The Magician's Land - Lev Grossman

The Magician's Land, the last volume of a series we can now say forms The Magicians trilogy, does several admirable things. It brings the series to a satisfying close, not always possible in a loose serial narrative, and addresses the primary question left dangling at the end of the first book: what is magic for? And it does so with a brisk, well-written narrative that avoids the bloat and long-windedness that the genre has become prone to.

The Magician's Land has some faults too. These are minor faults, to be sure, but they make the reading experience an uneven one. The first is an over-large cast of focal characters, and a structure that flips between characters at will, which forces Quentin, the protagonist of the trilogy, towards the background at odd moments, even though the story of his growing maturity and quest for restitution is the focus of the novel. Plum, a young magician snatched by misadventure from the magical college of Brakebills, holds significant portions of the narrative, but there's no real reason for her to do so, except to act as a foil for Quentin. There's also a tendency for characters to speak with the mock-ironic tone of college students even in moments of genuine tenderness or emotion, which is rather at odds with the growing maturity of the central characters, he signature development of this final volume. Nevertheless, Grossman has a magician's gift for combining action, contemporary references, and moments of true fantasy and wonder, and his invented world of Fillory has gathered true weight and strangeness (and a touch of sadness) as the series continues.

These, however, are small matters. Although Grossman is at pains to point out that the grand fantasy quest (even the quest for self-knowledge) is more often than not incomplete or ambivalent, his characters both destroy and remake a world. And in this we finally touch on the answer to the challenge of the first novel. Magic is not neat, predictable, merely technical, or even necessarily useful. But it is creative, and in creation and dislocation the magician, like the novelist, brings new possibilities into the mundane world.

A note on The Maltese Falcon

An astonishing proportion of any given page is given over to descriptions of Sam Spade himself: his grins, his grimaces, the set of his shoulders, the variable colour of his eyes. Yet the emotions that inform these are generally opaque, as though the detective himself were the cypher and only his gestures and expressions the clue. This may be the point, since the mystery is not that magnificent diversion, the falcon, or even the murder of Spade's partner, but the question, from the moment the trouble begins: what will Spade do?

The Taste for Death - a tribute to PD James

J.D. James, the preeminent writer of mystery and detection, died late last month. To my mind, she was also a significant novelist and outstanding stylist. I owe a deep debt to her work, firstly, since my Masters thesis on mystery and detective fiction includes a chapter on her work, she helped to cement my interest in the possibilities of mystery novels; and she also belonged to that class of exceptional writers who prove, as I've long suspected, that writing in a particular genre, popular or otherwise, does not signal a retreat from literary excellence but rather the potential for deeper engagement.

James was the closest we have had to an Austenian novelist since Jane Austen herself. Not only was Austen her literary model, but she understood perfectly well that the constraints of genre, in this case the enclosed world of the classical detective story, provided a precise and modulated stage on which to cast a coolly illuminating detective's eye on contemporary society. James used the murder case not just as the foundation for the investigation of a crime, but the investigation of the institutions of British culture, picking through the moral interdependencies, weaknesses, and tangled relationships inherent in institutions from the law, to the church, to publishing, medicine and museums. She had a sharp critical eye for the subtleties of organisations and character. Indeed, many of her characters were administrators, professionals, bureaucrats, often solitary, subtly alienated, of a piece with contemporary humanity.

It may seem odd to say that the comedy of manners was her strength, but although James used the brutality of murder to precipitate her novels – and for James, murder was always a brutal business, no cozy occupation but a source of violent trauma – investigation always led to a restoration of order, an explanation, however contingent.

Her authorial voice was lucid, exceptionally clear, sometimes haunting, combining clarity in detail with atmosphere, and occasionally humour. If her writing could be criticised, it could only be on the narrow charge that her voice was so strong that all her characters in dialogue tended to sound rather like their author herself.

The ambivalent ending to A Taste for Death: 'If you find that you no longer believe, act as if you still believe. If you feel that you can't pray, go on saying the words,' has remained with me a long time. It is an appeal to human order, faith even, in the midst or moral chaos that the detectives cannot untangle. In my thesis, in an off-hand line I proposed that the novelist is God's detective, but if that were so, then P.D. James was our Chief Inspector, and her mastery of her craft will be sorely missed.

NaNoWriMo, or discipline and distraction

November is the National Novel Writing Month (although it has now caught the attention of writers in many nations). Being a writer by intention and calling, I'm always writing a novel, but as an exercise in craft, NaNoWriMo raises some thoughts about discipline and distraction.

Committing to any creative work is a fine thing, a worthy undertaking, but for writers, our commitments to the real, lived world create the challenges – time, focus; in other word, distractions – that NaNoWriMo highlights.

Writing is hard; writing enough requires discipline. We are distracted by our technology, our habits, our connection to the Internet. Like many writers, I sustain this blog, a Goodreads profile, a G+ profile, and that's just writing. We look for the tool that will keep us away from online distractions, and there's even this, the Hemingwrite, a 'distraction free writing device', a fantasy gadget that mimics the writer's myth of the typewriter as perfect writing tool. (I've written on a typewriter: slow, noisy, and impossible to edit; the tech we blame for distracting us also speeds our task enough to contemplate writing 50 000 words in a month.)

But the truth is that our tools are ours to choose. That's a matter of craft, and discipline does not make the business of writing easier or harder, any more than the tools. It only creates the path to getting something done.

Years ago, I had the pleasure of seeing Terry Pratchett speaking at the Canterbury Public Library, one drizzly evening in Christchurch, New Zealand. One remark, one figure of his, has always stuck with me: three hundred words a day. That's not much. About a page. It can take ten minutes to write, half an hour, an hour if the scene is complex, the inspiration sluggish. Sometimes, you won't make that, and sometimes you can write twice, three times, much more than that. But three hundred words a day is a discipline, something you can look to and encompass and achieve.

You can learn discipline, but the more important important thing is to exercise it.

Noted in passing: The Devil in the Marshalsea

A recent debut historical thriller, The Devil in the Marshalsea, by Antonia Hodgson, explores familiar terrain to The Raven's Seal.

Indeed, the promotional copy evokes some of the Dickensian themes that drive The Raven's Seal:

The Marshalsea Gaol is a world of its own, with simple rules: Those with family or friends who can lend them a little money may survive in relative comfort. Those with none will starve in squalor and disease.

I hope to have a chance to read it soon, but perhaps readers who have enjoyed The Raven's Seal and enjoy this will return the favour and bring The Raven's Seal to the attention of Hodgson's readership, as the pre-modern prison mystery seems set to gain more followers.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time - Mark Haddon

The principle difficulty with mystery fiction is the business of telling two stories at once. There is the leading narrative, which must be lucid as any story, composed of incidents and characters that are intelligible and reasonable to the reader, and then there is the covert narrative, built out of clues, hints and sheer misdirection that keeps pace with the primary narrative but must ultimately be unravelled and accounted for as clearly and logically as its counterpart.

Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time cleverly plays with the conventions of mystery by shifting this difficulty from the mystery (the murder of the eponymous dog) to the character of the detective. What is most engaging and moving about the novel is that it forces the reader to read its narrative as though it were a case and points to the distinction between the bare facts and meaning on which detection itself depends.

To explain: Haddon's protagonist and nominal detective, Christopher, is autistic. The condition is never named, but Christopher cannot tolerate lying, cannot read faces or parse the complex emotions that expressions communicate, and cannot tolerate figurative language, although he is an extraordinarily precise observer of facts and details, with a mathematically acute mind. Christopher's revulsion at lies is perhaps aligned with his desperate need to maintain distinction, order and unambiguity in the face the overwhelming stream of reality. His memory for facts and details makes him, in the Holmesian mode, a perfect observer, potentially a perfect detective. All this we understand by inference and reading.

But although Christopher discovers the truth about the mystery, and thereby the suppressed truth about his own family, the solution is trivial compared to the complexity of adult emotions, needs and betrayals to which Christopher is almost completely blind. As a detective, Christopher can uncover the means, but the motives are forever obscure for him. As the last pages in the book outline Christopher's mathematical proof, ending with the triumphant QED, we realise that some proofs and some mysteries will remain outside of Christopher's perceptions.

The reader's task, then, in this work, is not to puzzle out the solution but to experience Christopher's puzzlement, and to understand that though plots are resolved by logic, stories are only brought to life by imagination and sympathy.

Novice and master

I've been writing fiction, serious, publishable (if not actually published) fiction, for over twenty years. I've taught composition and academic writing in the classroom. This semester, I also taught creative writing for the first time. It was a thoroughly enjoyable experience, not only to address my own passion as a teacher but to see creativity and inspiration develop in the classroom.

I believe that there is no endpoint to writing, only the continuous review and reflection of craft through practice. Writing is holistic and integrated, and so there is no one element of a work that can stand without the others, or be adjusted without affecting the others. We may attain mastery only as long as we think as novices.

But I have noticed that with novice writers I've read over the years there are one or two aspects of craft or 'tells' that show us a beginner's style or voice. This is not a list of pointers on 'how to write' — just a list of writing habits that mark the student.

Show and Tell

I don't wholly follow the workshop cliche 'show, don't tell'. Sometimes, we have to tell, and mostly we choose to show because it is better to let the reader see than force the point. But novice writers often show and tell in the same passage, as if reluctant to trust the details to speak for themselves:
Her hands shook minutely when she took up the scalpel, as her nerves took over her thoughts.

Let speech be speech

Often, dialogue can't be left as dialog. She said, he said, seems too pedestrian. So he commanded. She challenged. He argued. But then the verb drifts away from speech. He chuckled (but that's laughing, not speaking). She keened.
Sometimes it's important to know who is speaking and how, but mostly dialogue should be strong enough to carry its own sense. But then (see show and tell) the novice writer can't let that stand, so:
'Please leave my children, I beg you,' he pleaded.

The stock phrase

Not just the cliche but the familiar phrase, something out of our vast collection of idioms and metaphors that still carry meaning but lack the capacity to surprise, or the precision to make something feel authentic and present. Even when the cliches are deleted, the sense that this has been said the same way before remains.

The same goes for turns of plot and character motivations.

On the other hand, there's also the word, the turn of phrase, that is intended to be poetical and becomes awkward or murky when rendered.

The Auto-correct malapropism

This is a technical point. We all know about Autocorrect, which along with spelling checkers is a fair tool but a terrible master. But the word that Autocorrect introduces unseen is often close but not quite, or unintentionally funny. 

The room was closed up, dusty and dinghy.

I don't trust spelling and grammar correction in any word processor. Machine logic can't produce or apprehend meaning, and so these tools can only apply regular rules to irregular cases.

I won't say anything here about faults in narrative structure or characterisation, although in the end all these things become connected. But all of these tells command attention because, no matter how experienced I become, I will see them or do them again. Seeing them, knowing them, working through them: that's the craft of writing, the path from novice, to master, to novice again.