Category Archives: Books

Prologue prejudice

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Prologues never did Chaucer any harm, generally speaking, but all in all I’m against them.

For some reason they work better in films or TV than in a book. They can set up a scene, or deliver some nice misdirection, or alternatively scatter some useful clues. They can establish an atmosphere. A picture is worth a thousand words and all that. A friend who went to see The Prestige, having earlier read the novel, was amused to see that the opening credits – a panning shot of dozens of identical-looking top hats – essentially gives the entire plot away, but no one who hasn’t read the book is going to realise it. Thus, later on, the switched-on viewer gets the “aa-aa-h!” moment of understanding. But imagine if the book started with a description of the hats – that would just be pointless. Eventually the reader would get it, but so what? And that’s why the book doesn’t do that.

This is not to say I won’t use a prologue, ever. I already have. His Majesty’s Starship kicks off with a press release. It seemed the quickest way of setting the scene. So I’ll allow a prologue like that – something that seems off-whack with the story in general, so that the reader is intrigued to see how the two tie in.

But prologues that are essentially missing chapters from the body of the book – no. The information contained within such a prologue should emerge naturally within the story anyway. Case in point – an enjoyably flawed work I’ve just finished called The Last Templar by Michael Jecks. This, I’m guessing, was meant to kick off a medieval murder series in the vein of Cadfael. And it does – I gather there are other books with the same heroes – but not half as well. Part of that is way the author populates fourteenth century Devon with time travellers who invite visitors in for “a glass of beer” and can pin their movements down to “ten o’clock” or “half past seven”. (He does however know his technical details, like how houses were made and lived in at that time, and boy does he make sure you know it too. But there are exciting action scenes, and a couple of good bits of misdirection, and the way he describes the glooming, looming Devon moors makes them almost come alive as characters in the best Gothic tradition. Credit where credit’s due.)

BUT: it’s a three-murder mystery and the most significant of these was an abbot who was tied to a tree and burnt alive. The abbot’s abduction by two individuals was witnessed and it soon becomes very clear to the reader that there are only a couple of people in the novel who could possibly fit the description. One of them is quite obviously a nameless gent we met in the prologue. Now, without the prologue, we might think “that looks like X … but he’s obviously one of the good guys and I can’t think why he would do something like that, so it can’t be.” Meanwhile X’s history could be revealed bit by bit and the reader would be caught up in the excitement of discovery.

But no. Thanks to the prologue we can immediately guess 95% of what happened with perfect accuracy, and see why X would do that, and so the rest of the novel – approximately half, or more – is a frustrating exercise of watching the hero be immensely thick until even he can’t avoid working it out.

Prologues. Avoid, if possible.

… though I’m still not sure about Ronald Reagan

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Years ago – 1991 it were, the year before my stepson’s birth and therefore ranking somewhere between the invention of the Spinning Jenny and the Ravelling Nancy – I wrote an article for Vector on J.G. Ballard’s The Wind from Nowhere. This was Ballard’s first published novel, though he subsequently disowned it and always referred to The Drowned World as his first.

I actually quite liked it – more than I liked any of his other works. By this time I had also read The Drowned World, The Crystal World, High Rise, Concrete Island, Hello America, The Day of Creation, Empire of the Sun and – of course – Crash (never did get round to The Atrocity Exhibition, for some reason), so I did know vaguely what I was talking about.

I was feeling naughty and provocative because I couldn’t see the big deal and had probably just read yet another adulatory editorial in Interzone or the TLS on “science fiction’s consummate stylist” or whatever they were calling him that week and wanted to know why he was getting published and I wasn’t. So I wanted to stick something into the ant nest and stir. As it was I did get a letter from no. 1 fan David Pringle – sent to me personally rather than to the letters column of Vector, and giving me the editorial equivalent of a pat on the head and a tolerant smile – but that was about all the reaction it drew.

My main bone of contention, which I still stand by, was that Ballard suffered from the literary writer’s inability to trust the imagination of the audience to fill in the gaps. It had to be spelt out, and spelt out again, and then on the way out someone gave you a nudge and spelt it again just to make sure you got it. Instance: Vaughan in Crash has an obsession with the actress Elizabeth Taylor. (Or maybe it’s “the movie star Elizabeth Taylor”? Let’s say actress for the sake of convenience.) And this we are told time and time again. And it’s never just Elizabeth Taylor or Taylor or “her” or “she”. Every time Mrs Todd-Fisher-Burton-Twice shows up in the text it’s “the actress Elizabeth Taylor”. It gets so bloody tedious, and hence my reference in the article to it being “apparently in the contract that no copy editor should come within a mile of a Ballard manuscript”.

Eighteen years later he goes and dies, much mourned and missed, and I surprised myself by feeling there was a hole in the world too. I hadn’t read anything by him since that article, except for anything that popped up in Interzone in the meantime, but suddenly I was feeling I understood what he was about. Maybe it was because I’ve now lived out in the real world much longer than I had in 1991, and what he was telling me had time to sink in. Maybe it’s just because the world has got so much more – let’s say it – Ballardian. He wouldn’t have been remotely surprised by the predominance of reality TV or the Jade Goody saga. He would probably have wondered what took it so long.

And so I resolved to read his autobiography, Miracles of Life.

Okay, I think I understand him more now. A little. I certainly like him much more than I did. He seems to have been a genuinely nice bloke, warm hearted and friendly and extremely moral. I’m amazed that, coming from utterly respectable middle class stock, he could always remain so apparently respectably middle class yet be so profoundly unrespectable in outlook and views. Michael Moorcock and the rest of theNew Worlds crowd went hirsute and yeti-like in the sixties, yet in all the pictures our man is a slightly tweedy figure in jacket or v-neck and tie. His experiences with drugs just reminded him why he preferred whisky and soda. He lived in a happy family home in suburban Shepperton and turned out tales like Crash about the sexual fetishisation of car crashes.

He had the advantage of living at a time when a journal editor’s salary could support a family of five on top of the purchase of the family home and a daily commute into London. I laugh a hollow laugh. Yet then his wife died suddenly he was stranded with three small children who he managed to raise single handedly – no mean feat today, yet alone in the early sixties.

Respect!

Ballard as any fule no was born in the International Settlement in Shanghai in 1930, where he lived until his late teens, which included two and a half years of internment under the Japanese. (The experience wasn’t quite as harsh as depicted in Empire of the Sun: he stayed with his parents and they could live in their own home for over a year after Japanese occupation. On the other hand there are throwaway lines like the one about about his rectum prolapsing due to malnutrition, so it was no picnic.) I get the impression he would have turned out much as he did even without the internment bit. His experiences in the camp just confirmed what he was already coming to see. Shanghai was even more artificial than most cities, constructed for the sole purposes of trade and treated as a fantasy land by the many expatriate communities living there. Where obscene wealth and obscene poverty can co-exist within a few feet you must start to feel that reality isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

Maybe we as a race have always been outmassed by the world we live in, but until comparatively recently there was always the illusion that we could shape our destinies. Ballard’s experiences taught him that the modern world is a massive artificial construct that we created but which now dominates. It dictates, we follow. Individuals can swim against the stream but even the flow of the stream is affected by forces beyond us.

I should also add that Miracles of Life was an eye-opener for the sheer clarity and openness of the writing. See, he could do it after all. I will also accept a mild tap on the wrist for one of my other gripes in the article – the fact that the characters in his books very rarely do what any sane person would do and get the hell out of whatever catastrophe they’ve ended up in. But that was the point, of course, the same way Ballard couldn’t get out of Shanghai because it was just too big. At one point he mentions a fellow writer with a “Victorian” ideal of writing – strong characters, plausible dialogue, logical plots. I would say that’s not just Victorian, that’s latter-day-neo-Elizabethan too, because how dare a writer just write a book and assume everyone will want to carry on reading past the first page? But when you’re separated by such a gulf in your basic premises, there’s not a lot of point trying to make comparisons. That’s probably why I liked The Wind from Nowhere, whereas his one reference to it is, disparagingly, “my only piece of commercial fiction”.

I used to think Ballard got his reputation the same way the original Star Trek and Dr Who became cult favourites. It’s the difference between what you see and what you take away. Everyone saw the dodgy sets, iffy actors and questionable scripts, but after they turned the TV off the cognoscenti remembered epic tales of time and space and speculative thought. However, that’s not quite fair, or indeed true. I’ll now concede that Ballard got his reputation by absolutely mastering his chosen field. Easy.

Miracles of Life also confirms my favourite Ballard tale that I’ve heard from other sources, or at least some of it: that when The Atrocity Exhibition was published by Doubleday in the US, Mr Doubleday had no idea it contained a story called “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan“. When he did find out, he ordered the entire run to be pulped. Ballard confirms this part but not the best bit: that he sent one of the surviving author’s copies to the then Governor of California with a note saying “I think you ought to see the kind of filth Doubleday are publishing about you.”

Revving like a souped-up Ford Cortina

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The comedy duo Kit & the Widow have a number called “Love Song in a Major Key”, about the affair between two of our formerly prominent politicians.

“Edwina, O my Edwina,
Other men would rather swig industrial cleaner …”

Other rhymes for “Edwina” include “let’s make love until you scream like a hyena” and the title of this post. Somehow I could never quite rid the back of my mind of it as I waded through A Parliamentary Affair …

Well, I told you I was reading it and I know everyone was waiting for a report.

A Parliamentary Affair was published in 1994, which means the present day reader has an advantage the original readership didn’t: we know the author had a four-year affair with John Major when she was a newly elected MP and he was a Whip. A nation felt faintly queasy over its breakfast cornflakes as the news broke and didn’t want to imagine too many details. And guess what, here the female protagonist, newly elected Tory MP Elaine Stalker, has an affair with one of her party Whips. In the light of what we already know there’s a terrifying suspicion we’re getting just too much information. You read the sex scenes with a growing, horrified fascination: oh, please don’t say you did THAT? Like, did he really have her backwards in his office over a leather blotter with the Commons crest pressing into her face? And there is one scene involving whipped cream, strawberries and the male anatomy that … well, fortunately I never liked whipped cream with my strawberries anyway.

Moving on. I would say Currie chose her order of careers – MP first, then novelist – wisely because she started off by playing to her strengths. Novel writing isn’t one of them, or at least it wasn’t in 1994. This was her first and she may have improved. All the newbie habits are there: inability to settle on a point of view character for any one scene; occasional rants on subjects that the author feels strongly about (amoral tabloid journalists, overweight working class people); a very strong authorial voice that sometimes delivers information direct to you, sometimes lets it emerge through character dialogue. Sometimes you can only tell which is which by seeing if there are inverted commas wrapped around the paragraph you’re reading. The characters have the kind of conversations where they reveal exactly the information required by the scene without any sense of it arising naturally through dialogue. A test I like to use for natural sounding dialogue, which I think I learned from David Langford, is: can you imagine it being shouted across a room? This definitely fails the shouting test.

(It does not however pass the Soft Porn Dialogue Test. After the first Encounter, she says to him [staring intently at the anatomical part with which she has just become orally familiar] “It certainly gives a new meaning to the term Honorable Member”. I wish I was making this up.)

And yet it grips you, in a West Wing kind of way, because of the author’s obvious love of the parliamentary process and the minutiae of how the great British political machine goes about its stuff. A lot of stuff I’m sure comes straight out of Currie’s own experiences, in particular her frustration as an underappreciated intelligent and capable woman in the 99.9% male world of Westminster. Yes, I can well believe she was felt up by a smug Tory patriarch as all the MPs milled together at the bar of the House to elect the Speaker.

But of course we’re not reading this for the dialogue or the politics. It’s all about the shagging. It doesn’t take us long to get into the swing of it, as it were: two on-going hetero adulterous affairs and one gay one between elder statesman and underage boy (underage meaning 19, as it still was in 1994), with a bit more bonking, titillation, adolescent sexuality and one rape going on in the wings. And here I have to admit Currie surprised me – a little.

My chief memory of the 1992-1997 Major government is a never-ending series of scandals and resignations (Wikipedia helpfully lists 13 of them, averaging at 2.6 a year), mostly to do with affairs. I distinctly remember getting to the point of wondering why Major didn’t just give his Cabinet an ultimatum: dump the mistress or get out, now. Of course, we now know he was in no position to point fingers. (What’s grey and smells of Currie? Moving swiftly on …)

Currie convincingly portrays the Commons as such an alien world that affairs become almost inevitable. The hours, the pressure, the sheer detachment from what passes for normality in the outside world. You’re thrown against these people who understand, unlike the wives and husbands trapped back home in their normal day to day lives, and who can deliver what said spouses can’t in terms of support and meeting of minds. Don’t think for a moment that I believe she excuses the behaviour, but she does explain it much more than I thought possible. Sadly, she then goes and blows it with Elaine’s righteous indignation when her husband also has an affair. The difference is obvious, at least to Elaine. Elaine and the Whip are engaged in doing Great Things in Parliament, so that makes it All Right. Their affair is what keeps them sane. Elaine’s husband is caught in bed with a neighbour who is not very intelligent and overweight and generally menial, and he’s obviously there for the base reason that he isn’t getting enough in the marital bed, so clearly that’s grounds for divorce. Well, obviously.

It all works out, sorta. Elaine goes through a learning process that I’d like to think the rest of us never needed to. There’s a sudden IRA bomb threat plot that feels a little grafted onto the end of the book, but it does bring about closure. The book ends on a nice note, keeping us in suspense at the fictitious 1996 election with the results about to be read for Elaine’s constituency. And just to show that Currie does have a sense of humour, one of the more repellent characters is polished out of the story with a nasty dose of salmonella.

So, where does this leave the proposed political bonkbuster Best Beloved wants me to write? Not sure. I can probably supply the plot, she can provide the gossip, but then there’ll be the, um, stuff that probably wouldn’t occur to me in a month of Sundays under normal circumstances. Like novel uses for dairy products and fruit. Ah well, thinking cap on, and I can console myself it will all be tax deductible.