'Structure in stories' - week 2 of a course from by the Cambridge Storytellers

Week two of the story-telling course, in the wonderfully atmospheric space of Cambridge's Michaelhouse Church and Arts Centre - big enough to give you a real feeling of performance, and yet intimate enough for us to work in pairs and small groups without any difficulty.

Cambridge Storytellers are a wonderful group of people, talented storytellers all, who come together to celebrate, practise and encourage this wonderful art. Folk tales, new stories, retellings of people's lives - all sorts of shapes and stories are told at the monthly Story Circle.

And now, in the darkest part of the year, they're organising a series of story-telling classes, taking novice story-tellers through on a journey

I was first inspired to join the classes after hearing Marion Leeper recount an elderly Cambridge man's memories, in story form, at a local history celebration in a graveyard (I have some wild nights out). I then tried my hand at a bit of storytelling in the Story Circle (sharing a wonderful old Viking tale, translated by my old friend Ralph O'Connor), and am now working on the craft during the story-telling course.

This week's class focused on structure. We looked at the idea of the 3 part structure - beginning, middle and end - identifiying the structures of first various folk tales and myths, and then the stories that we'd all brought. It was felt-tip and paper time, and we drew out our stories as cartoons, ready to analyse the structure without getting caught up in the language.

I'd 'brought along' two stories - one, a set of reminiscences of a local woman that I'm shaping into a story, and second, a fully worked out tale by the great 19th century Yiddish writer Isaac Peretz. The Yiddish tale fitted perfectly into the 3-part structure, but I soon realised that part of the problem with my local-history story is that it doesn't have a proper end. One task for the week is going to be finding an end! On the other hand, Marion had also suggested that the three parts themselves, particularly the middle, Marian said, can in turn be divided into three parts. I was glad to realise that the middle of my tale already separates nicely into three parts.

We next looked at tracking the characters' ups and downs, drawing graphs across the story outline with their changes of fortune. If we had two contrasting protagonists, Marion suggested, the graphs might form mirror images of each other - the hero's triumph is the villain's downfall, and vice versa. Again, I realised one of the issues with my local-history story - a real lack of change of fortune. After a bad start, my main character currently seems to continue on a fairly even keel for the rest of the story, which isn't keeping the listeners' attention, although the individual incidents are good. Definitely something to think about and work on, before next week's class on 'creating a setting'. 

To find out more, see http://www.cambridgestorytellers.com/

Review of Colin Cotterill, The Woman who Wouldn't Die, a Dr Siri mystery

Chosen: from the circulating selection in the village library

Similar to: the Number One Ladies' Detective Agency, the Daisy Dalrymple mysteries


I came in to the Dr Siri series about half-way through, or possibly towards the end, so at least half of my description of the novel's setting is probably going to be wrong. Set in Laos in the 1970s, a country still under a military / communist rule, Dr Siri is Laos's only coroner, although he seems to have been sacked under mysterious circumstances relating to another novel. (This is the downside to picking up books from the local library, which never seems to take into account the fact that many people like to begin at the start of a series, and then move on one by one. Our library seems to specialise in having only the middle part of a trilogy, and a random selection of novels throughout a series.) Dr Siri is called in by the authorities to validate the claims of a medium, who is claiming to be able to track down the bodies of those who have died in the country's long and bloody struggle for independence. Meanwhile, Dr Siri's wife is being pursued by a sinister figure from her young days as a freedom fighter. Is the medium telling the truth about her mysterious abilities? And can she guide Dr Siri in the use of his own psychic powers? (It turns out that psychic powers in a coroner are less use than you might imagine.)

It's a remarkably cosy novel,  despite the ostensible subject matter of Laos's fight for independence from the French. Filled with extraordinarily nice characters, all of whom spend their time being nice to each other, you're left in no doubt that nothing unpleasant will happen to any of the main characters, even if the author has to pull in an extraordinary and previously almost unmentioned deus ex machina to do so.

Good comfort reading for a winter's evening, but I was left oddly without a sense of place. Compared to Magdalen Nabb's novel 'Death in Springtime' about poverty among Sardinian shepherds*, this left me without a sense of place, and without any real feeling for what makes Laos unique. It could very easily have been set in an English village, and very little would need to be changed. Still, the library has a few more of Cotterill's novels, and I'll probably pick them up for light entertainment.

*And far, far more gripping than this suggests


Update - after a discussion with colleagues in the office, I realise that at least I'm now rather better informed about Laos 20th century history than I previously was, which has to up the star rating of this book somewhat.

Review of The Cadaver Game, Kate Ellis (2012)

One of the Wesley Peterson Murder Mysteries

A team of archaeologists digging up a buried picnic as part of an art installation find their activities unexpectedy linked to a series of murders in a small Devon town.  


Chosen because: available in the village library



You'd think the police force of Devon would have seen sense and banned all archaeological investigations by now. Because every time that Neil Watson of the Devon County Archaeological Service leads a dig in any kind of archaeological site - Viking longships, iron age forts, or here, as part of an art installation - his friend DI Wesley Peterson of the local police force is sure to be notified about a murder. And the two are just guaranteed to be related in some unexpected but sinister way. We must be onto the 20th book in the series by now, and the archaeology and the murder are linked every time.

On the other hand, the unlikely historic coincidences are just part of the fun of this series of detective stories, where the archaeology gets as much time as the modern-day murders. They aren't gory, but at the same time, Ellis never forgets the potential sadness of police work, and the impact that it can have on the police involved.

In The Cadaver Game, a local landowner has had the unsavory idea of recreating an 18th century game of man hunting, inspired by an old diary. Unfortunately, it ends in death for two of the young human 'foxes', who are found naked at the bottom of the cliff. One of them is the cousin of a young officer in Wesley's squad, who struggles to come to terms with her death. Meanwhile, another woman is found dead in a surburban house. And Neil Watson - under the influence of large amounts of cash - is taking part in an art installation which involves his archaeology students digging up a buried picnic. Could any of it possibly be linked? Yes, of course it all is.

It's a great advert for having likeable characters in a novel series, and plenty of them. Ellis's books are just packed full of nice people - detectives and archaeologists - none of whom are in the least bit gritty or brooding. They're about as far away from Scandi-noir brooding heroes - or even Inspector Morse - as you can get. You might actually want to go to the pub with them, if you didn't mind hearing quite a lot about the problems of county archaeological funding. Gerry, the widowed senior policeman, might seem to have the potential for a bit of brooding, but gets over it by eating a lot of fish and chips, going to the pub, arguing with his teenagers and generally getting on with life.

Well worth reading for a cosy evening in with a bit of bite to it. Plus the fun of wondering why Neil and Wesley never seem to comment that once again, their two jobs have become mysteriously interlinked.

Review of Tea from an Empty Cup by Pat Cadigan (1998)

A complex crime novel set in a world where virtual reality has become more attractive than real life, and where identity is endlessly alterable.

Chosen by: discovered on the science fiction shelf on a Mill Road charity bookshop

Set in some unspecified time in the future, Tea from an Empty Cup follows the story of  detective Lieutentant Konstantin, whose latest case involves the murder of a virtual reality addict. Just as the gamer 'dies' within the game, his throat is cut in real life. This turns out to be only the start of a series of disappearances and deaths, and Konstantin makes the decision to take on the dead man's virtual avatar in order to investigate the case. At the same time, young Yuki is looking for her missing boyfriend, and also, you've guessed it, takes on his virutal persona to track down his movements.

There's also a bizarre sub-plot about Japan having been overwhelmed by a tsunami, and the inhabitants' attempts to recreate their lost Japan in the virtual world.

It's an intriguing premise, but for me, the novel really failed to grip. The main flaw was that the plot was simply too confusing - with two women on different missions both taking on a character in the virtual world, the result was that I could never remember which was which, who they were pretending to be, and who they were looking for. In a twist about three quarters of the way through something even more confusing happens, but by that point I was pretty much failing to follow the plot, and so cant remember what it was. I certainly wasn't able to develop any relationship or empathy with either of the main characters, and was left unmoved by their cyber-fates.

First published in 1998, the novel is perhaps most interesting today as a relatively early take on the potential implications of virtual reality, and video gaming  (the author was for a conencted with the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit at the University of Warwick). However, for me, the overly complex plot and the under-defined characters let it down.

Review of Plan for Chaos, John Wyndham (2009)

A photojournalist in 1950s New York is appalled to discover that a series of women, each one looking identical to his fiance, are being killed. He's even more appalled when the deaths turn out to be merely part of a convoluted Nazi plot to take over the US, led by his aunt.

Chosen because: seen in the science fiction section of Waterstone bookshop, Oxford


When I saw a 'new' John Wynham novel on the shelves of the science fiction section at Waterstones in Oxford, I had to buy it straight away. Wynham's classic novels - The Day of the Triffids, The Midwich Cuckoos, and all the rest of them - were some of the first science fiction that I ever read, and I put one of his short stories down as responsible for my current profession (it's the one in which a Soviet botanist dies in mysterious circumstances on the Moon, for those of you that know it).

Plan for Chaos was in fact apparently one of his earlier novels, one that he was working on at the time of The Day of the Triffids, and which he put to one side without re-drafting when The Day of the Triffids was accepted for publication.

The story line is frankly rather silly - the type of thing that Clive Cussler would be using for a Dirk Pitt adventure if he hadn't already done Nazis to death. A top-ranking Nazi has escaped at the end of the war, and developed a new technology for IVF and human embryo growth (in a very similar way to Huxley's Brave New World). She uses it to grow a master race of identical young Nazis, all of whom are genetically her children, who are going about taking over the world in a mysterious and roundabout way.

Our hero, a young photographer for a New York newspaper, is appalled to see a photograph of a dead woman who is identical to his fiance (and cousin) Frieda. He's even more appalled when he discovers that a whole string of women, all of them identical to Frieda and each other, are being found dead across New York. Then Frieda disappears...

Its fair enough to begin by saying that it's not great. Wyndham has hit the problem that (as I speedily discovered in writing my first novel) people locked up in a prison for chapters on end are not especially thrilling. Even when the people holding the hero and heroine prisoner are Nazi clones in an underground bunker, you can still get very fed up of people stuck in one place.

I'm always particularly interested by the speculative and predictive aspects of Wyndham's novels - the social effects of rising sea levels in The Kraken Wakes, the political effects of increased life spans in Trouble with Lichen - and this one doesn't have the same intellectual punch. Some of the ideas haven't aged particularly well - in particular, the horror of the hero and heroine at the idea of IVF per se seems rather unnecessary today - and having been primed by Lois McMaster Bujold's Ethan of Athos, I was extremely dubious about who had actually looked after all these clones in their early years.

The result is a novel which is most interesting as a comparison with Wyndham's other writing, in order to see what he gets right so often elsewhere, rather than as a good read in itself.