Got Story?

Some books are a breeze to read, even when they run over 800 pages, and some books, no matter how long or short, are more like slogging through muddy clay wearing lead boots. Books like that often have excellent grammar, wonderful similes and metaphors, and the writing is sublime, but something is missing. An important ingredient didn't make it into the final product, like leaving the chocolate out of a hot chocolate. All that's left is hot milk and that is just gross. A little vanilla would help the taste, but chocolate makes it tasty.

Finding the reason why the book plods instead of zooms along has been the focus of my review work for the past 9 years of my professional reviewing life. After a box full of such books, I long for Stephen King, Dan Brown, or even an old favorite like Andre Norton. The genre doesn't make nearly as much difference as the writer. Stephen King loads on the horror, and I'm not averse to that. Dan Brown's technique leaves a lot to be desired and he loves information dumps, but he makes it all seem so effortless, if a bit facile at times. Andre Norton wrote what would now be considered YA (young adult) novels, but to me they were passports to worlds of magic and warfare and the stuff of dreams.

I recently read Moonfire by Marion Zimmer Bradley, whose Darkover series I devoured whole. The short story was disappointing and I couldn't quite put my finger on why. I'd loved so many of her other short stories and novels, and series, so why wasn't it jelling for me? Why did I feel like I was plodding through that muddy clay pit in leaden shoes again?

I've been switching between E. L. Doctorow's All the Time in the World and The Flatey Enigma, both books that I have to review, and the leaden boots were getting heavier. A few of the stores in Doctorow's anthology were interesting but most seemed pointless. I chalked up having trouble getting through The Flatey Enigma as a fail in translation between Norwegian, the author's original language, and English. It happens sometimes, but then I enjoyed
Juan Gomez-Jurado's The Traitor's Emblem, despite a few plot inconsistencies. Maybe translations problems were not the source of my struggle with the book.

I put both books down and decided to read Charlaine Harris's Grave Sight, the first book in the Harper Connelly series. I have to force myself to put down the book so I can get some sleep or write for a while. It's that good. I have had the same reaction to most of the Sookie Stackhouse series by Harris.

That's when it hit me. I couldn't put the heavy plodding down to lack of characterization, bad grammar, horrid sentence structure, no technique, or being so in love with the words and creating beautiful and memorable passages. It's much more basic than that. There is no story. That's why I had to put A Dance with Dragons aside for a while and why Terry Pratchett's Pyramids got stuck going on the downslope. The authors did what so many authors fall prey to; they forgot the whole point of writing is to tell a story. Among all the witticisms, great battles, wonderful characters, and marvelous prose, the story was lost, and a good story is the only reason for a book to exist.

That's what Dan Brown, Stephen King, Andre Norton, and even Marion Zimmer Bradley when she's on her game, do so well. They tell great stories. The genre isn't important; that's a matter of taste. Story is important.

Literary, horror, adventure, thriller, science fiction, fantasy, romance, mainstream, none of that matters if the author keeps to the whole reason for books, if they tell a good story. Scheherazade would have been killed long before she got through her first night of storytelling for the king if she had been dressed it all up with fancy words and intelligent technique and forgot to tell an entertaining story that was so good the King had to keep listening, needed to know what happened next.

I read a considerable amount of literary novels but some authors leave me cold, no matter how many awards they win. I enjoyed Julian Barnes's The Sense of an Ending and couldn't get through John Banville's The Sea. Banville left me cold and Barnes's almost novella enticed me with wondrous prose, detailed descriptions, and a memorable character. Barnes's story was worth the read. I still can't get through The Sea.

Jasper Fforde's Thursday series has caught my interest and his stories are stories within stories, as has Ian McEwan's Atonement. I still haven't gotten to read any more of his books, but there are plenty in my to be read pile. Salman Rushdie enchants me with exotic fare and Terry Pratchett almost always makes me laugh while the tale ends far too quickly. Pyramids was an aberration -- or at least I hope so.

We are all children putting off having to go to bed, wanting to stay up just a little longer as our parents read just one more chapter of Peter Pan or Wind in the Willows or even Harry Potter. We want to hear a story, even a made up story, as long as it is a good story. Forget all the pyrotechnics, academic prizes, and prose stylings. All of those are as satisfying as a masterful and artistic wrapping job on a box that contains the good, in this case a story. Just tell me a story and make it a good one. I can live without the trimmings as long as there is sufficient meat on the bones. Books like that take no time at all to read because a wondrous story is at the heart of it.

When a writer forgets the basic premise of putting together a book, none of it matters if the story is not there or only half there. If you've got story; you will have readers, faithful readers who will snap up everything you write.

Charlaine Harris is not a prose stylist and her books are a joy to read most of the time because she tells fascinating stories. Harris unlocked the mystery that I have struggled with for so long, reminding me of what is important and why I write. It's all about the story. Where would Scheherazade be without a compelling story? As a storyteller, without listeners, but as a woman trying to save her life . . . dead.

Give them story.

Writing sex and death

Ever since I saw the movie Atonement I wanted to read the book. I find out about a lot of writers by watching adaptations of their work. I finally had some time and had Ian McEwan's book, so I sat down and dove into the story.

Much of the movie stuck pretty close to McEwan's book -- until the end. That's when everything changed. Briony, in her seventies and just diagnosed with a slow decline into senility, has rewritten and sent her story to the publishers who have brought out all her previous work. The first draft of the book was written fifty years and five years after she accused Robbie Turner of raping her cousin Lola the night the twins ran away. She finally understood what was going on between Robbie and her sister Cecilia and wants to make amends. She will recant the testimony that put Robbie in a mental hospital for nearly four years and he can come back and pick up his life where he left off, go to medical school and be a successful and respected doctor without the specter of rape and mentally ill hanging over him and Cecilia. They can be happy and get married and move on with their life. She will have atoned for her sins.

That's not how it ends.

Robbie did indeed die of a septic wound from shrapnel and Cee died in a bombing that took out the tube station near where she lived. Briony's book cannot be published because Lola and Paul Marshall are now married and very wealthy and would sue the publisher for libel. You cannot libel the dead, but Lola and Paul aren't dead and Briony's mind and life are raveling out so fast it isn't likely she will survive to see her book published and Robbie vindicated posthumously. The bad guys win or, in this case, the bad guy and girl win.

From what little I've read of McEwan's work, and some of the reviews of his other books, the bad guys usually win in the end. McEwan has a fascination with sex and death that permeates everything I have read so far, including the stories in first love, last rites, most of which are crude and shocking in their descent into the depths of the connections between sex and death.

A pedophile who blames his unpopularity on his weak chin takes advantage of a young girl, exposes himself and makes her touch his penis and then kills her because no one can know what he's done. Then he poses as an innocent man who just happened to see the dead girl drifting down the canal from the bridge above. That's his story and of course no one believes him because he has a weak chin, almost no chin, just a straight slide from his lower lip down to his neck. The story is creepy and delves into the mind of an anti-social, whining, wretch who is obviously mentally ill. In that sense, McEwan captures the character perfectly.

At first I felt sorry for the guy, but it didn't take long for pity and sympathy to turn to disgust. Most of the stories begin and end in the same vein. One sexually precocious pre-pubescent boy glorying in his mastery of all things bad over his mate decides a trial run before convincing the town tramp, who will let him look at her quim for a shilling, is in order. He lures his much younger sister into a new twist on the game of Mummies and Daddies while his parents are out so he can see the female plumbing ahead of time and have sex with her. He succeeds with the help of his little sister who knows more about her body than her older brother and is shocked and upset when he pees inside her. All of this is told by a bragging, preening boy who is so generous he allows his father and uncles to gift him with a shilling when he makes more money than they do through criminal acts. After all, his father and uncles are so proud of being able to give him the shilling he doesn't want to spoil their feelings of generosity and kindness. It's not the money he enjoys, but the superiority over his elders. No doubt, he too will get away with it, as do all the perfidious and evil-minded characters in McEwan's stories.

It seems McEwan is fascinated by meanness of spirit and spiritually and emotionally stunted people who succeed at everything they do no matter who has to suffer in the process. Sex and death are integral parts of Atonement as they are in McEwan's short stories and, from what I've read, in his Booker Prize winning novel, Amsterdam. There is no doubt of McEwan's mastery of prose and his intricately plotted and executed stories, but the unsavory characters who manage to get decent people to do their dirty work for them seem to be the point of his theme. It's not just sex and death that infuse McEwan's work with life, but the perversion of sex and twisted deaths that are at the heart of them all.

What's needed is more research and more reading to get to the bottom of McEwan's themes and the driving force behind his portrayal of the darkness that inevitably triumphs.