Why Should I Read?...

Point Blank

Richard Stark, 1962

“Richard Stark” is a pseudonym of the prolific Donald E. Westlake, and whichever name he writes under, he’s worth reading. For me, though, the twenty or so Stark novels, of which Point Blank is the first, are the best of the bunch.

The protagonist of the stories is Parker (he doesn’t have a first name, which would be an unnecessary frivolity). He’s a career criminal who defines “amoral”: he murders, robs, extorts as the need takes him. His job is crime, and he’s a thorough professional. The people he works with are not always so proficient, and his heists usually come unstuck at some point, often when members of the gang try to double-cross each other.

Creating sympathy for such an anti-hero is a difficult business, but Stark’s technical mastery pulls it off. The cool narrative tone doesn’t give us anything in the way of interior monologue: when we see Parker thinking, it’s about the practicalities of his heist, so the reader too is sucked in at that level. We are not invited to judge Parker, just to watch him—and we come to respect someone who’s very good at what he does. And he is amoral rather than immoral: he doesn’t kill for kicks, only when it’s “necessary” (i.e. to help him get what he wants). When we see the police, which is rarely, they are invariably buffoons, corrupt, or both. There is no-one to root for but Parker.

The Parker books are very much in a line of descent from the hard-boiled mid-century writers like Chandler and Hammett to the bleak nightmares of Ellroy, but there are other philosophical considerations at work. When reading Stark, I’m also reminded of books like Camus’ L’Etranger¸ another story in which killer is adrift in a world without morality. It might be excessive to describe Stark as an existentialist, but there seems to me little doubt that existentialist fiction has been an influence on his work.

One last observation: the Parker novels are short (normally around 200 pages). There are no frills at all. The grim practicality of Parker’s existence is reflected in the utilitarianism of Stark’s prose. It’s a perfect match.

How has it influenced me?

Stark is quite a recent discovery for me, so he’s not a writer who influenced my formative years. His example in showing how to pull off the anti-hero trick was an inspiration for The Dog of the North, however. One of the ways I try to make Beauceron sympathetic despite his career as brigand and kidnapper is to ensure that he’s very good at what he does, and to show that the people around him are no better, and in some cases rather worse. Both are lessons I learned from Stark.

Lessons for the aspiring writer

Nice guys don’t always make the best protagonists

You can write satisfying stories in which crime pays

Choosing a narrative voice which supports the protagonist’s character is essential

You can get away with telling the reader almost nothing about your protagonist’s inner life

::Acquired Taste returns

After a week away from emails and the Net, I am now back with a new entry on the Macmillan New Writers' blog. It promises to be fascinating series of articles on how we all go about our craft.

Next up on ::Acquired Taste, why you really should read Richard Stark's Point Blank...

Interlude

I am taking a holiday, and so, therefore, is ::Acquired Taste. Look out for some new entries by the end of the month, including assessments of Richard Stark's Point Blank, the novel which took hard-boiled and baked it in a furnace; Iain M. Banks' Inversions, a book which was a big influence on The Dog of the North; and perhaps more news from MNW on finalising the text. While I'm away, make sure you keep up with the other Macmillan New Writers at our group blog. You can find out all about my fellow writers Aliya Whiteley, Brian McGilloway, and Faye L. Booth (whose Cover the Mirrors is the next MNW offering).

Why Should I Read?...

The Big Sleep

Raymond Chandler, 1939

Sometimes “Why Should I Read?...” is just too easy. This is one of those days. Raymond Chandler’s first novel starts with this paragraph:

It was about eleven o'clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved, and sober, and I didn't care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.

What more do you need? I can go home now. Surely this speaks for itself.

The first thing to note is that Chandler gets his “voice” down in the first paragraph: world-weary, assured, unfussily competent. We will be spending a long time in the company of the protagonist, Marlowe, and Chandler strikes the tone from the start.

Mechanically, Chandler’s opening is a masterpiece of economy. The power is all in the detail, yet the detail is astonishingly simple. Why does he need to tell us the sun isn’t shining? Isn’t all rain wet? Both clauses seem like “mistakes”: that is, they don’t follow the rules; but together they create a vivid image of a certain kind of morning (and a morning fully appropriate to what’s coming up). Then Chandler gives us a list of what Marlowe is wearing: just one word of more than two syllables, the only colours blue and black. This is easy, right? We could all do it. Don’t you believe it. Next we learn that Marlowe is “neat, clean, shaved, and sober” and everything starts to fall into place: this isn’t someone who habitually displays those qualities. Chandler has explicitly told us what Marlowe is wearing, but immediately undercuts it with his implication that it’s out of character. It’s the first paragraph, and with no dialogue or authorial commentary Chandler has set up internal tension. If it was that easy we’d all be doing it. The simplicity of the scene and the language conceals the effectiveness of the writing. And that’s before we get to the kicker: “I was calling on four million dollars”. We know by the end of the first paragraph that we will enjoy our journey with this wry narrator.

Last time out we looked at James Ellroy. Ellroy is a direct descendant of Chandler’s prose, but there are real differences too. We can see from the opening paragraph that Chandler doesn’t deal in the verbal pyrotechnics of Ellroy: there’s nothing at all of the street about his writing. What Chandler does have is the ability to make plain language bear a great weight, and a narrative voice of deceptive simplicity which looks easy to copy until you try it.

Add in Chandler’s ability to create vivid minor characters in a paragraph, and the shady moral universe in which he positions Marlowe, and we have a writer of real power and durability. The idea of the battered idealist, a loner drinking his way through the mean streets of an uncaring city, is something of a cliché, and Chandler can’t even claim the credit for inventing it (Dashiell Hammett is probably closer to the source). It’s become a staple of detective fiction (today, Ian Rankin and Mark Billingham are two of the more successful British exponents). What lifts Chandler above the ruck is the exquisiteness of his prose—economical yet flexible. Just go back and re-read that first paragraph if you don’t believe me.

How has it influenced me?

Chandler was one of the first writers I encountered with an authorial voice so strong and compelling that it justified reading the book in itself. He wrote the kind of book I could, however delusionally, imagine myself writing. Indeed, when I first came to try out the novel form with The Zael Inheritance¸ I envisaged it as the tone and milieu of Jack Vance imbued with the grittier sensibility of Raymond Chandler. However imperfect the execution, that still seems to me a laudable ambition.

There are few writers I admired as a teenager whom I still admire today. Chandler is one of them.

Lessons for the aspiring writer

Simple words and sentences can convey information every bit as efficiently as more elevated language.

You can do new things with an old plot (in fact, if you find a genuinely new plot, let me know).

Wit is not misplaced in an action novel.

It’s possible to convey character without action, dialogue or overt commentary.

The first-person narrative does not need an unreliable narrator to be successful.

Macmillan New Writers' blog

Matt Curran, author of The Secret War, has set up a collective blog for Macmillan New Writers past, present and future. This is a talented group of writers, all of whom believed in themselves and kept plugging away. There should be some interesting views here, and the MNW list is so eclectic you're sure to find some good reads over there as well.

Why not pop over and have a browse?

Why Should I Read...?

L.A. Confidential
James Ellroy, 1990

Last week we looked at a masterpiece of stylistic understatement, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. James Ellroy’s L.A. Confidential is about as different as it’s possible for a book to be, but for connoisseurs of style it’s equally rewarding. It’s the third of Ellroy’s “L.A. Quartet” which tracks the fortunes of a number Los Angeles policemen in the 1950s. So far, so genre.

Two things set Ellroy apart from other writers of the “American cop” novel. The first is his extraordinary verbal pyrotechnics. He makes absolutely no concession to the reader, using a fragmented sentence structure which gives an urgency and immediacy, sometimes at the expense of intelligibility. And then there’s the slang, the 1950s LA street-speak which at times represents the entirety of the dialogue. As a Brit, I didn’t have a clue what was going on for the first 50 pages (and this is a hell of a risk for an author to take: contemporary American readers may have an easier ride, but not much easier, I suspect…). But the language is so pulsating, so vibrant, that you want to hang on. Eventually a kind of sense emerges. You realise that “statch-rapo” is someone who commits “statutory rape”, sex with a minor (the kind of thing that happens a lot in Ellroy’s LA). By page 75, you’re understanding almost everything: by page 100, the style and the language don’t even seem noteworthy. The reader has internalised it, and recognises that this is the only way Ellroy’s story can be told.

The other defining characteristic of Ellroy’s work is its unremitting bleakness. We can compare Ellroy with Raymond Chandler, one of the progenitors of the noir tradition in which Ellroy is working. In Chandler, we have a flawed good guy trying to get by in a world which has corrupted his ideals: in Ellroy, there are no good guys. The only difference between the LAPD and the city’s underworld, with which it is utterly complicit, is that the cops wear uniforms. It’s a given that the cops are on the take. The characters who hold out against this are invariably flawed in other ways. This, again, is an immense risk. Who do you root for in a story like that? (The answer is, that as the story unfolds, some of the characters do come to have a kind of warped nobility, which sets them above those who are merely warped).

Ellroy, then, is the most risk-taking of writers. He doesn’t seduce with the beauty of his prose, and he doesn’t give you anyone to identify with. It goes without saying that he doesn’t give saccharine happy endings. Even if his books were crap, you’d have to admire him for that. But his books aren’t crap: you may feel you need to take a shower after 400 pages of his sordid world, but his work is technically magnificent. His realises his grim vision with economy and, ultimately, considerable clarity.

How has it influenced me?

Ellroy is a comparatively recent discovery for me: of the noir school, Chandler has been much more influential. I admire the bleakness of Ellroy’s vision, without feeling remotely tempted to try to copy it. He is instructive as a world-builder: he is taking the reader somewhere as profoundly “other” as Middle Earth or Imperial Rome. For all his stylistic bravura, he does it the good old-fashioned way—he doesn’t explain what’s going on, he lands you in the middle of his world and lets you find your own path. 1950s LA is not a place where anyone gives you anything for free, and neither does Ellroy.

Lessons for the aspiring writer

I’m tempted to say there is only one: “Don’t try this at home....”

There are perhaps a few other observations:

If your story really does demand an unconventional telling, don’t be afraid of it

There is nothing inherently wrong with risk-taking—but make sure you understand exactly what the risks are, and why you think they’re justified

Establishing your fictional world is as important for contemporary fiction as historical or fantasy—because in all fiction the world you are creating is illusory and imaginary

Makeover

::Acquired Taste has a new look from today. If only to demonstrate I am not wholly technologically inept, I've selected a template from outside blogger.com's standard range. But fear not, all your favourite features (that's what Reg Connolly would call a "forced assumption") remain.

Normal service will resume soon.

Why Should I Read...?

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

Muriel Spark, 1961

If all you know of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is 1968 film with Maggie Smith, you have a treat in store. With few writers I know is style more divorced from plot, and the reason I’ve read this book a dozen times is almost entirely stylistic. Throughout her long career Spark was a stylistic experimenter and innovator: such an approach carries risk, and in all honesty I find most of her work from The Mandelbaum Gate onwards unreadable. But her earlier novels, The Comforters, The Girls of Slender Means, The Ballad of Peckham Rye and most of all The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, have a minimalist sinewy elegance enough to excuse any subsequent folies des grandeurs.

Superficially Jean Brodie is a very simple novel: a coming of age story (with strong autobiographical elements) told in only 100 pages or so. There are no tricks or hidden revelations. Miss Brodie is a progressive school teacher in a distinctly unprogressive girls’ school: she mingles feminism with support for Fascism—in 1930s Edinburgh, an uncomfortable mixture. Spark realises Brodie on the page with élan and superbly captures her magnificent eccentricity. Her teaching career comes to an end when she is ‘betrayed’ to the school authorities by Sandy, one of her protégées and the novel’s protagonist. A lesser writer would have created an artful narrative tension from concealing the identity of the betrayer from the reader: Spark casually throws the information away as an aside. She is constantly playing chronological games, telling us what becomes of the characters almost from the outset. One girl, the lacklustre Mary Macgregor, is destined to die in a fire, “running hither and thither”, as Spark repeatedly tells us, without any kind of authorial commentary. Her dialogue eschews all tags except “said”, the first writer I ever noticed doing this. For such a spare writer anything more would be overdone.

Structurally Spark pushes the omniscient narrator to extremes. Although Sandy is the nominal protagonist, the authorial voice is the main character, telling us things none of the cast could know, and retailing everything with a deadpan dryness with could score the skin of the unwary. Adverbs are rarely deployed, and when they are, it’s to surprising and telling effect. For instance, one of the girls “was accosted by a man joyfully exposing himself beside the Water of Leith”: a phrase of characteristic composure opened up by the unexpectedness of the adverb. That, ladies and gentlemen, is why you should never over-use adverbs.

Spark can do all the basics so well the reader hardly notices them. The characters of Jean Brodie and her young disciples are drawn with precise economy, the historical sketch of 1930s Edinburgh vivid, and the themes of the novel—betrayal, loyalty, the social position of women, coming of age—are handled so expertly that the novel would be remarkable without its stylistic brilliance. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie has the chilly perfection of an ice-crystal: not to everyone’s taste, but of its type an unequalled glory.

How has it influenced me?

Muriel Spark was the first writer to give me a sense that style could be an end in itself. With writers like Austen and Vance I had always had the sense of the style supporting the plot, but Jean Brodie gives us a style which is self-sustaining and has a vitality independent of the story. It’s not something I’ve ever wanted to copy, but as an illustration of what narrative tone can do, it’s hugely instructive. Compare and contrast LA Confidential¸ featuring later on our list. Even the later works, which I enjoyed much less, are instructive in showing how delicate an experiment stylistic innovation is: get it even slightly wrong and freshness is replaced by inaccessibility.

The minimalism of Spark’s style has always impressed me as well. She’s not the only writer to show how much can be done with how little, but few do it better.

Lessons for the aspiring writer

How you tell your story is more important than the story itself
What the omniscient authorial voice loses in immediacy it can gain in perspective
Do you really need that adverb?
If your story only needs to be a hundred pages long, don’t pad it out to two hundred
Even if you are a brilliant prose stylist (and you probably aren’t, whatever you may think…) don’t neglect the basics: character, theme, pacing
Flash-forwards are very, very risky. Be cautious about using them.

“Why Should I Read…?” even more…

“Why Should I Read…?” has reached the end of its original run. Like a tempting box of chocolates, I have not made it last as long as I should. Instead, I will have to risk sickening myself and my readers with an expanded list.

So, without further ado, here is my second set of ten books which have made an impact on me, and which I hope will do the same for you.

Lucky Jim – Kingsley Amis

Inversions – Iain M. Banks

The Big Sleep – Raymond Chandler

Bleak House – Charles Dickens

LA Confidential – James Ellroy

Beyond a Boundary – CLR James

Buddenbrooks – Thomas Mann

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie – Muriel Spark

Point Blank – Richard Stark

This is a list I hope has a nice variety, although I notice three hard-boiled American crime novels (and why not?). We have another sports book (and, like The Miracle of Castel di Sangro, about much more than sport). Only one of our choices is from the 19^th century (although Buddenbrooks surely deserves honorary membership). There’s only one fantasy and two very British novels to counterbalance the American thrillers.

I think we’re going to have fun exploring them!

Macmillan New Writing focus

The Herring Seller's Apprentice
L.C. Tyler

I don't intend to make a habit of writing about MNW titles, a practice both suspect and incestuous. That disclaimer aside, I picked up the latest offering at the weekend, and it's worth drawing to your attention. For the record, I've never met or corresponded with L.C. Tyler, even though he lives less than twenty miles from me. My opinion is as objective as these things can be.

David Isaak and I have both touched on the inadvisability of writing fiction about writers on our blogs: Tyler shows triumphantly that it can be done. The protagonist of this crime novel is... a crime novelist. Tyler deconstructs all the tropes of the English crime novel in a story which is witty, self-referential, meticulously plotted and unexpectedly poignant. If that makes it sound rather high-falutin', it isn't. It's great fun, a judgement which does not contain even a hint of denigration. The breezy narrative voice could easily conceal the fact that The Herring Seller's Apprentice is a very accomplished piece of work. In addition, Tyler has a cutting way with one liners, and I suspect his work will bear re-reading. I'll certainly be looking out for whatever he turns his attention to next.

The Herring Seller's Apprentice is highly recommended.

Why Should I Read...?

Lyonesse

Jack Vance, 1982-90

I could have picked just about any of Vance’s books for my list, but the Lyonesse trilogy is Vance at his very best. It answers all of the often lazy criticisms levelled at the author: that his plotting is perfunctory, his narrative structures pedestrian, his female characters weak and his interest prone to wane over the course of a series. Lyonesse is intricately plotted with multiple viewpoints, and at least two compelling female characters. And all that’s on top of Vance’s everyday virtues: a prose style with the coolness and precision of diamond, dialogue at once graven and fluid, and a sense of humour so oblique as to be all but invisible.

Lyonesse shares many of the trappings of Big Commercial Fantasy, without ever approaching the derivative. The trilogy’s protagonist, Aillas, after much struggle becomes king of Troicinet, and the trilogy follows his rivalry with Casmir, King of Lyonesse. Magicians enter the scene on a whim, pursuing their own goals which occasionally intersect with the more conventional feudal intrigues of Aillas and Casmir. The juxtaposition of the everyday and the fantastic—in one scene, Aillas can be reviewing rural militia, and in another dickering with the King of the Faeries—never jars: Vance is a master of tone and, in particular, of place. The Elder Isles he paints, with the sinister and magical Forest of Tantrevalles at their centre, effortlessly accommodate realpolitik and otherworldly.

How does Vance differ from the conventional fantasy with which he shares so many characteristics? The quality I find most readily in Lyonesse is freshness: I never get the sense that I am consuming a reheated Tolkien and that I’m going to turn the page and find another bloody elf or some doughty sodding dwarf…* Instead, I might find the following:

Shimrod sauntered forward. "Why must you beat poor Grofinet?"
"Why does one do anything?" growled the troll. "From a sense of purpose! For the sake of a job well done!"

Grofinet, an absurd furred creature of good nature and amusing vanities, is rescued by Shimrod and enjoys an interlude as comic relief: and then Vance arranges a pointless and painful death for him. It takes great skill to pull off the two moods: it is one of Vance’s great strengths that he can manage the transition. (Indeed, his tonal range is rarely noted: at one end of the spectrum he can write Wodehousian comedy like Space Opera, at the other a haunting and sombre coming of age story like Emphyrio).

Vance’s greatness is not amenable to capture in the brief twinkling of a blog entry. If you already know his work, you already believe me: if you don’t, log on to Amazon immediately. You will not regret your investment.

How has it influenced me?

I used to say Jack Vance had had more influence on me than any other person I’d never met. Since then, I have met him, so the observation is no longer apposite. But Vance, more than any other author, is the person who made me want to write – and most of all, to “write like that”.

There is a certain cast of fiction: cool, clear-sighted, understated, coupling action and adventure with a distanced style, at once astringent and compelling. It’s not an approach that everyone enjoys, but it’s my own metier. And I found it in Vance first, and I’ve never seen it done better.

Lessons for the aspiring writer

Over-heated events need not be retailed in over-heated prose
Good genre fiction is good fiction, full stop
Humour and drama do mix—usually to the benefit of both
Dialogue does not have to be naturalistic to work
You don’t need to write down to your audience if you’re writing in genre
Action doesn’t have to take place on stage to be powerful
You can write spare, minimalist prose without sacrificing descriptive power

* for David Isaak: a diction-drop

Why Should I Read...?

Byzantium

John Julius Norwich, 1988-95

Having dwelled at length on historical novels in recent entries, today we look at real history. I’ve cheated a bit here, because Norwich’s survey of the lengthy history of the Byzantine Empire covers three volumes (although a single-volume abridgement is available).

Norwich makes no claim to original scholarship as he takes us from Constantine’s conversion to Christianity to the heartbreaking fall of the city named after him 1,100 years later. He is instead what is sometimes disparagingly referred to as a ‘popular historian’ (surely a better fate than an unpopular one). His skill is synthesising the vast range of primary and secondary sources to make a coherent narrative with a story arc of centuries. The great secondary source is of course Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, with which Norwich has an interesting relationship: he does not subscribe to Gibbon’s thesis that the Byzantine Empire was a steady slide into feebleness and corruption, but he can’t resist quoting Gibbon liberally. Norwich is a beautiful prose stylist, with an eye for the waspish anecdote—and in this he clearly finds Gibbon a kindred spirit.

Norwich has a wonderful knack of bringing a character to life in a couple of paragraphs. Few emperors are on stage for more than a chapter, and even so colourful a character as Basil Bulgaroctonus (the “Bulgar-Slayer”) cannot be allowed to detain us for too long. Event piles upon event, with coups, plots and religious controversies punctuating every reign. Indeed Norwich gives full weight to the religious aspect of Byzantine society: in today’s largely secular Britain it’s fascinating to see the contrast, and Norwich is to be congratulated on bringing such alien material to life. The cantankerous, grasping and opportunist theologians who wrangle their way through so much of the first millennium, pausing to denounce their rivals as “pestiferous pimps” and the like, provide magnificent entertainment.

Norwich excels in marrying the telling detail with wide-screen narrative. The depiction of the fall of Constantinople in 1453 is studded vivid close-ups (the last Emperor disappearing into a press of Ottomans in his purple boots) , but as readers we recognise the loss of all that has gone before: Norwich at once gives us immediacy and context, to powerful effect.

How has it influenced me?

Norwich has been able, in 1,000 or so pages, to give us an entire society, from its birth, through long melancholy decline to its final heroic destruction. He has created an entire world which could leave no fantasy writer unstirred. In his tales of valour, political intrigue and religious extravagance he touches on motifs that I have looked to incorporate in my own fiction. Most of all, Norwich shows that the stories of individual men and women are more powerful when we understand the world which has produced them. As a writer, you don’t need to set out the history of your imagined world, but you need to have at least a sense of it.

I also owe to Norwich (along with Jack Vance) the sense of how much fictional zest can be squeezed out of religion—a marvellous device for showing how different your imagined society is from today’s world, and for enriching your vision. Norwich (unlike Vance) is by no means anti-clerical: his respect and admiration for Byzantine religious art is manifest. But he recognises that the combination of piety and hypocrisy which religion so often juxtaposes makes for a compelling narrative.

Lessons for the aspiring writer

Don’t be afraid to plunder history for fictional material
Your story will have greater resonance if you conceive a story arc wider than the segment you choose to put down on the page
In any fantasy world, it’s implausible that your characters will have either no religious beliefs, or all share the same ones
One of the best ways to give a fantasy world a convincingly different ambience is to invest time in creating a plausible religion
Characters’ beliefs and assumptions are shaped by the society in which they live: if you create a society fundamentally different from our own, it’s almost certainly a mistake to give them only 21^st-century attitudes
If you have a satirical bent, religion really is a sitting duck…
We’ve been here before, but a happy ending is not always the best way

Why Should I Read...?

Augustus
Allan Massie, 1986

Historical novels have featured heavily in our list to date. Augustus¸ however, is the first which employs the deliberately anachronistic ‘modern’ dialogue style. In general I prefer the illusion (for illusion it is) of period dialogue, but here Allan Massie shows how successful the other approach can be when used skilfully.

Massie’s first-person protagonist is Rome’s first Emperor, Augustus, looking back over his life and achievements in the crisp language of 20^th century political memoirs (Massie is himself an eminent political commentator). The emphasis is not on the battles which allowed Augustus to gain and maintain power, but on the human relationships, and particularly the political intrigues employed.

Massie is embarking on dangerous territory. Anyone who writes about this period lives in the shadow of Robert Graves, and one reason Massie may have chosen modern language is to distance himself from I, Claudius, which attempts more closely to capture a ‘period’ feel. But the real reason for Massie’s choice is that he’s only incidentally writing about imperial Rome: his theme is the timelessness of political processes, and Augustus is revealed as shrewd modern political operator. He’s chilly, ruthless and manipulative. Augustus reveals a protagonist who is utterly self-serving and unreliable in his memoirs (Tiberius, the next novel in the series, is an even better example of this approach).

Later in the series, Massie portrays Julius Caesar as an antique Margaret Thatcher, even down to giving him Thatcher’s famous line “There is no such thing as society”. Unlike, say, O’Brian, Massie is using historical fiction as a window on current events. It’s easy to botch this (Harry Thompson’s excellent This Thing of Darkness falters only when a 19^th century Argentinian dictator deploys Tony Blair’s justification for invading Iraq) but Massie manages it.

If your thesis is that politics is politics across the ages, you should be able to pull off the trick of making your narrative at once relevant to the present while maintaining the feel of the original time. By using the detail of daily life in ancient Rome, Massie gives us the sense of living in imperial Rome. In his modern dialogue, he delivers not just timelessness, but immediacy. Edward Charles, a fellow Macmillan New Writer, and one of the ‘modern’ school, says: to me, the people of Tudor England and Renaissance Venice were, deep down, very like us. I don’t want them to appear stilted and old-fashioned. Massie’s characters are neither, but we can still plausibly imagine them in the Senate and the bath-houses of ancient Rome.

Massie has walked a tightrope. He has a written a novel which simultaneously illuminates the past and the present, risked the wrath of classical scholars with a flagrantly anachronistic style, and made a first-person protagonist interesting. The novel could have failed on any of these technical grounds, so we should congratulate him on taking a gamble which has paid off.

How has it influenced me?

The Roman period is so far divorced from the twenty-first century as to be another world. In some ways fiction set in this period has more in common with fantasy than it does with Napoleonic historical works. I’ve found Massie instructive in the way in which he balances world-building with characterisation. The first person narrative structure requires an oblique method of conveying information about the world, because Augustus is writing for his contemporaries, not Massie’s—so we learn about the Roman world through incidental detail, clothing and customs, rather than direct authorial address. It’s something I’ve tried to do myself, particularly in The Dog of the North.

The reader of Massie will also be aware that, while characters from the past may have fundamentally different beliefs and assumptions about their lives, certain qualities will be constant across time. Much, if not all, of my fiction, treats the will to power and its corrupting effects—and in this I have to doff the cap to Massie.

Lessons for the aspiring writer

First-person narratives are much more interesting if the narrator is unreliable.
Historical novels are not just about the past.
Style and tone of dialogue are among the most fundamental choices the writer has to make (and not just for historical fiction).
When giving information about a world which is not the reader’s own, less is more.
Characters in historical novels don’t realise they are in historical novels…

Why Should I Read...?

The Quincunx
Charles Palliser, 1989

Like Austen and O'Brian, Palliser's immense novel is set in the early years of the 19th century, and Palliser also follows O'Brian in reproducing the idiom of the period. The Quincunx follows the extreme fortunes of young Johnnie as he attempts to discover his true identity and recover his lost inheritance. With its labyrinthine litigations, London lowlife, streetwise rogues and blistering social commentary, the reader can be forgiven for thinking of Dickens. And in this case, the comparison is entirely appropriate, for Palliser has set out, among other things, to write a Dickens homage. One key name in the plot is "John Huffam", two of Dickens' given names. Palliser has written a novel which in plot and manner is at once a tribute and a commentary on Dickens--in particular, Bleak House.

The Quincunx succeeds primarily through the sheer compulsion of the plot. It is a huge story, and the tension never lets up. Every page seems to have some fresh revelation, invariably shown 300 pages later to have been illusory. The narrative force drags the reader through 1,000 pages with scarcely a lag. The plot is a marvellously wrought puzzle, whose structure is reflected in the book's title. On this basic level, The Quincunx is a barnstorming 19th century novel which just happens to have been written 150 years after its models. Had Palliser left it at this, he would have earned our acclaim; but he does rather more.

What is easy to miss, because Palliser is so at home with the Dickensian model, is that The Quincunx is profoundly informed by 20th century fiction as well. Johnnie turns out to be a profoundly unreliable narrator, and while there are examples of this from the 19th century (Charlotte Bronte's Villette being an early example), it's a narrative technique which came into its own much later, and now it's a standard part of the fiction writer's repertoire. Palliser gives us a narrator who is so unreliable that the ending of the novel undercuts much of what has gone before. There are entire websites devoted to trying to work out what the end of the novel actually means--the central mystery of the novel (who is Johnnie's father?) is susceptible to more than one interpretation. Even in this, we have something of Dickens: the final sentence of Great Expectations, for instance, admits of two wholly contradictory readings.

Why I admire the book is the way in which it balances its twin aspects. It works perfectly on the ostensible mystery level, while playing with the tropes of Victorian fiction for those who enjoy such things.

How has it influenced me?

The mysteries at the heart of The Quincunx are all about identity: not just Johnnie's but most of the characters in the novel. Hardly anyone is who you think they are. I am sucker as a reader for this device, and have tried to employ it as a writer as well. My first novel-length work, The Zael Inheritance, turns explicitly on whether or not the (anti-)heroine is who she says she is, there are a couple of peripheral identity mysteries in Dragonchaser, and The Dog of the North has a similar puzzle built into the DNA of the structure.

I have also found the more general mystery plot appealing. All novels require the reader to answer the question "what is going on here?". In some stories that's as straightforward as understanding how the characters relate to each other; in others the unravelling the mystery is the entirety of plot. In the kind of fiction I write, the question "what is going on?" also relates most pressingly to the world the characters inhabit: one of the challenges a fantasy writer sets himself is to create an unfamilar environment, and make it both intelligible and interesting to the reader. Palliser is an inspiration in creating a richly-textured fictional world which at once invites the reader to make sense of that world and its central mystery.

Lessons for the aspiring writer

It's all about plot.

No, it's all about character.

If you get both of those right, you can do all the fancy stuff you like (but don't try the fancy stuff without it).

A fictional world created with enough depth becomes a character in its own right.

The unreliable narrator device can illuminate your fictional world from angles invisible in more straightforward narration.

Even after 1,000 pages, you don't have to give 'em a happy ending.
Your protagonist can get what he wants, and it still not need be a happy ending.

"Why Should I Read...?" Gets a Makeover

I have been pleasantly suprised by the amount of traffic and favourable comment occasioned by my ramblings. It's rather unfortunate that my list of ten books is rapidly drawing to a conclusion. I'm re-reading one of them now, and finding to my dismay that it no longer exerts the fascination it compelled in my youth. Our tastes change, since clearly the book itself (which for now shall remain nameless) does not. This in itself is a valuable insight. Several years ago I came to read The Lord of the Rings for the umpteenth time, and realised to my horror that while I could still admire the book, I no longer loved it. For a fantasy writer this is a shocking admission, and my fifteen-year old self would disown me for it. But when I come to look back at my own fantasy writing, it's a journey of trying to put the things into fantasy which I wanted to see but never found in Tolkien: credible female characters, wit, nuanced characterisation. That's not a criticism of Tolkien--he did not set out to do those things. The revelation for me as a writer is that I was reacting against Tolkien in my fiction long before I realised I no longer enjoyed reading him.

The artificiality of "Why Should I Read...?" is that it fixes my ten favourites at a point in time. As readers and writers we develop. Some of our old friends come with us, some fall away, and sometimes, by the happiest chance, we make new ones (The Time Traveler's Wife, for instance).

With this in mind, I will be extending "Why Should I Read...?" for some time beyond its initial span. Twenty books now seems a trivial objective, and for the time being I am aiming to expand my list to include 50 books, and in some cases I will relax my "one book per writer" rule. This will require me to re-read a number of books which are certain to feature on my list, a toil I endure for the sake of my readership.

And, tempting as it is, I have no plans to begin "Why Shouldn't I Read...?", a review of the ten books I have considered most irritating or over-rated. Such speculations have no place in the corn-fed sunshine world of ::Acquired Taste -- although I would as an aside note that you can learn as much from a book you hate as a book you love.

Next on our list at "Why Should I Read...?" is Charles Palliser's The Quincunx, an extraordinary book which at once a Dickensian homage, an intricately-carved puzzle, a deconstruction of the Victorian novel and--most of all--a rattling good yearn.

Why Should I Read...?

Master and Commander
Patrick O'Brian, 1970

I had been saving O'Brian for later in this series, but David Isaak's comments on my last post make this the opportune moment to consider him. Master and Commander is the first of a series of twenty novels treating the fortunes of Captain Jack Aubrey and his ship's physician, naturalist and sometime spy, Stephen Maturin. Why should you read Master and Commander first? Well, it's the first in the series, and they demand to be read in order.

There are two broad approaches to historical fiction: one uses language modelled on that of the period, the other more contemporary with the author. Both are illusory, of course, but the former method aims for verisimilitude through immersion in the language of the time, the latter through the immediacy of modernity. There is no "right" way (although in general I prefer the less modern approach) and each school carries its own risks.

O'Brian is perhaps the exemplar of the "total immersion" school. Not only the characters' dialogue but O'Brian's authorial voice drip Napoleonic period. O'Brian can write seamlessly in the Austen manner (witness the first half of Post Captain, the second novel in the series) but he has a much broader range. The drama of battle on the high seas (and the agonising tension of waiting for it), subtle verbal humour, coarse seaman's humour, the range of human emotion: O'Brian can do it all, and make it look effortless--although on close examination the scope of his research is awe-inspiring.

From a technical point of view, O'Brian is austere in the way he conveys information to the reader. The books employ jargon from the Age of Sail without any direct authorial explanation: there are no concessions to the 20th century reader. Luckily--although it is not luck, of course--the co-protagonist Maturin knows as little of ships as we do, and as he learns, so do we. But this info-dumping is not crude and mechanical: Maturin's ineptitude is a comic feature of the series, and while we laugh, we learn. And because Maturin is so accomplished in so many other fields, he does not appear a buffoon.

The Aubrey-Maturin series is also remarkable for retaining its freshness over 20 volumes. It is hard to maintain interest in a small group of characters over the long haul, but--partly because Aubrey and Maturin are so different--O'Brian is always able to till new ground. Both characters develop significantly, although this is not a prerequisite of series novels (Richard Stark's Parker, for instance, is much the same in 2007 as in 1961, and the reader wouldn't have it any other way).

How has it influenced me?
I discovered O'Brian comparatively recently, and much of my voice as a writer was already shaped, but he does something that I have long been trying to achieve: to take the narrative coolness of Jane Austen and deploy it in an action novel. O'Brian never belabours his effects, never nudges you to make sure you notice: he can kill off a sympathetic character we've known for ten novels in a single sentence and let you make what you will of it (and in this situation, if the author has to tell you how to react, either he or you is doing something badly wrong).

Dragonchaser also owes several explicit debts to O'Brian. The strong nautical theme--albeit racing galleys rather than square-riggers--came from my admiration for O'Brian, and the protagonist's naivety when not on his galley comes straight from Jack Aubrey.

I also admire--and try to replicate--the way in which O'Brian is able to juxtapose the comic and serious in a way which enhances both (a characteristic we also see in Jack Vance).

If my two greatest literary influences are Austen and Vance, then in O'Brian we see a writer who embodies the best of both. Writers are always learning and always absorbing new influences: I am sure O'Brian's over me is not yet complete.

Lessons for the aspiring writer
You can trust the reader to make sense of your world without explaining everything up-front.

Having a character as ignorant as the reader is helpful way of conveying information.

You can have two major characters without setting up a protagonist/antagonist relationship.

Using period diction need not alienate the reader.

Make sure you know far more about your fictional world than the reader--but don't feel compelled to tell them more than a fraction.

If you love the world that you are creating, it will be apparent to the reader.

Why Should I Read...?

Pride and Prejudice
Jane Austen, 1813

There are few books I write about with trepidation, but Pride and Prejudice is one of them. It is surely the most widely read book on my list, and one on which most people already have an opinion. In this case, I can dispense with a plot summary: there can be few readers who are not aware of the switchback romance of Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy.

In any event, the plot is the least interesting aspect of the book: girl meets boy, girl hates boy, girl hates boy even more, girl reconsiders, girl gets boy. Austen does the mechanics with unobtrusive excellence, but it’s not for this reason we’re still reading the book two hundred years later.

When we think of Pride and Prejudice¸ what comes to mind most of all are the characters. A detailed analysis of how Austen delineates her characters is (fortunately) outside the scope of this piece. For now it’s enough to note the variety of techniques employed: interior monologue (Elizabeth); naturalistic speech (Darcy, who is never a viewpoint character); comically exaggerated speech (Mr Collins, Mrs Bennet); direct authorial statement.

The conventional view of Austen as a purveyor of superior drawing-room romances does her a considerable disservice, since Pride and Prejudice is more than a crisp love-story with rounded characters. There is real steel under the surface. Charlotte Lucas’ marriage to Mr Collins has no place in a fluffy comedy, and the astringency of Austen’s authorial voice is no less mordant for coolness with which it is deployed. When Caroline Bingley goads Darcy into praising Elizabeth, Austen soundlessly slides in the killer thrust: Miss Bingley was left to all the satisfaction of having forced him to say what gave no one any pain but herself. It’s unfortunate that the currents of modern fiction make such authorial observations unfashionable these days.

How has it influenced me?
Jane Austen is not perhaps an obvious influence for a fantasy writer (unless you’re writing Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell)¸ but her impact on me as writer is second only to Jack Vance. It’s interesting to speculate whether my cool narrative tone comes from reading Vance and Austen, or whether I like those writers so much because of my predisposition to that style.

The Dog of the North would be a pitiful novel if I had never realised the tensile strength and flexibility of formal dialogue, and the immense power to be gained from restraint. And while it would be crass to compare any aspect of my dialogue with Jane Austen, the battles between hero and heroine in all my stories always have Elizabeth and Mr Darcy not too far from my mind.

Austen’s characters are frequently unable to speak and act directly because of the constraints of the societies in which they exist, hence the marvellous verbal subtleties and indirections they employ: as a writer who specialises in stratified societies, political intrigues and injudicious romances, I would be cloddish not to try for the same effects. Others are better placed to judge the effectiveness of my technique.

Lessons for the aspiring writer
The modern creative writing advice “show, don’t tell” is valuable when not taken to excess, but when you can do the telling as well as Jane Austen, it’s criminal not to.
Don’t be afraid to give the reader information directly. Sometimes it’s more efficient and more pleasing than a contrived dialogue drop.
If you are going to use the “classic romance plot”, your characters need extraordinary freshness and vividness to pull it off.
The tension between formal dialogue and the emotions concealed beneath is a powerful dramatic tool.
Conflict can be not just protagonist against antagonist, but protagonist against society. Best of all, use both together.
Understatement trumps overstatement. Always.

Why Should I Read...?

The Miracle of Castel di Sangro
Joe McGinniss, 1999

This is the first book on my list which is not fiction. McGinniss spent a season with the Italian football—should that be "soccer"?—team Castel di Sangro as they struggle against relegation. Not the least of the ironies is thrown up is that perhaps the greatest book ever written about football should come from America, one of the few countries where the game has never taken root.

The Miracle succeeds on several different levels. The ostensible sporting story which underpins it is dramatic, as Castel di Sangro avoid relegation in the penultimate game of the season, but this is really a story of relationships: McGinniss becomes close to the players as the season unfolds, is befriended by the team’s coach and is drawn into the sinister games of the quasi-mafiosi club owner and his henchman. Two of the players, friends of McGinniss, are killed in a car accident and another is arrested for drug-smuggling.

So far we have a magnificent sports book, raised above the ruck by McGinniss’ ability to get inside the sporting clichés and the vividness with which he draws the characters. But it is truly great for another reason, and it’s one I don’t think McGinniss intended: I came away from the book thinking that for all his privileged access and his genuine empathy with the players, he in fact fundamentally misunderstood the world he was living in. McGinniss becomes an unreliable narrator in his own life.

At the end of the book, Castel di Sangro go into their last match of the season have secured safety. The players tell McGinniss that he doesn’t need to go to the game—he should stay at home and relax. McGinniss goes to the match anyway. Castel di Sangro lose—lose because they have deliberately thrown the match. In Italy, if you have nothing to play for at the end of the season, but your opponent does, you come to an arrangement: il sistema, the system, Italians call it. You never know when you will want the favour returned. McGinniss can’t accept il sistema. It offends his sense of fair play, and he calls the players liars, cheats, cowards. Most of them he never speaks to again. The acceptance of the players, for which he so yearned, is withdrawn. Despite Castel di Sangro’s escape, the book ends in bitterness.

McGinniss can’t accept the ethics of the world he has aspired to enter. Of course match-fixing is wrong, but McGinniss can only view the situation through his own perspectives; he can't, or won't, enter into the players' maps of the world. He doesn't understand that "this is how we do things round here", that players' livelihoods are dependent on following these unwritten rules. He has been opinionated throughout the book (a privileged observer, he regularly harangues the team’s coach on his tactical errors) and ultimately his tragedy is that he can’t fully give himself over to the values of the world around him. It makes for a melancholy conclusion to what should have been a triumphant story.

How has it influenced me?
All writers, whether in fiction or factual, are faced with the task of organising their material: that’s what writing is. There is more crossover between the two than might immediately be apparent. If we see The Miracle in structural terms, we have a protagonist coming into an environment as an outsider, being partly assimilated and ultimately rejected. The outsider plot is certainly not original, but McGinnis retails it with power and pathos. And in all of my fiction, the hero begins as an outsider, and ends up as one. In The Dog of the North , like The Miracle of Castel di Sangro¸ the protagonist has goals whose implications he doesn’t fully understand, with profound implications for the achievement of those goals. And all of my protagonists struggle, usually with indifferent results, to reconcile their personal ideals with the grubby world around them.

I have long nurtured the idea of writing a story in which the fortunes of a sports team are central (also partly influenced by Jack Vance’s Trullion). Dragonchaser, with its galley-racing plot strand, was a part-scratching of that itch.

Lessons for the aspiring writer
The “outsider motif” is a strong mechanism for transmitting information about the world of the book to the reader.
Having a protagonist who doesn’t understand key elements of the world around him creates dramatic tension and the possibility of a strong denouement.
If you are telling a story about a principled man in a flawed world, the effect is much more powerful if you are not uncritically sympathetic to the protagonist.
Sport may ultimately be trivial, but writing about it doesn’t need to be.
Plotting is not just a sequence of events: it’s how the events fit together, what to include, and what to exclude.

Why Should I Read...?

The Time Traveler's Wife
Audrey Niffenegger, 2004

Uniquely among the books on my list, I've only read this once--and a single reading is enough to know that this is a magnificent novel. Combining a "why didn't I think of that?" central concept with two beautifully realised protagonists and a heart-breaking climax, it's hard to imagine a more compelling romantic novel.

The novel is structured around the extended relationship of Henry and Clare. Henry suffers from a genetic condition which causes him to time-travel unpredictably across his lifespan, and as a result he meets Clare, who is to become his wife, when he is an adult and she still a child. He knows how the relationship will develop, but she does not: later in life, when Clare meets Henry "for real", she knows they will marry, but he does not. Niffenegger handles the time-travel paradoxes with skill--while The Time Traveler's Wife was not marketed as science-fiction, science-fiction it most assuredly is, but that's a hobby-horse for another day.

It becomes apparent early in the novel that Henry's time-travelling does not persist beyond his early forties, and with gloomy foreboding we come to realise that it is his death which will put a stop to it. Niffenegger imbues the characters with such vitality that we hope against hope (with occasional encouragement from the author) that we are wrong, but as the novel races towards its climax, the conclusion is inescapable. And while the ending is not by any means a happy one, it is uplifting in a bittersweet way wholly in keeping with what has gone before, at once both unexpected and appropriate.

One of the prime achievements of the book is to make it into print at all. In synopsis it must have seemed all but unpublishable: a chronology all but impossible to describe, and a science-fictional premise underpinning a novel which could only ever have been aimed at a mainstream audience. If any one element of the whole had not worked--if the timeline had unravelled, if the characters had been flat, if the ending had been pedestrian--I suspect the whole thing would have collapsed. But Niffenegger is pitch-perfect throughout. The result is a quirky, brilliant, unclassifiable novel which, against all the odds, became the international hit it deserved to be.

How has it influenced me?
This is the most contemporary work on my list, and I would be hard-put to find any direct line of succession to The Dog of the North, the only novel I've written since. But it's always encouraging to find speculative fiction enjoying mainstream success, and so it must have weighed to some extent in my decision to submit my own writing to Macmillan. And in the ending of The Dog of the North, I try for that mixture of poignance and congruence which Niffenegger so perfectly achieves, even if in rather a different way.

Lessons for the aspiring writer
If it's good enough, it will sell--even if it's uncategorisable.
Sometimes the biggest hits come from doing something no-one else has ever tried.
No matter how avant-garde your premise, make sure you do the basics right: compelling, vivid characters and rigorous control of plot and pacing.
The most powerful endings combine several often contradictory emotions.

Why Should I Read...?

My Cousin Rachel
Daphne du Maurier, 1951

Daphne du Maurier was a prolific writer of novels and short stories, and most of her work repays careful reading. Many of her novels combine intensely-realised Cornish settings, warped romances, a central mystery, an unstable protagonist and an overwrought Gothic sensibility. When all the elements come together the results can be spectacular, as in her best-known story Rebecca (1938) and The House on the Strand (1969).

Even better than either of these fine novels is My Cousin Rachel. The plot incorporates all of the familiar du Maurier motifs and each enhances the other. The naive young protagonist Philip inherits his cousin's Cornish estate and shortly after, his cousin's widow Rachel visits. Rachel is clearly a woman with a past, and from the outset there are suggestions that she might have poisioned her husband. As the story develops, Philip becomes infatuated with her, moving from hostility to adoration under Rachel's manipulations. Du Maurier depicts the relationship beautfully, never nudging the reader to emphasise her points. It's all there in the text without needing to be underscored.

Philip's mental and physical state unravels as the story unfolds. From being the only character to suspect her at the beginning, he is the only who does not by the end (although his doubts are starting to return). Du Maurier gives plenty of contradictory clues as to Rachel's true nature and motivation and--this is what makes the novel great--never resolves the question at all. The book ends with Rachel's death, and we never know whether she killed one man and plotted against another. It is a rigorous triumph of point-of-view: Philip is the narrator, and he cannot be certain--so neither is the reader. How easy it would have been for du Maurier either to give us an explicit resolution or a heavy hint. It's what the reader expects, and it's taking a big risk not to provide it. In the end, though, it's that risk which takes My Cousin Rachel from a very good novel to a great one.

How has it influenced me?
I have never written a story which doesn't have a beautiful, enigmatic (anti-) heroine, invariably more intelligent than the male central character. I'm not unique in that, but I've never seen it done better than the character of Rachel Ashley. The combination of mystery and romance so favoured by du Maurier has also underpinned all of my plots: when the elements are properly intertwined, they make a rock-solid plot structure.

Lessons for the aspiring writer
You don't have to tie everything up: sometimes less is more.
The limitations of first-person narration can sometimes be a strength