The Author's e-Book

I've had a chance to look through the e-book (preview copy only) of The Raven's Seal. It's a wonderful, strange thing for the author to hold his or her own book in electronic form. It's a file, no more or less than the words you wrote. It's ephemeral, but then, aren't the words what really counts?

The e-book version looks great, like all of Top Five Books' work. The font is elegant, with a slightly old-fashioned feel, and the page looks wonderful, especially in portrait. Of course, I think the print copies will feel even better, and there is something about the materiality of the printed page that still holds us, through memory or association.

Yet, I'm reminded of the light, almost onion-skin paper of the compact editions of Dickens I first read at home, and how the electronic page in iBooks (or Kindle) almost duplicates that lightness, and comes closer to the book that Borges speculated about: infinite pages of infinite thinness.

The ‘Dickensian’ and The Raven’s Seal

Novelist Martin Amis, interviewed in the Chicago Tribune, acknowledges a Dickensian influence on his new novel, Lionel Asbo: State of England.

Amis says Dickens ‘isn't really a realist. Accurate social criticism is not his great strength; his great strengths are exaggeration and melodrama and comedy. It's a melodramatic form, the Dickensian novel — a magical transformation, with a sort of fairy-tale vocabulary or furniture behind this amazingly vivid picture of London....’

Amis’s comment had me thinking again about the Dickensian. To me, this word summons up not just the rich texturing of character and place and fairy-tale plots, but an extraordinary imaginative density and energy of style. Accuracy is not the point; the range of his sympathies, his irony, anger and penetrating humour are what makes Dickens' social criticism not only pointed but universal. 

This is what inspired me about using Dickens as a source for The Raven’s Seal. I aimed for a richness, and sometimes a complexity, of language that could create a lively sense of scene, which could be comic or melodramatic but never static. I wanted vivid characters rather than psychological portraits (although I hope that many of the characters are psychologically interesting). The prison was not only a Dickensian motif but an ideal setting for social criticism, still relevant because so much hinges on wealth and poverty, crime and punishment, the law and injustice, prisons and policing. And The Raven’s Seal is structured by at least a couple of Dickensian reversals of fortune which have that fairy-tale Romance flair about them. One of them, of course, is Grainger’s fall into the prison. The mystery hinges on the other. And the last thing I took from Dickens was a conviction that mystery need not just be a puzzle but the thematic core of a novel.

Coming in Fall 2012

More details of my forthcoming mystery novel, The Raven's Seal, are now featured on the publisher's website: Top Five Books. There's a sample from the opening and the back-cover blurb, here.

The cover design is great, but the sketch map of Airenchester (the fictional city where the story is set) is fantastic. More about mapping, imaginary spaces and The Raven's Seal soon.

Mystery and the locked room

In The Raven's Seal, now on its way to galley proofs, I tease the reader with a locked-room mystery as a celebration of that venerable device. What is the locked room apart from a piece of machinery that can show us something about how plots work, as well as the gears and levers of reading?

BBC News magazine puts the locked room on display.

It occurs to me that all mysteries are versions of the locked room, except that the walls and door have been removed or, more precisely, replaced with the horizon.

Update - The Raven's Seal

My novel, The Raven's Seal, an historical mystery with a Dickensian edge, has been contracted for publication by Top Five Books, an independent publisher of quality mysteries and classics. Details to follow, after the manuscript is delivered.

Codex - Lev Grossman

Codex is not exactly a prologue to The Magicians, but a nicely constructed intellectual thriller that signals some of Lev Grossman's later work.
Again, the young male protagonist, Edward, is talented and smart, but not quite smart enough to achieve, or even know, exactly what he wants. Moreover, he is inevitably overshadowed, defeated even, by a more capable, or perhaps only more focused, woman, Margaret.
New York is again the setting, and again it is the city and the state's secret places, its libraries, that are the most interesting. Grossman is able to make the territory of the mind as engaging as the city streets - a hallmark of the intellectual thriller with a touch of metafictional conceit.
One thing that makes Codex particularly engaging is the way the story moves between the present-day narrative, the lost medieval codex of the title, and the open computer game-virtual world that reflects and in some ways binds them. All of these imaginary worlds are compelling, though for different reasons, and this is where the ability to create other worlds in books and games is singularly intriguing and a binding theme. And yet, as in The Magicians, the ultimate dreamworld, once achieved, somehow fails to satisfy, leaving the protagonist chastened if not wiser.

Glory Road - Robert A. Heinlein

Only a fantasy novel by a mechanically minded science fiction author could be this dull and literal-minded. It is as if every instinct that enforced verisimilitude, or at least plausibility, in his science fiction oeuvre led Heinlein to over-explain and literalise every potential marvel in 'Glory Road'.

This is a shame, really. I read 'Glory Road' as a teenager and brought away an impression of its action and brisk pacing, and the sense of the adventurer's road across uncountable imaginary realms is powerful and evocative. But, on rereading, I'm left only with a dash of perfunctory action and a great deal of trans-dimensional expository dialogue, sandwiched with cultural-relativism lite.

There's none of the light touch that Fritz Leiber brought to pulp fantasy adventures, and far too much effort extended in making the wonderful seem believable, as though Heinlein had decided to write a fantasy to show that he could, and used all the science fiction techniques at his disposal to show that he couldn't.