, this is the book for you.

The humour in Thin Blue Smoke is of a different stamp. Worgul takes a wry look at a beautifully realised ensemble cast, refracted through the lenses of barbecue, blues, baseball and bourbon. Of these, barbecue is closest to the book's heart, and LaVerne, ex-baseball star and barbecue philosopher, is an offbeat and pleasantly flawed hero. At one point he discusses the essence of barbecue with another character (it's that kind of book), and they conclude that barbecue is the art of taking the worst cuts of meat, and transmuting them slowly over a low heat, making them into something wonderful. Worgul does something similar with his characters: poor, disadvantaged or alcoholic they may be, but over the course of this marvellous novel he smokes them until they too, turn into lives which fascinate and move us. A novel as quintessentially American (just what is a "pulled chuck"?) as A Very Persistent Illusion is British, Thin Blue Smoke deserves to be a huge success.

One of the things I really do like about Macmillan New Writing (aside from the fact that they publish me, of course) is the sheer variety of the titles they put out. Considering MNW only publishes twelve titles a year (it really is a small press hidden inside PanMacmillan), the breadth of output is remarkable. I can never read titles like the two above without that old genre writer's inferiority complex kicking in at some level: MNW publish fantasy, too! And my fantasy at that... Maybe reading two such accomplished MNW titles just after I've submitted my own was not such a good idea after all. Those not in that singular position need not hesitate, and should get hold of these two excellent novels immediately.

Into the Ether

Yesterday I sent The Last Free City to Will, my editor at Macmillan. (Will, if you read the previous more downbeat post - only joking! The Last Free City is the greatest work of literature written in English...). There is nothing more I can do to the novel unaided. If Macmillan accept it, of course, I get to work with a professional editor and that will improve it. A good editor will bring a keen and objective eye to material you may have been living with for a period of years, and if my experience of The Dog of the North is anything to go by, the effect on the text can only be positive.

Of course, Macmillan may not want the book - and as a writer you should never submit anything unless you're prepared for that outcome. I feel curiously relaxed about it, because there's nothing else I can do now to improve my chances: I've spent a year writing the best book I can, I've sent to an editor who likes my writing, and that really is all I can do. It's out of my hands now.

I'm already thinking about what I'm going to write next. For some time I had this nailed down pat: The City of Green Glass, the story which wrapped up this particular part of the Mondia cycle. Now I have other ideas, and I may reach a couple of generations back into Mondia's history instead, because there are stories there which interest me, and directly bear not only on The Last Free City but also The City of Green Glass--which is now likely to have a different title, because it's so confusingly close to its predecessor. Alternatives I'm thinking about are The Vitrine Gates and The Glass Labyrinth. I don't need to worry too much about any of this just now: until I know the fate of The Last Free City, I can't devote too much time to another project because I might have more editing to do.

For now, I can just enjoy not having a work in progress--although soon enough I will be bored, I'm sure!

An Acceptable Level of Failure

At what point is a book finished? Anyone who's ever written one will know that the answer is "never", but there does come a point when, whether through inertia, frustration or some external factor, the writer accepts that there is nothing to be gained from further work.

The Last Free City is almost at that stage. I spent last week at home polishing the latest, near-final draft. All of the loose ends I can find have been tied off: the story is complete and it's told in the way I eventually decided to tell it. It has scenes of high drama and characters I have come to love and it has--no great surprise here-swordfights, possibly to excess. It nods to Vance, Shakespeare and Calvino.

This should be cause for celebration, but I always find this part is one of the grimmest of the whole process. The end of the first draft is a fantastic feeling - the whole story is there, I know what happens to everyone and there's still the chance to fix what's wrong: I can even include more swordfights should I wish. Because the gestation of The Last Free City was so difficult (I radically changed the structure of the book halfway through the first draft), there wasn't too much to do subsequently; the first draft was really drafts one, two and three rolled into one, not the way I wanted to write the book. There is a real sense of triumph in subduing such a slippery foe. It's like duelling with a vastly superior swordsman and...well, if you if you like that kind of metaphor you might enjoy the book.

Subsequent drafts, for me at least, by contrast are about defining an acceptable level of failure. By the end of the second draft you realise that the book isn't going to be the touchstone of literary genius you'd hoped (a tarnishing process that begins with the first word of the first draft, if not earlier.) Instead, you're just looking to get out alive: the book is not the Platonic ideal you conceived at the start, and now your ambitions are limited to ensuring that none of the holes is below the waterline.

The good news, then, is that The Last Free City is close to being ready to submit to my editor at Macmillan. The challenging news (for we don't have "bad" news, do we?) is that my attempts to touch the sun have failed, and will have to wait until my next book. Now, if I can only manage to cram in a few more swordfights...

Why Should I Read...?

The Remains of the Day
Kazuo Ishiguro, 1989

Take a lord with some very strange notions and an ability to get himself into all kinds of trouble, and his selfless butler who ensures that everything is running smoothly behind the scenes. That's the set-up for Jeeves and Wooster, but Lord Darlington, the well-bred fool in The Remains of the Day, has peccadilloes more serious than getting in trouble with his aunt. Lord Darlington, in fact, is a Fascist. And his butler, Stevens, is certainly no Jeeves.

The Remains of the Day is deceptively simple. It's a classic unreliable narrator story, with Stevens reflecting on his years in Lord Darlington's service as he takes a motoring tour. Ishiguro captures Steven's voice perfectly: pedantic, opinionated, repressed. The humour in his stiff phraseology is not unlike Jeeves, but where Wodehouse's character is comic, Stevens' lack of self-awareness is tragic. The reader realises long before Stevens the depth of the relationship between the butler and the housekeeper Miss Kenton--and sees all the chances that he had to act on it--and also the nature of Lord Darlington's sympathies. When Stevens' father dies upstairs, Stevens simply gets on with the job of ensuring his lordship's guests are comfortable. Too late, Stevens comes to realise his mistakes, and that all the years he has spent debating the qualities of a "great butler" or the nature of "dignity" have just been ways of blocking off his emotions.

Ishiguro controls Stevens' voice with precision, and he avoids the temptation to make Lord Darlington too obvious a blackguard. His political views are unpalatable, and the episode where he dismisses his Jewish servants painful (although not as distressing as Stevens' quiescence), but he is presented as a sincere, if fundamentally misguided figure.

The Remains of the Day is a deep and subtle meditation on reflection and emotion, and a melancholy love story of the first rank.

How has it influenced me?
The Remains of the Day is an excellent example of how to make the reader care about an essentially unsympathetic character. I've never tried a sustained first-person narrative of this sort, but if I were to do so, this would be one of the first novels I studied. So much of the information the reader is given is indirect--much of the pleasure for the reader is in seeing things long before Stevens does

Lessons for the aspiring writer

• unhappy endings can be oddly uplifting
• love stories don't always have to pay off in the expected ways
• the precise language of the butler/bureaucrat/pedant is a good source of humour
• you can convey an awful lot of information indirectly--and often the reader will prefer to receive it that way
  
• you can rely on the reader to do most of the work, if you plant the right seeds
  

A Footnote on Footnotes

Over on Becoming a Fiction Writer, blog author Amanda proposes setting up a "Society for the Abolition of Footnotes in Novels". Since one of the examples she quotes is Jack Vance's Marune, it's no surprise to find that I disagree. Unlike the regrettable rantings of Das Übernerd, however, Amanda's arguments are expressed with intelligence and moderation, and while I won't be joining the Society, I can see why many readers find them irritating.

I thought it might be interesting, nonetheless, to look at some of Vance's footnotes and playthings to see just what they're adding. Amanda's central thesis is this: if the information is important to the story, make it part of the story. If it’s not, leave it out.

The footnote in question is too long to quote in full here (in itself a support to Amanda's argument). Vance has set out in the main text the various phases of daylight caused by the multiple-star system around which Marune orbits. He then gives us a 400-word footnote on the ramifications of this which, as Amanda says, you need to read if you are to understand the phases. The latter part of the footnote reads:

The Rhunes, as proud and competent as the Majars are demoralized, are also strongly affected by the changing modes. Circumstances proper during one mode may be considered absurd or in poor taste during another. Persons advance their erudition and hone their special skills during aud, isp and umber. Formal ceremonies tend to take place during isp and also the remarkable ‘Ceremony of Odors’. It may be noted that music is considered hyper-emotional and inducive to vulgar conduct; it is never heard in the Rhune Realms. Aud is the appropriate time to go forth to battle, to conduct litigation, fight a duel, collect rent. Green rowan is a time for poetry and sentimental musing; red rowan allows the Rhune slightly to relax his etiquette. A man may condescend to take a glass of wine in company with other men, all using etiquette screens; women similarly may sip cordials or brandy. Chill isp inspires the Rhune with a thrilling ascetic exultation, which completely supersedes lesser emotions of love, hate, jealousy, greed. Conversation occurs in a hushed archaic dialect; brave ventures are planned; gallant resolves sworn; schemes of glory proposed and ratified, and many of these projects become fact and go into the Book of Deeds.

This conveys a lot of information, most of it relevant to the story, some of it merely a gracenote. I don't think it kills the story if you don't read it, but it adds an extra gloss to some of the subsequent action. As a reader, I'd rather have this information retailed in Vance's omniscient crisp prose than see it shoehorned in via factitious conversation (where it could only slow down the plot). Marune is a short novel (around 85,000 words) and Vance could easily have "showed" this information rather than "told" us. It's a deliberate artistic choice and for me, at least, it's one that works.

Vance also often deploys footnotes to sardonic effect. Here's a nice one from The Palace of Love.

On one hand was the display wall characteristic of middle-class European homes; here hung a panel intricately inlaid with wood, bone and shell: Lenka workmanship from Nowhere, one of the Concourse planets; a set of perfume points from Pamfile; a rectangle of polished and perforated obsidian: one of the so-called supplication slabs* of Lupus 23II.

*The non-human natives of Peninsula 4A, Lupus 23II, devote the greater part of their lives to the working of these slabs, which apparently have a religious significance. Twice each year, at the solstices, two hundred and twenty-four microscopically exact slabs are placed aboard a ceremonial barge, which is then allowed to drift out upon the ocean. The Lupus Salvage Company maintains a ship just over the horizon from Peninsula 4A. As soon as the raft has drifted from sight of land, it is recovered, the slabs are removed, exported and sold as objets d’art.

This is characteristic Vance, at once precise, economical, and barbed. You don't need it to advance the story at all; it's an imaginative riff thrown out solely for the reader's amusement. Free-wheeling delight or self-indulgent indiscipline? Tastes will vary.

Vance also employs a similar technique in chapter introductions. Every chapter in the five-volume Demon Princes series has information conveyed through oblique articles, interviews or other pseudo-factual devices. It's an aspect of the books which fans tend to love, but it's not without risk. Would you start an adventure novel with this?

From Popular Handbook to the Planets, 330th edition, 1525:

SARKOVY: Single planet of Phi Ophiuchi.
Planetary constants:
Diameter—9,600 miles
Sidereal day—37.2 hours
Mass—1.40
G—.98

Sarkovy is moist and cloudy; with an axis normal to the orbital plane it knows no
seasons. The surface lacks physiographical contrast; the characteristic features of the landscape are the steppes: Hopman Steppe, Gorobundur Steppe, the Great Black Steppe, and others…From the abundant flora the notorious Sarkoy venefices leach and distill the poisons for which they are famous.

The population is largely nomadic, though certain tribes, generically known as Night Hobs, live among the forests. (For detailed information regarding the rather appalling customs of the Sarkoy, consult the Encyclopedia of Sociology and The Sexual Habits of the Sarkoy, by B.A. Egar.)

The Sarkoy pantheon is ruled by Godogma, who carries a flower and a flail and walks on wheels. Everywhere along the Sarkoy steppes may be found tall poles with wheels on high, in praise of Godogma, the striding wheeling God of Fate.

* * *

News feature in Rigellian Journal, Avente, Alphanor:

Paing, Godoland, Sarkovy: July 12:

As if Claris Adam were to be destroyed for beguiling William Wales:
As if the Abbatram of Pamfile were to be liquefied for smelling too strongly:
As if Deacon Fitzbah of Shaker City were to be immolated for an excess of zeal:
Today from Sarkovy comes news that Master Venefice Kakarsis Asm must cooperate with the guild’ for selling poison.

Circumstances of course are not all that simple. Asm’s customer, no ordinary murderer, was Viole Falushe, one of the ‘Demon Princes’. The essence of the crime was neither ‘trafficking with a notorious criminal’ nor ‘betrayal of guild secrets’, but rather ‘selling fixed-price poisons at a discount.’
Kakarsis Asm must die.
How? How else?

This is our indirect introduction to Sarkovy and its "venefices" (a real word, incidentally), the master poisoners who dominate the first part of the novel. There are other ways of doing this, but would they really be this much fun? One of the ways Vance gets away with this is his immaculate control of voice: he can readily replicate the dry language of a guidebook or the racier tone of a magazine (and indeed the dozens of other mechanisms he deploys across the course of the series, for instance "Reminiscences of a Peripatetic Purchase Agent", by Sudo Nonimus, as published in Thrust, a trade journal of the metallurgical industry). There is a humour here so dry that many readers will miss, or dismiss, it. For those of the same cast of mind, though, it's one of the joys and unending rewards of reading Jack Vance.

Why Should I Read...?

The Stars My Destination
Alfred Bester, 1956

Ironically for a genre whose lifeblood is predicting the future, nothing dates faster than science fiction. Pick up an sf novel from the 1950s and you will probably wince at the scientific naivety, the quality of the prose, and the social attitudes embodied. On the other hand, you may pick up The Stars My Destination (or The Demolished Man, by the same author), in which case you will be astounded to realise you are reading an sf novel over 50 years old, and at least 30 years ahead of its time. It's as fresh today as when it was written, and prefigures the cyberpunk movement which was so influential from the mid-1980s.

I won't retail the plot of The Stars My Destination in any detail, because the book's not primarily about the plot, an energetic retread of The Count of Monte Cristo. Gully Foyle, the most vivid antihero since Heathcliff, sets out to revenge himself on the people who left him for dead. He's not an attractive character, and Bester never tries to pretend he is; neither are his enemies. If James Ellroy wrote science fiction, this is what he'd come up with. Bester gives us telekinesis, ("jaunting"), shadowy global corporations more powerful than governments, astounding weapons and a deeply misanthropic take on the human condition. His prose spits venom and the odd typographical conventions he employs actually add to the whole. It's modern, sparky and unencumbered by the cod-Freudianism which is the only weakness of The Demolished Man.

Because the novel is so singular it's easy to overlook the significant technical achievements it incorporates. Antihero novels are hard to pull off, especially when they have real antiheroes rather than the sheep in wolves' clothing so often passed off as antiheroes. But Gully Foyle is murderer, rapist, thug. Morally he scarcely improves over the course of the novel (I've seen it described as a bildungsroman, but I'm not convinced Gully develops enough to merit that). What Bester gives him is energy, durability, cunning and an absolute will to achieve his ends. He's hard to like, but in a perverse way he's easy to admire--a testament to Bester's narrative skill. The world-building is all the more effective for its unobtrusiveness: we never have the sense that the relentless pace of the story is on hold while Bester fills us in on the background. The tawdry hi-tec industrialisation Bester paints is so compelling that decades later we can see echoes of it in Neuromancer, itself one of the most influential novels in the field.

How has it influenced me?

It's hard to imagine any writer of speculative fiction not having taken on board this novel; like The Lord of the Rings, it's part of the genre's kitbag (and arguably has worn rather better). As a pithy exercise in world-building and a dynamic character study, it sets a standard that few of us will meet. My first novel, The Zael Inheritance, owed much to its model of government by corporation, even if I never felt capable of pulling off a Gully Foyle.

Lessons for the aspiring writer

• If you have a voice, let it off the leash
  
• You can make a sympathetic character out of the most unpromising materials
  
• One book can make your name forever
  
• If you are going to use gimmicks like unorthodox typography, make sure they're anchored in the story
  

The Fly

It's so much easier to talk about a terrible book than a good book; with a good book I don't want to spoil the experience for anyone and with the terrible I desperately want to warn people away. So take this review as a warning.

So says "Das Übernerd", whose mission is to review every Hugo, Nebula and World Fantasy Award winning-novel since the dawn of time. This is a person who reads a lot of science fiction and fantasy, and we can all be grateful that he's there to warn us off the bad stuff.

But... you knew there was a "but". Which book does he introduce with this dire warning? Sadly it's none other than Madouc by Jack Vance: by any rational analysis (i.e. mine), one of the titanic works of fantasy.

Having roundly panned Glen Cook last week, I'm in no position to throw stones at negative reviews, and can only observe that there are all kinds of opinion in the world. While I could rebut Das Übernerd's arguments point by point (including some errors of fact), it's probably enough to observe that there is no book so good that someone won't hate it. Das Übernerd also strongly disliked (and profoundly misunderstood) Vance's The Dragon Masters and The Last Castle, so this is just one of those cases where wavelengths are awry.

Those of us who've ever had a bad review can surely take comfort from Das Übernerd's ranting conclusion to his thoughts on Madouc:

And then there's what I can only generously describe as "prose". It gets so purple in the novel that it shifts to ultraviolet. The dialog is amazingly clunky as it switches wildly between common dialog and peppering it liberally with archaic terms. It's all heavily overwritten and made me groan at how painful it was.

Not only is Madouc a fantasy novel that features everything I hate in fantasy novels, it is a bad novel on every level. There is not a redeeming feature in it.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the style of someone who presumes to condemn Jack Vance's prose. We can do no better than conclude with the observation of the great aphorist Samuel Johnson:

A fly, Sir, may sting a stately horse and make him wince; but one is but an insect, and the other is a horse still.

Buzz off, Übernerd!

Why Should I Read...?

The Ax
Donald E. Westlake, 1997

The prolific Donald E. Westlake, who died last year, wrote under a variety of pseudonyms, the most of famous of which, Richard Stark, became hugely influential in the field of noir fiction. There is an easy generalisation that "Westlake" wrote comic crime capers (for instance the Dortmunder novels) while Stark was the outlet for the darker material.

The Ax gives the lie to that generalisation; under the Westlake byline we have a dark, if bleakly humorous, satire on corporate folly which is more relevant today than when it was written. It's the first-person tale of Burke Devore, the manager of a papermaking plant who is "downsized" (Westlake relishes these management-speak euphemisms). After two years unemployed, Devore realises he isn't going to get another job. He's seen one he's well-qualified for--but he knows others are ahead of him the queue (oh, and the job isn't vacant...). His solution: identify the other potential candidates for the job, kill them, and then kill the incumbent.

While the theme of the novel is clearly satirical, because Westlake is such an accomplished thriller writer, it's also grounded in the plausible. Westlake just tells us what happens, and lets the readers find the satire for themselves. In some ways it's like Stark's Parker novels (relentless attention to the detail divorced from any authorial comment; morally ambiguous endings) but in others it's very different. Stark tells us what Parker does, not what he thinks, but The Ax is a first person narrative, so the book takes place inside Devore's head. His thoughts on his situation, the monstrous but yet entirely reasonable logic he applies, are what makes the book. He is not without conscience or humanity; the reader identifies with him to an alarming extent. The book's resemblance is less to the Parker novels than to American Psycho (which it outclasses by a distance) and Aliya Whiteley's Three Things About Me, another withering deconstruction of the corporate world.

Lessons for the aspiring writer

• Satire need not be crude--indeed it's probably better if it's not
  
• First-person narrative creates instant sympathy
  
• If you are going to have an anti-hero as protagonist, you need pinpoint control of voice
• You can write a comedy--of sorts--about a serial killer
  

Aunthood and Apple Pie

One of the things we love as writers is the ability of language to hint at the unsayable, to imply, to allude, and sometimes to misdirect. And writers all know that glorious moment of serendipity when what we've put on the page is subtler, deeper and richer than we realised when we wrote it. Or as Jack Vance puts it:

Supple sentences, with first and second meanings and overtones beyond, outrageous challenges with cleverly planned slip-points, rebuttals of elegant brevity; deceptions and guiles, patient explanations of the obvious, fleeting allusions to the unthinkable.

Sometimes, though, we want our language to be clean, clear, unambiguous. Imagine, if you will, that you are compiling the instructions to go on the back of an apple pie packet. You would not want to be imprecise here, would you? Imagine you were drafting the text to go on the back of the Aunt Bessie's Apple Pie which made its way into our house yesterday. How might you start?

45-50 minutes, 180C/350F/GAS 4
To oven cook: Pre-heat oven and remove outer packaging, glaze with a little egg and/or milk and sprinkle with sugar.

Not a bad start, eh? Time, temperature: the sine qua non of cooking. The stuff about the eggs and/or milk, well, no-one does that, do they? Aunt Bessie and I both know that: it's just there to make me feel better about being too lazy "and/or" inept to bake my own bloody pie. There's a hint of pedantry which will come back to haunt us, though: remove outer packaging. That means "take it out of the box". I had thought of that one, strangely. Perhaps Aunt Bessie's lawyers were wary of potential litigation. ("Coffee: contents may be hot." "Sleeping tablets: may cause drowsiness.").

OK, so the outer packaging is removed, the oven's tooling along at the correct temperature.

Place product on a baking tray and bake in the centre of the oven for 45-50 minutes until pastry is golden brown.

Not so good here, Bess. Product? You mean the pie, right? Then she tells me how long to cook it for--for the second time, but adds a potentially conflicting instruction. What if the pastry is golden brown after 35 minutes? Or 50 minutes have come and gone and it still looks like a Pre-Raphaelite heroine? Do I remove the product or not?

Half way through baking, turn the foil (round not upside down) to ensure even browning. Ensure the product is piping hot before serving.

She's still sticking to the fiction about baking: not rubbing my nose in the fact that I've just rammed a frozen pie in the oven. Then we come onto the foil (which should perhaps be described as the product's inner packaging, the part I didn't remove before baking). Here's the kicker: turn it round not upside down. Come on, Bess! Do you think I'm going to invert the pie in the oven if you just write turn the foil to ensure even browning ? Haven't we come further that that together? We're baking, for Heaven's sake! I should have known when you told me to remove outer packaging that you didn't really trust me to bake, that I was just some miserable kitchen-boy.

Ensure the product is piping hot before serving. It's getting tricky now: we've been in oven 50 minutes, the product is golden brown and still there are conditions. I didn't turn the pie upside down at the halfway mark, surely it's ready now.

If it's not, I'm gonna sue you. And I don't think we're going to be baking together any more.

A Pain in the Ass

::Acquired Taste doesn't normally do negative reviews. If I don't like a book, I normally draw a veil over it; there will be someone out there who likes it, and who's to say they're wrong? Nonetheless...

Glen Cook's The Black Company and Shadows Linger are not bad books. Indeed, the reason they irritated me so much is that they are nearly very good. The Black Company series follows the fortunes of a band of mercenaries over an extended period. The Company goes where the money is, fights hard, fights dirty when necessary, and tries to pick its way through a world of treachery and duplicity. Sounds good, no? The set-up is actually pretty good, and it's easy to see Cook's influence in subsequent better writers like Joe Abercrombie and George R.R. Martin.

Cook is good at the basics: plotting and characterisation are sound enough to engage and retain interest. He makes some narrative choices, however, that while not exactly wrong, are so grating as to pull the reader out of the moment. The worst of these is style of dialogue. The mercenaries all speak 20th century American argot, so Cook tries to have us believe we are in a medieval-textured world and then has characters say things like "pain in the ass" and "bite in the butt". It's a legitimate artistic choice to have your characters speak in a modern fashion in a period work, but it's very high risk. Cook is clearly trying to convey the earthy speech of rough soldier-men, but he sacrifices so much to achieve it that it's hard to see it as a sound bargain. (To the British reader, of course, "ass" and "butt" just add to the egregiousness: American readers would no doubt find "arse" or "bum" equally jarring).

Cook also has a tin ear where names are concerned. His cities have names like Beryl, Jewel, Juniper. Magical beings sport pseudonyms like Feather, Whisper and Soulcatcher. One of the Black Company is called "Raven", a cliche of the field deployed seemingly withour irony. Shadows Linger has a character with one of the most bathetic names in all fiction: Marron Shed (it's hard not to read this as Maroon Shed, which admittedly would be worse). Where is the music we find in Jack Vance: locations like Doun Darric, Ascolais, Poelitetz, Tyntzin Fyral, characters like Rogol Domedonfors, Shimrod, Faude Carfilhiot, Iucounu the Laughing Magician? Cook's naming choices, perhaps deliberately, are cloddish in comparison.



The books also vex by playing the Company's moral code both ways: dark-lite, as it were. The Black Company may be deep-dyed blackguards, but they have a core of decency. They don't change sides at the drop of a hat, like the medieval Free Companies on which they're clearly based, or Joe Abercrombie's Styrian mercenaries. Really they're just like John Wayne in the role he played a hundred times--rough and tough, coarse on the surface but big softies underneath. Nothing wrong with that in itself, but hard to integrate in a fictional world which you're trying to convince us is edgy and amoral. In one typical copout scene, the mercenary leader reluctantly sends one of his henchman back into an inn to kill witnesses who could betray the soldiers' whereabouts. Luckily the witnesses have cleared out, and the mercenaries are spared the blood of innocents on their hands. In a later episode, Maroon, sorry Marron, Shed, Cook's most nuanced character by far, is given a stock "redemptive death of the sidekick" moment which wholly undercuts the genuinely subtle portrayal until that point.

I'm sure Glen Cook neither needs nor desires my approval for his fiction. He sells a lot more books than I do, and plenty of good judges enjoy his work. But sorry, Glen, I'm off to read Donald E. Westlake with a spring in my step and not a backwards glance.

On the Big Screen...

Valkyrie
dir. Bryan Singer, 2009

It's easy to mock Tom Cruise. Indeed, with some of his phoned-in performances, he's indulged in the sport himself. His latest offering, Valkyrie, is a Hollywood retelling of the 1944 Stauffenberg plot to kill Hitler. It has received what charitably might be described as mixed reviews, the bulk of the criticism boiling down to "it's got Tom Cruise in it". Cruise is a better actor than he's given credit for (he's effective in Born on the Fourth of July, The Last Samurai and action films like Minority Report are pretty good). If there are question marks around his performance as the genuinely heroic Stauffenburg, they relate at least much to the script and direction, which deliberately make Stauffenburg's inner life opaque.

I think Valkyrie is actually a pretty good film, and it makes some interesting narrative choices. Most reviews observe rather snootily that Bryan Singer (director of the immensely over-rated The Usual Suspects*) has chosen to make the film as a thriller. Presumably critics would have preferred to see something more cerebral, along the lines of Bonhoeffer: Agent of Grace, a subtler and more reflective film about another attempt to assassinate Hitler. Singer has chosen a different path, though, and should be judged on the film he's made, not the one someone else might have done.

The technical challenge in making a thriller about the Stauffenberg plot is that Hitler doesn't die (sorry if that comes as a spoiler). You know from the start that the protagonist will fail -- so where's the thrill? Unlike Agent of Grace, Singer doesn't fill the space by showing us what's going on in Stauffenberg's head. In a brief prologue, Cruise is shot up even while deciding that Hitler has to go. Instead of reflection, Singer gives us the mechanics of the plot, and in particular the dynamics between the conspirators. Bill Nighy, as the vacillating General Olbricht whose hesitation fatally undermines the scheme, and Tom Wilkinson's General Fromm--determined to be on the winning side, whichever that is--are both standouts in an excellent ensemble cast.

Singer also makes a virtue of necessity by deploying a superb piece of dramatic irony. For half an hour of screen time, the conspirators believe they have succeeded, and that Hitler is dead (the mechanics of why he isn't are very neatly worked out, underscored by a clever shot of the open windows which will disperse the blast). The audience knows, of course, that Hitler is still alive, and Singer milks it for all it's worth.

I've blogged fairly extensively about Rome recently (with which Valkyrie shares several cast members), and David Isaak made the excellent point that, when the audience knows the bones of the story already, it frees the creator to make some different narrative choices. This is clearly the case with Valkyrie. Singer chooses to emphasise the tension of what the plot must have felt from the inside, using the audience's knowledge of the outcome to underline just how much the characters are risking. He's also strong on the logistics of the plot; the anatomisation of the post-coup hours could scarcely be improved.

Valkyrie emphasises the "how" of the Stauffenberg plot over the "why" (the question of historical accuracy is by-the-by here - the film hangs together on its own terms). That is perhaps the heart of its poor reception (over and above Tom Cruise...), but Singer has made an absorbing film which does full justice to the heroism of the men who sacrificed themselves in their attempt to shorten the war and restore pride in their country. As the film makes clear, success in that latter aim was their enduring achievement.

* films lauded for "unguessable twists" usually turn on one of two lame devices: the protagonist is really the villain, or the protagonist is really dead (see The Sixth Sense, similarly overpraised for the same reasons).

Hey, an award!

This one comes from Alis Hawkins, fellow Macmillan New Writer and author of the excellent Testament (now out in paperback).

This is the award:

Leaving aside the curious grammar of the award citation, it's always good to be appreciated. We don't do this for the money (what money?) so the only external validation we get is the approval of our readers and peers - so thanks, Alis!

The award is also a meme, the rules of which are thus:

Here are the rules of the meme:
1. Put the logo on your blog.
2. Add a link to the person who awarded you.
3. Award up to ten other blogs.
4. Add links to those blogs on yours.
5. Leave a message for your awardees on their blogs.

1 and 2 are already done and dusted. 3 is more difficult as Alis has already stolen a couple of my favourites, but here are some other sites I keep an eye on and are always worth a read. Click on the author's name to go to the blog.

Faye L. Booth
Another MNWer, Faye is never afraid to give it both barrels. Her fiction is as recommended as her blog.

Jane Smith - How Publishing Really Works
Jane's blog is full of down-to-earth advice on the ins and outs of the publishing industry. Not for the dilettante or the easily discouraged, but if you're serious about finding a commercial publisher for your work, mandatory reading.

Sam Hayes
Another blog from a practising novelist, with some detailed and practical reflections on the craft of writing.

Matt Curran
Matt, formerly of Macmillan New Writing, now flourishing in the mainstream, keeps a blog where he writes about his works in progress--particularly interesting in addressing how to balance writing, real life and the need to earn a living.

Emma Darwin
Another novelist's blog--do you see the pattern yet?--Emma's is recommended for the critical insight she brings to bear on the craft of writing. She critiques manuscripts to a professional standard and this forensic intelligence runs through the reflections on her blog.

Still here? What are you waiting for?

The Glory That Was Rome

I have blogged about this before, but some things bear repetition. Yesterday I finished watching the second and final series of Rome, the HBO mini-series charting the history of the Roman republic from Caesar's crossing of the Rubicon to the Battle of Actium. This, surely, is just about as good as television gets: excellent writing supported by first-rate casting, all retailed at leisurely length.

In reflection, it's the characters and not the plot you remember (there is a lesson for all writers here): Polly Walker's Atia, at once repellent, manipulative and yet oddly pitiable and sympathetic; James Purefoy perfectly capturing Mark Antony's debased populism; Simon Woods' chilly egotism as Octavian. Those are just the standout performances, but there's hardly a dud among the huge cast.

I am not one of those who think that TV/film is inherently inferior to written fiction (although I do think it's very hard for a movie adaptation to do justice to its source material). In particular, I think that the mini-series format is one of the very best narrative art forms available. The 90-minute movie inevitably sacrifices something of either plot or character development because of the constraints of the format. The soap opera form never has a resolution (even though individual stories may); it merely repeats itself ad nauseam. The seasonal drama, even when it is done well, is essentially the same every week (for aficionados, that's part of the appeal, viz: Bones). But the mini-series has room to breathe, while also reaches a conclusion. Rome consists of 22 50-minute episodes, none of which stands alone. It is one extended narrative, an experience far closer to reading a novel than watching a movie is. The form allows sustained character development across an ensemble cast; it permits changes of pace and tone; it can afford digression (usually, in Rome, via the interpolation of frequent sex scenes...)

In Rome, every major character has time for significant growth: the obscure can rise and fall again, and all the stories reach a conclusion. It's hard to imagine a 90-minute movie mirroring this achievement. Even the very best of them (for instance The Page Turner, reviewed here) must work through subtlety, shorthand, indirection. A good director can turn this constraint into a strength, but there are options available to a mini-series which simply can't be replicated by a movie.

If you haven't seen Rome, I can't recommend too strongly that you track it down now. And I haven't even explored the interesting relationship between the show and the Shakesearean treatments of the same period in Julius Caesar and Antony & Cleopatra. That must wait for another day...

Not a Review

I have sworn off reviewing other Macmillan New Writing titles: in many cases I know the writer, and even where I don't my objectivity may well be questionable. I'm not, therefore, going the review the latest one I've read, Restitution by Eliza Graham. It's not a review, is it, to say that the book is every bit as good as its predecessor, Playing with the Moon, and that anyone with a taste for good fiction is likely to enjoy it?

Neither is it a review to state my admiration for the way in which the writer weaves the personal destinies of a handful of ordinary characters into a backdrop of events leading up to and during World War II; the unobtrusively excellent prose with which the story is retailed; or the satisfying way in which each chapter unfolds into the next.

And it is certainly not a review to say that I am delighted to hear that Eliza has a deal with PanMacmillan for another two novels.

I go back to my editing fully satisfied, then, that I have held fast to my rule not to review Macmillan New Writing titles.

Kids' Stuff...

Yesterday was the last of my literary appearances following the publication of The Dog of the North. This was at the "Just Write For Kids" Club in Chichester, run by the enthusiastic Becky Edwards, herself a writer of children's books. "Just Write" meets once a month for children aged 6-13 who get together to have fun writing stories, and Becky invited me along as a guest local author. My books aren't aimed at children, but this wasn't a book-selling exercise: it was a chance for the young writers to meet someone who was lucky enough to have been published and perhaps take some encouragement from it.

In fact, the kids there didn't need encouragement. They were all amazingly enthusiastic, and in most cases couldn't wait for me to finish so that they could tear off and get on with writing their own stories--a healthy attitude I can only endorse. At the end of the session some of the writers fed back the work they had set down during the morning. The standard was very high--not just were the stories lively and enthusiastic, many of them deployed some sophisticated narrative strategies. There were some real talents on display, and by providing a structured forum in which they can develop, Becky's group gives them a chance to develop their skills and maintain their enthusiasm for writing.

Becky had asked me to go along as a favour but I came away thinking that I was the one who had got the most out of the morning. It was inspiring to work with a group of people who enjoyed their writing so much. "Just Write For Kids" is a great idea and I hope it goes from strength to strength.

Why Should I Read...?

The Persian Boy
Mary Renault, 1972

I can probably trace my love of historical fiction back to Mary Renault, whose exotic tales of Ancient Greece fired my imagination at an impressionable age. The Persian Boy has long been my favourite, an emotionally charged and meticulously researched tale of the final years of Alexander the Great.

The story is recounted in first person through the eyes of Bagoas, Alexander's eunuch lover. In such bald summary it sounds sensationalised, but this central relationship is crafted with such care and intensity as to lift the novel far beyond the normal run of historical fiction. This is not costume drama: it is a love story which happens to be set in the past. The development of the relationship is charted against Alexander's conquest of the east and his eventual destruction by jealous rivals. Alexander himself springs to life, his great gifts offset by his equally great flaws. Curiously, Alexander is much more vivid in this novel than its predecessor, Fire From Heaven, in which he is the protagonist.

The Persian Boy seems to me an exemplar of historical fiction in two ways. Most importantly, the characters feel different. They may have a recognisably human array of feelings and foibles, but they exist in a world almost unrecognisable to a contemporary audience. Renault's characters are not twentieth-century men in robes - their mindset is at once alien yet plausible. The central relationship is not one the contemporary reader might be expected readily to empathise with, but it's carried off with such bravura that few will find it anything other than wholly compelling.

The other excellence of the book is the way in which Renault integrates her research. Almost every event is drawn from a primary source, but so smoothly are they integrated into the shape of the whole narrative that it doesn't read like a plot culled from Quintus Curtius and Plutarch. Renault uses her research as it should be used, in the service of the whole, and not an end in itself.

Few novels have drawn me as strongly into their world, both physical and spiritual, as The Persian Boy. Nearly forty years after its publication, it remains as vivid as the day it was published.

How has it influenced me?

The Persian Boy has much in common with fantasy, in its creation of a richly detailed world alien to the reader's experience. That Renault's world is historical and mine is not is a relatively minor distinction: in both cases the reader has to be convinced to invest emotional and intellectual energy to inhabit the writer's territory. The biggest lesson for me from Renault is that characters must be--credibly--of their own time, and not the writer's. It sounds obvious, but it's an insight many writers fail to draw. The Dog of the North would never have had a religious subplot, something important to the world of my novel rather than today's world, were it not for The Persian Boy.

Lessons for the aspiring writer

• Do your research, and then forget it
  
• Having a viewpoint character who is not the "star" of the story can lend an interesting perspective
  
• If you are going to the trouble of creating a setting very different to our own world, don't neglect to make your characters culturally different too
  

Choosing what to write

I'm never averse to stealing someone else's good idea and calling it "homage" (on a blog, "meme" does the trick as well). David Isaak posted recently on the pleasantly alliterative topic Why We Write What We Write - a thought-provoking question. It's one I'd never asked myself before, at least not in that form. I've got a pretty good idea why I write; on some level I've made my peace with the long lonely hours and performed the calculus that tells me it's worth it. But what I've never done is question why I've ended up in the particular genre I inhabit.

My intial lazy response when I read David's post was to say, "well, I write what I like to read". And as far as it goes, it's true enough. (It would be perverse, after all, to write what I didn't like to read: I'm not cut out for chick-lit). At the Macmillan New Writers soiree last year, it became apparent that I was about the only one who enjoyed re-reading my own work, so my knee-jerk reaction is perhaps not too far from the mark.

On the other hand, it's not the whole story. "Why Should I Read...?", my ongoing list of books I've loved and recommend to others, contains about 35 books. Of those, less than a third are ones you'd find on the Science-Fiction and Fantasy shelves of a bookshop. Only three are fantasies written primarily for adults. I don't, in fact, read that much fantasy: I'm at least as likely to read historical fiction, popular history, 19th century fiction, hard-boiled crime, and sports. But I've never written, or seriously aspired to write, in any of those fields.

So how did I end up writing in a genre which no longer makes up a large proportion of my reading? The cynic may suggest that all of the genres above require research, a structured activity to which I am largely averse; but so does fantasy, even if it doesn't require quite the adamantine rigour of historical novels.

In the end I arrive at two conclusions, neither of them especially flattering: programming and emulation. The first literature I really loved was speculative fiction: when I became a voracious reader, just before my teens, it was science-fiction and fantasy I devoured with indiscriminate relish. And somehow, that got hard-wired into me. Even though I can't read many of the books I loved then, speculative fiction became my default setting.

Which brings us to emulation. Because one of the writers I stumbled across in those early years was Jack Vance. From the day I first started to read Vance, he became the touchstone for literary excellence and, unlike anything else I read at that age, he remained there. So when I started to write seriously myself, the benchmark was Vance, even if it was not one which could be achieved.

In the end, then, the question has quite a simple answer. Why do I write what I write? Because somewhere, deep down, even now, I still want to be Jack Vance. And that doesn't seem such an unworthy ambition.

How watching DVDs is writing by another name...no, really!

Christmas is a time of goodwill to all men, a time to take stock of our lives and reflect on how we can be better people next year. No, scrub that: it's a time of almost total indolence and self-indulgence, which is why we like it. Who'd come back for all that self-abnegation stuff year after year...?

Which is one way of saying I didn't get too much done on the book over the holidays (although what I did get done was very useful and takes me a long way forward on the second draft). What I did instead was a lot of DVD-watching. We picked up two great series, Bones Season 1, and Rome, the HBO mini-series.

One of the curses of the writer's life (and there aren't many) is that you can never just read a book or watch a TV show: instead, you're always filtering it through some kind of critical process, noting the tricks the creator has used, and filing things away for future use. It doesn't mean you don't enjoy the experience, but it's a different kind of enjoyment. What do I do that they're doing? What don't I do?

I've blogged about Bones before so I won't say too much about it again. Perversely, one of the things I most admire about it is that it's formulaic: part-CSI, part X-Files, structurally it does nothing you won't find elsewhere. It has twin protagonists, male and female, oozing unresolved sexual tension; a nicely differentiated supporting ensemble; wisecracks; slick plotting on both an episode and a series level. But it's not really about plot: Bones stands or falls on the quality of the character and relationships. The success of the show is, I suspect, at least about the actors as the writers: the stars, David Boreanaz and Emily Deschanel, have "chemistry" (whatever that is...) and conceal the fact that the plot is largely the same every week. In every story I've ever written I've tried to put in a relationship like that (strangely, it was my first attempt, The Zael Inheritance, which was the most successful), and I also respond to the way the show mixes the comic and tragic. That's a very difficult trick to pull off, and completely fatal if misses even by a hair's breadth.

Rome has few similarities with Bones, but one common feature is that it's not really about the plot. If you have even a basic working knowledge of the Roman Republic, you know from the start what's going to happen to the main characters (particularly since the show doesn't take too many liberties with history). Again, the characterisation is fully-textured: there are few stereotypes, and no stock villains (although there are plenty of subtly-nuanced ones). Rome is structured as an ensemble piece: the two nominal protagonists, the odd-couple legionaries Lucius Vorenus and Titus Pollo, have to compete with the historical giants of the time, Caesar, Pompey, Mark Antony et al. That's one of things I like best about it--the way it merges the individual stories of the obscure figures, just trying to live their lives against a background of civil war--with the grand drama unfolding around them. I'm trying something similar in The Last Free City so it's interesting to see the way it's handled here.

If there is an underlying similarity between Bones and Rome it is this emphasis on character over plot. That's odd, given how tightly both are plotted (Rome in particular marshals its huge cast with an excellence all the more commendable for being invisible). But the plot is the backdrop against which the characters shine. The lesson, if there is some general point we can extract, is this: the more competent the plot, the less you notice it (at least in the kind of fiction I enjoy).

There: having spent some time in documented reflection on how I've lazed the Christmas holidays away on the sofa, I can return tonight with a clear conscience to find out what happens when Caesar pursues Pompey all the way to Alexandria--where a queen-in-waiting named Cleopatra is lurking...