The Tyranny of Plot: Reflections on Agatha Christie

Orson Scott Card has an interesting way of analysing stories. He talks about the "MICE Quotient":

• Milieu
• Idea
• Character
• Event

Card is clear that there isn't a magic formula here: every story will mix the ingredients in different forms. We might expect fantasy, where worldbuilding is significant, to be strong on milieu; science-fiction to excel in ideas; literary fiction to emphasise character,;and the detective story to be event-heavy. Satisfying fiction, of whatever genre, is likely to be at least competent in all departments if we are to re-read it, though. Or is it?

This came into my mind when re-reading, for the first time in many years, Agatha Christie: specifically Curtain - Poirot's Last Case. If the MICE quotient is imagined as a table, Christie's would be very lopsided: only three legs to start with (Idea being almost entirely absent), and one of those--Event--much longer than the others. I wouldn't want to eat my bowl of soup off that table.

More than just about any novelist I've read, Christie is a writer of event: plot is king, to the exclusion of almost all else. Her work has dated in such a way that milieu is probably more noticeable than it was at the time: her classic "country house" mystery has a stronger sense of place now that country houses are no longer part of our cultural furniture.. A character commits suicide and Poirot says this is only to be expected because she comes of "poor stock". Captain Hastings is worried that his daughter has fallen for a bounder. Christie now, in a way she never intended, has delineated a world which no longer (and perhaps never did) exists.

At her best, Christie is masterful at plot. At least three of the Poirot stories, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Murder on the Orient Express and Curtain are brilliantly constructed. (Curtain is also utterly ludicrous, but this doesn't vitiate the cleverness of the concept).

The question that Christie raises is: can man live by plot alone? Her stories give us virtually nothing but plot. Even her best-loved characters are not really characters at all: Miss Marple is a nosy old bat; Poirot, a moustache, a smattering of French words and cod-continental syntax, leavened with hypochondria and "the little grey cells". These are not characters, they're chess-pieces: at the start of every game, you know their permitted moves, and they run through them until the endgame.

And yet people still read Agatha Christie, long after more accomplished writers are forgotten. The predictability of a Poirot novel is, oddly, part of its appeal. You might or might not solve the crime yourself, but you know the wily Belgian will. And even if you aren't as bright as Poirot, you're surely one step ahead of Hastings or Inspector Japp.

You probably couldn't get away with writing this stuff today: the best modern crime writers, like Ian Rankin or Brian McGilloway, give us appreciable character development over time. You have to read the Rebus or Devlin novels in order, because the protagonist becomes a very different man as he matures. Indeed, the best of today's crime fiction is so subtly nuanced as to bear favourable comparison with more overtly "literary" work.

But in the end I can't help admiring Agatha Christie's work. She knows exactly what she's doing, and sticks to it. If publishing today is all about brand, then Christie's 80 novels are a big step on the road to how we got here. Her influence shows no sign of diminishing. Eh bien.

What Happened Next?

British viewers will probably be familiar with A Question of Sport, in which sportsmen and women submit themselves to thirty minutes of largely undemanding questions about...you guessed it, sport. One of the most entertaining rounds is "what happened next?", in which a clip of sporting action is stopped just short of the generally unpredictable denouement (for instance, a seagull descends and abstracts the ball just as the golfer is about to take his putt).

"What happens next?" is the question which the writer has to address every day. Not "what is the thematic significance of my work?" (this question is valueless, or even meaningless, to the writer) or "how soon can I stop?" ("not yet" is usually the answer...). Writing fiction is the business of arranging one event after another in plausible sequence, which need not necessarily be chronological.

I may be leaking a writers' trade secret if I say that this is not always the most difficult part of writing. Some aspects of evolving the story may be sticky, but generally one piece of the story evolves into the next without too much coaxing. An exception to this area, for me at least, is battle scenes. These have to be as tightly choreographed as a ballet if they are to convince and to be comprehensible, and in The Dog of the North, the battle of Jehan's Steppe and the siege of Croad were the two "what happened next" segments which I found the most difficult to write.

I was delighted on my recent trip to America to discover, for only $15, a handsome hardback entitled Battles of the Medieval World 1000-1500: From Hastings to Constantinople. This unpretentious book takes twenty major battles of the period, briefly outlines the historical context before giving us a detailed account of the dispositions of the troops and the course of the battle. As a bonus, there are clear illustrations of the arms and equipment of the troops involved. For a writer like me, who needs to put the occasional battle on the page, this book is a godsend. I am completely shameless about recycling from historical sources in my fiction (much better writers have done it).

Battles of the Medieval World is a splendid demonstration of "what happened next" on the battlefield. It is likely to be a book with a limited audience--hence its place in Barnes and Noble's bargain bucket--but of its kind it's perfect.

Next time you come across a set-piece battle scene in one of my books, odds are Battles of the Medieval World will have been consulted intensively...

Epiphanies of New York

2: Ellis Island Museum

New York is packed with museums and galleries but none that I've visited has anything like the resonance of the Ellis Island Museum, a place that opens a window into the soul of America.

Ellis Island, hard by the Statue of Liberty, was the processing centre for US immigrants between 1892 and 1954, and has been restored to something like it would have been during its turn of the century heyday. The visitor gets something of the sense of what it must have been like for the millions of immigrants as they got off the boat and went through the battery of tests to determine whether they would be allowed to stay in the US.

The museum is intelligently and imaginatively structured; it works on several different levels. The visceral feel of standing in the very halls where immigrants queued is supplmented by a more cerebral series of statistical displays about the history of US immigration (much more interesting than it sounds). There were also the personal effects of many of the immigrants and all kinds of marginalia from history, like the passenger manifests from some of the ships. The displays were informatively signposted but the artifacts themselves were sometimes more eloquent. There was a passenger manifest from 1892, full of Irish passengers. On adjacent lines were Rose Lenihan, 20, servant, and Kate Lenihan, 18, servant. There were no other Lenihans, so no doubt they were sisters, travelling together to America to make a new life. But Kate died on the voyage. What must it have been like for Rose, just out of her teens, alone in a new country and mourning her sister? Millions of such stories created America.

The thing that really strikes the visitor--the European one, at any rate--is just how young "America" is. (That is not to ignore the people who lived there before the era of mass immigration). All countries have their creation myths, but "Britain", as we understand it today, was arguably born in 1066. In America, that creation myth is only just beyond living memory, and perhaps most Americans will remember talking to an elderly relative who was born overseas, and remembers growing up in Lithuania or Poland, Jamaica or Croatia.

For anyone who has an interest in the past--or indeed in understanding the present--few experiences will be more absorbing and enlightening than the Ellis Island museum.

Epiphanies of New York

1: Running in Central Park

At school I was averse to any form of exercise, and it was not until my early thirties that a friend asked me to do a "fun run" and I realised that actually I liked running. Ever since, I've run two or three times a week, injuries aside.

Last year when we went to New York I regretted not taking my running shoes when I saw all the runners gambolling in Central Park. This year I didn't make the same mistake. In my week there I managed to squeeze in three five-mile runs - quite a hefty mileage for me.

The first run in the Park was an astounding experience. At 7am the roads were thronged with runners--as many as if there was an organised event taking place. Running is essentially a solitary activity (the Zen aspect of it is part of the appeal) but it takes on an added dimension when there are others around. For someone who loves running, a sunny morning surrounded by trees and grass, with scores of other runners alongside you, is just about as good as it gets. And, like all days when running is perfect, you even forget that you're tired.

To have such a serene, almost transcendental, experience in the middle of one of the world's busiest cities is something I never expected. The view from the central running track itself, ringed by trees with skyscrapers behind them reaching up into the early-morning mist, is one I'll never forget.

Firing on Some Cylinders

::Acquired Taste is back after a week in New York. I'm still groggy with jetlag (I don't deal well with anything which mucks up my sleeping patterns) but I'm here just in time for the paperback launch of The Dog of the North, which is released on Friday. My author copies have arrived and they look marvellous: so good, in fact, that you'll want to buy another copy even if you already have the hardback. Even if you hated it... The future of The Last Free City may well hinge on The Dog of the North's sales performance, so let's all buy a couple of dozen copies.

In general I'm not a city person. The only two cities I actively enjoy spending time in are Paris and New York: if Betjamen's friendly bombs are to fall on Slough, they might as well go the extra few miles and take out London while they're at it. My week in New York was hugely enjoyable, if tiring, and two of my experiences were so stimulating that they'll rate their own blog entries once my brain has returned to what passes for normal functioning.

In my absence, a tremendous new blog in the speculative fiction world has launched: SFFE, or Science Fiction and Fantasy Ethics. In genre which suffers more than its fair share of negative criticism--internally as well as externally--SFFE is set up explicitly to celebrate the positive side of science fiction and fantasy. A lot of top authors in the field have signed up to the manifesto--and yours truly--so why not check it out. There's already some great content over there.

Talking of great content, I've ordered today Joe Abercrombie's latest, Best Served Cold. Abercrombie is one of the best writers working in fantasy today so I'm looking forward to this one immensely.

New Interview

While things are a bit quiet here at the moment, BFK Books has a lengthy interview with me to while away the time. There are stacks of other reviews and interviews there too, so even if mine soon palls there are many more to enjoy.

The interview adds further evidence to the hypothesis that there is only picture of me in existence...

Matters Vancean

The regular visitor to ::Acquired Taste will know that my appreciation for Jack Vance knows no bounds. For many years I believed I was alone with this particular enthusiasm; I was wrong. Vance remains a minority taste, but those people who enjoy tend to take it to extremes.

In 1999 a group of those aficionados got together to republish everything Vance had ever written--4.4 million words--and if that were not enough, to extirpate every unwarranted editorial intervention. This was not, as you may suspect, a straightforward task. I should know: I was one of those aficionados.

The editor-in-chief of this project, the Vance Integral Edition (VIE), was Paul Rhoads. Paul has recently collected and revised a series of essays he wrote about Vance's work over the life of the VIE. Published by Afton House, the essays in Winged Being: Thoughts on Jack Vance and Patient Explanations of the Obvious, are provocative and always lively. In attempting to show Vance's work in its cultural context--a context much wider than science-fiction--Paul Rhoads' essays pay Vance the compliment of serious critical attention.

For anyone who has even a passing interest in Vance's work, this book is sure to entertain, educate and amuse.

On Boxes and Boundaries

I had an email from Will, my editor at Macmillan, yesterday which was not the hoped-for offer to publish The Last Free City. On the other hand, neither was it a rejection. Instead, it was a request to linger a little longer over the decision while various factors are taken into account. One of these, reasonably enough, is the sales performance of The Dog of the North, but more interestingly there's also the consideration that they can't work out what kind of book it is (I paraphrase Will's views here).

This isn't a post about the iniquities of the publishing industry--after all, The Last Free City may still appear under the MNW banner--but instead about genre. Like it or not, books are not just 'books'. Someone has to sell them, and for that they need to have a label. It's all very well to rage about the artificiality of genre boundaries, but the fact is readers like them just as much as booksellers. Genre labels are here to stay, and that's something we all have to live with.

That isn't such good news for The Last Free City: it's a fantasy without most of the trappings of fantasy; an historical novel about a place that never existed; a romance punctuated with shocking violence; an action novel with long periods of reflection. No wonder Macmillan don't know how to sell it. Readers of fantasy, of historicals, of romance, of action, might all find much to enjoy - but equally they will find their expectations confounded at key points (I'm actually making the novel sound much better than it is here...). From an artistic point of view, I can defend this as healthy and challenging; but I can understand marketers taking a rather different perspective.

The downside of the genre boxes is that it can make work which is genuinely original and contemptuous of accepted boundaries difficult to sell. Genres are self-perpetuating, self-reinforcing: the more books that are bought which fit the mould, the thicker those walls become. (This can create a different set of problems: I'm bursting with admiration for Brian McGilloway who can operate wholly within his genre boundaries and yet create something fresh and original).

So what kind of book is The Last Free City? If pushed, I'd go for that sub-genre of fantasy sometimes known as fantasy of manners. This is characterised thus:

Major influences on the subgenre include the social novels of Jane Austen, the drawing room comedies of P. G. Wodehouse, and the historical romances of Georgette Heyer. Many authors also draw from nineteenth century popular novelists such as Anthony Trollope, the Brontë sisters, and Charles Dickens. Traditional romances of swashbuckling adventure such as The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas, The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Orczy, or the works of Rafael Sabatini may also be influences. The Graustarkian romances typified by The Prisoner of Zenda by Anthony Hope, or George Barr McCutcheon's Graustark itself, are also of some consequence as literary precedents, as are the historical novels of Dorothy Dunnett.
A typical fantasy of manners tale will involve a romantic adventure that turns on some point of social punctilio or intrigue. Magic, fantastic races, and legendary creatures are downplayed within the genre, or dismissed entirely. Indeed, but for the fact that the settings are usually entirely fictional, some of the books considered "fantasy of manners" could be considered as historical fiction. Ellen Kushner is perhaps the definitive writer of fantasy of manners tales; almost all of her novels have some of the traits of the genre, and her homoerotic Swordspoint: A Melodrama of Manners (1987) is considered as the epitome of the genre. An earlier example, and possibly the first true fantasy of manners, is the Gormenghast series (specificially the first two books) by Mervyn Peake

Is there still a market for this kind of thing? You tell me--or better yet, tell Macmillan's marketing department!

The Endless Appeal of the Tudors

Over the past year I've read most of Philippa Gregory's Tudor novels without ever really deciding whether I like them or not. The latest to fall into my hands is The Queen's Fool, which follows the life of Hannah Verde, a Jewish refugee from the Spanish Inquisition. It has all Gregory's traditional virtues: a claustrophobic sense of life at court, plausible and interesting representations of historical figures. Queen Mary's descent from the optimism with which she took the throne to her tyranny and miserable death is convincingly bleak; Princess Elizabeth's mixture of calculation and provocation is equally compelling; and if Robert Dudley is overdrawn as the rakish intriguer, at least he has style.

Where Gregory is on less certain ground is the character of Hannah herself--a fairly major problem given that she is the first-person protagonist. The way in which she flitted from one court to another, seemingly trusted by both sides, in itself strained credulity, but what I had trouble swallowing was her modern outlook. The idea of a woman independent in outlook and aspiration is not anachronistic (Gregory herself brings Bess of Hardwick, the exemplar of the type, to vigorous life in The Other Queen) but Hannah, at once shrewd and naive, never fully convinces. To this reader at least, she is a 21st-century feminist somehow lost in the 16th century. If you want to read a novel in which an independent female character still manages to feel at one with her historical context, I'd recommend instead Ann Weisgarber's The Personal History of Rachel DuPree, Alis Hawkins' Testament or Faye L. Booth's Cover the Mirrors: it's the kind of fiction Macmillan New Writing does particularly well.

Downtime

Things are a bit quiet at ::Acquired Taste at the moment. I have produced no babies; I am not in the running for awards; I have not just finished the final draft of my latest novel; and I'm in between series of The Wire. I am, in fact, in limbo. The Last Free City awaits the yea or nay from Macmillan and until that happens, future plans are on hold. I have several ideas for new stories, but which one I invest the time and emotional energy into working up depends on where Macmillan (or Tor as it will be if we move onto Book 3) see TLFC. There should be news on that soon, so for now a period of quiet reflection is in order.