Expelled from the garden: some random thoughts.

[sheenaghpugh]

When we finish reading a novel, there's generally one of three reactions:

1. bloody hell, that was good!
2. meh
3. that's an afternoon of my life I'll never get back.

But there's one particular kind of book that gives me another reaction, a sense of massive bereavement and a wish to start straight in again at the beginning. This isn't, entirely, related to the book's intrinsic quality, though a downright poor one won't do it. I've been thinking about which ones do it to me, and have realised it is, above all, the world-builders. They are often historical, futuristic or fantasy and they tend to be long, the sort of door-stops that in Victorian times would have appeared in three volumes. They have to be long (or a series), because part of what they are about is not just telling a story but building the world in which it happens, and if, as is generally the case, this is not the everyday world in which the reader lives, then more time and trouble is needed to bring it alive.

The result, if it's done well, is that on finishing the book, I don't just feel I have come to the end of a story but that I have been evicted from a world, and desperately want to get back in again. I re-read Hilary Mantel's A Place of Greater Safety about a week ago and, ever since, have felt nostalgic for the French Revolution; I daresay I shouldn't have much enjoyed being there in reality, but for some hours after I closed the book, I felt my life would be empty if I could not be the Lanterne Attorney or one of his colleagues. Mantel is good at this: I have read her two Thomas Cromwell volumes, Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, several times each now, and always end up wanting to live at Austin Friars.

But world-builders don't have to be absolute top-of-the-range writers, as Mantel is, to achieve this effect. Tolkien is nobody's idea of a great prose stylist; his dialogue leaves much to be desired, his characterisation varies alarmingly depending on what he currently needs the character to do, and some of his plot devices.... But he can build worlds; he's very good at it, in fact, and has the same ability to draw the reader into not only the story but the world in which it happens, so that at the end you find yourself again outside looking in, rather like Adam and Eve.

Canny world-builders do it in series, so that the Desperate Reader can repeat his/her fix simply by buying the next one. I'm not sure how long this works for. I suspect the effect might diminish the more we are given of the world in question and that short series might be best, because the important thing is to leave us not only wanting more but feeling there is more to want.

Comments

Re: expelled from the garden and school dinners.

[(Anonymous)]

Hello, Sheenagh, I know what you mean about feeling evicted from a world, admittedly an alien one, but one which had held me enthralled. I was utterly gripped by Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch and felt almost bereft when I reached its end. I immediately had to begin The Secret History. The spell that this work cast was less intense, but similarly mesmerising. When that too was finished, I thought I needed to go on a Tartt-diet and read Alexander McCall Smith's The Forever Girl and Ian Rankin's The Saints of the Shadow Bible. Enough already! It's time to indulge myself again with The Little Friend.
A propos of school dinners, I've just had a delightful lunch in Leeds with old school friend Pauline (nee Gibbs). I am convinced that it was you, Sheenagh, and your partner in culinary crime, Maureen West, who served us our school dinners at Fryerns Grammar Technical School in approximately 1966. Am I right or is this a horrible slur on your blameless school days? If I am right, you will doubtless remember Mr and Mrs Roberts and the amazing school plays that they produced. We were indeed blessed by their inspiring teaching - if not by the school dinners. Pam Aveyard (nee Warner)

Re: expelled from the garden and school dinners.

[sheenaghpugh]

It must be so... but not only am I incredibly old, I don't recall Fryerns with any nostalgia whatever and have forgotten most of it. Those absurd snobbish academic gowns... and a bitch of a PE mistress whom I do recall, Miss someone, not the surname but she must have been a Miss, nobody could possibly have lived with her. When we moved to Nottingham I went to a much more laid-back school with a leftie head who let us study pretty much what interested us. My schooldays kinda began there... I did see Maureen again however, on our mutual friend Jenny Cole's 50th birthday. Is The Goldfinch set in the past - or futuristic? I ask because so far, the kind of books I've seen eliciting this response don't tend to have present-day settings.

Re: expelled from the garden and school dinners.

[kalypso-v.livejournal.com]

From the chapters I heard on Radio Four's Book at Bedtime, I thought it was present-day - or present-dayish, given that the hero goes from schoolboy to adult during the story.

Re: expelled from the garden and school dinners.

[sheenaghpugh]

ah, that's interesting. She does write long novels, doesn't she, and takes a lot of time over them? That'd fit with the world-building thing, maybe.

Re: expelled from the garden and school dinners.

[kalypso-v.livejournal.com]

I wasn't particularly conscious of world-building, but hearing occasional chapters which were presumably abridged probably wasn't the best way to judge - and I didn't catch the last one so don't know whether I'd have been left wanting more.

I believe Tartt produces a large novel once a decade...

[ideealisme.livejournal.com]

World building is not an issue for my WIP, but I hope I can leave the reader with that sense of departure...nice post.