Chosen because: a Christmas
present from my mystery-loving aunt
Well, once again (following
Colin Cotterrill's The Woman who Wouldn't Die) I'm thrown into the
middle of a series, with a set of characters who (presumably) all
know each other and each others' little foibles, while I'm left
trying to work out who's who, and, more importantly, try to work up
the empathy for them.
This last couple of weeks, I've
been reading four different crime novels (The Woman who Wouldn't Die,
The Cadaver Game, A Lesson in Secrets, and The Library Paradox), all part of
a series, all with a historical twist, and its been an incentive to
consider the role of character in the readers' enjoyment of the
novel. With two of the novels, The Cadaver Game and A Lesson in Secrets, I'd
already read several other books in the series. With the other two, I
was coming fresh into the story half-way through. How much of my enjoyment of The
Cadaver Game was the result of meeting again characters who I'm
familiar with? How much of my difficulty with The Library Paradox was
the result of being thrown into the fourth or fifth novel in the
series?
I was left thinking of Donald
Maas's thoughts (in his excellent book Writing the Breakout Novel) on the crucial importance of the reader's empathy with a
central character, and his discussions of what makes us identify a character. My
problem with Vanessa Weatherburn, the heroine of this novel, was that I never
particularly got to like her. For no good reason. She seemed a nice
enough person, but there was never that moment in the opening chapter
when she grabbed at me and made me think, 'yes, this one, I'm rooting
for this one'. I certainly never got as far as liking (or even being
able to quite remember who was who) her three young student
companions, Amy, Emily and Jonathan, which meant that when one of
them fell into mortal danger towards the novel's climax, I was fairly
unmoved.
Vanessa Weatherburn meets all the criteria
for a heroine I should empathise with - an intelligent, educated
Victorian woman, who is willing to throw off the shackles of
convention to take up an alternative career as a detective. She even
lives in Cambridge, my own home town, in a house which I can picture
exactly. And yet... I was left ungripped.
So what does an author have to
do to make me want to cheer for their heroes, right or wrong, from
the beginning to the end of the novel? What makes us put a small part
of our soul into someone else's imagination? It's something that I,
as a would-be writer myself, need to keep thinking about. But one of
my writing buddies, reading over an early draft of my novel,
suggested that it was the small incidents that can touch - and the
small words. My heroine left her cold, while her side-kick, she said,
had her from the very first moment that he gently smoothed the straps
over a dead boy's shoulder.
I was repeatedly left thinking
that I should be enjoying the novel more. For me, without a deeper
empathy with the characters, I felt rather as though I was listening to a
BBC Radio 4 documentary about attitudes towards Jews in England and
France in the late 19th century - and if I'd wanted to read about
that, I would have gone back to the source and re-read Amy Levy's
Reuben Sachs, or Zola's J'Accuse.
Having said that, I really did
enjoy the elements of the novel set deep in the immigrant Jewish
community in London's East End. Shaw brought the atmosphere, the sights and smells and people, to life in a way that I was longing for in the rest of the novel's settings. But in many ways, for me, the most
memorable part of the whle novel was a re-telling of a short story by Yiddish writer Isaac Peretz.
No comments:
Post a Comment