Reviews

Degree of Separation

/ Lisa / 4 Comments

I belong to a mystery book group on the Shelfari website. We just finished a discussion on Val McDermid’s book, The Mermaid’s Singing. One of the discussion points was around the difficulty of reading scenes of torture. My response has continued to nag me, so I’m going to broaden the response, here.

I read the book, and also watched the television show based on it. For the discussion group, I said that reading a torture scene troubled me a lot more than watching it on TV. I felt it was because watching something allows a greater degree of separation than reading.

Reading allows no separation between the reader and the story. We’re up close, physically and mentally. Our imagination allows us to be more deeply involved because we picture everything the way we need or want it to look. We have the tactile experience of holding that story in our hands, either in print or within an e-reader. The outside world is held at bay because we are within our own mind, even though we are reading the words of another.

With television, we have the physical separation, nothing to touch but the remote, and distance between the couch and the box. We are also not so intimately involved because there are others around us in the form of the actors. We are observing only, not engaged because our imagination isn’t needed. The scene, setting, and characters are chosen for us. And the emotions conjured by the scene are only those emotions the actor shares with us. In contrast to the emotions a character is given by a writer, that I, as a reader, can project on to and picture the way I want that emotion to look.

So, watching a torture scene in a thriller on TV may be disturbing, but reading it, for me anyway, was so unsettling I considered not finishing the book. I love Val McDermid’s writing, and a testament to her strong skill is her ability to raise very strong reactions and emotions in me. This is one example of her skill. She pulls me into her story and eliminates all barriers between me and the characters.

Television just isn’t the same.

Tribute on a Shelf

/ Lisa / 10 Comments

I unpacked some (but not nearly all) of our books recently.  One whole, long shelf ended up being full of just Elizabeth Peters books.  Those cracked and well-worn spines represented years of an author’s devotion to the craft.  And those were just the ones she wrote under that pseudonym.  To them you can add all the many books written as Barbara Michaels (any of you give yourself nightmares reading Ammie Come Home?), and her non-fiction books on archaeology written under her real name of Barbara Mertz.  I notice her cover photos are starting to show her age, but she’s still writing.

Think about it.  All those years of struggling with plot and character and continuity in her series, and editing.  Now that’s love.

The first book I purchased of hers was back in the late 1970’s and was called Legend in Green Velvet.  It was during the time period of Phyllis Whitney, Mary Stewart, Victoria Holt.  You know, the gothic romance period.  The book was set in Scotland and since I was madly in love with anything Scottish and had just started Scottish dancing, I counted out my seventy-five cents and bought it.  Elizabeth Peters tricked me.  It wasn’t a gothic romance.  It was hilarious.  It was a mystery.  It had characters who weren’t perfect, and who were eccentric.  Needless to say, when she followed that with the first in the Amelia Peabody series, I was hooked.  All these years later I still anxiously wait for the next one, knowing that as she ages, the chances are good there won’t be more.

One of the things Elizabeth Peters has always done is insert ‘inside’ comments.  If you’ve read all her books, you understand them.  A character from one series wanders through another.  An object important to one book shows up in another.  A character says something that has to do with another story.  I know there are other writers who do this, but she does it with a gentle hand and with the humor that is in all her books.

Another thing Elizabeth is very good at is showing the protagonist in stories written in first person.  If you like to write in first person, I strongly urge you to read the Amelia Peabody series.  The books have evolved over the years, but even in the early ones written in the 1980’s, she was very strong in this aspect of writing.  Amelia has a view of herself that is at odds with the way everyone else sees her.  And Elizabeth manages to show everyone’s opinions without stepping outside of Amelia’s mind.  This is very strong in her later Peabody books.

I would say that Elizabeth Peters went a long way toward encouraging me to write.  I was writing anyway by that time, in secret of course, but she instilled in me a desire to be able to pull a reader so fully into a story, to make them laugh out loud, and to make them want to be part of the character’s family for many years.

I can only hope that she has some more books in her because I’m not ready for her to be done writing.  There’s still one more shelf to fill.

 

Coincidences

/ Lisa / 3 Comments

I have a personal goal that I will never walk away from a book unfinished.  Partly it’s optimism.  Sometimes I just keep hoping the book will get better.  Honestly, it is very rare that I come across a story that I feel the urge to pitch out into the woods.  Which is why I am very, very slowly making my way through a book called The Historian, by Elizabeth Kostova.

Here’s the first problem.  I am on page 323 (not quite half way through) and I still do not know the name of the protagonist.

Second problem.  I can flip through the book, pick out a line of dialog, and not have a clue who is talking because they all sound so much alike.  The father talks exactly like the teenage daughter, who in spite of being a teen in the 1970’s speaks like an old-world professor.  I could cut the author slack here because dialog that is unique to the character is something we all struggle with.  However, I’m also struggling with hundreds of pages with this type of dialog.

Third and biggest problem: Coincidences.  Jessica Page Morrell says in her excellent book, Between the Lines, to use coincidences very sparingly.  One per book could even constitute pushing believability.  If you do use one, it should be written very carefully, very thoughtfully, in order to make the reader swallow it with the story as a whole.  In this book, there are so many coincidences that I’ve given up counting.  It would take too long to enumerate each one here, and I really don’t want to pick this book apart in that level of detail.  After all, it’s not such a horrible book that I don’t keep picking it back up.  It pulls at me in spite of all the problems.  Either that, or I’m just hoping to find out the reason the author is withholding the protagonist’s name.

Either way, coincidences in a story bug me, and I find myself agreeing with Jessica.  If one coincidence is written in, and handled professionally enough that the premise is set up beforehand, it can work.  We all know that coincidences happen in real life, so a reader might be inclined to believe one showing up in a story.

In reality though, I think most readers are disinclined to believe coincidences within the story framework.  I think the reason may be that there is a higher expectation that the writer will not take the easy way out by giving the characters coincidences to ease their path to the end of the book.  Because after all, that’s what coincidences in a story do.  Make things easier for the writer.

Although harder for the reader.