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Tag Archives: Dunmore

The Power of “No–and furthermore. . . .”

29 Monday Dec 2014

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Chandler, conflict, Dunant, Dunmore, hopes, Keneally, raising stakes, writing technique

Column

Raymond Chandler once famously advised writers that if their story lacked tension, introduce a man with a gun.

This is another way of telling your protagonist, “Think you’re going to get what you want? Forget it.” Or, as I remarked in my last post (December 22, “Dance or Dangle?”), “No, you’re not going to get it–and furthermore, you’re in even greater trouble than you thought.”

Not only thrillers benefit from the “no–and furthermore.” Every novel I’ve praised on this blog, no matter what genre, succeeds in part because the author has used this powerful technique to its fullest. Every one I’ve disliked fails because the author either presented no credible barriers for the protagonist to overcome or made them too easy. It’s called constantly raising the stakes, and it’s not as simple as it sounds.

Sure, you can make the mountain too tall to climb, the door too thick to break down, the road too dark to travel, or the weather too miserable to allow watching the bad guys. You can have the villain get to the gold first or seduce the woman who was really meant to be with the hero. All these may be useful, even necessary.

But I think raising the emotional stakes counts a lot more. What the characters believe, their dearest principles, must be threatened. The threat shouldn’t only be external, as with the man with the gun; but internal, as with what the character feels about herself. Those feelings usually include the fallout of shifting perceptions, when the character realizes he’s been lying to himself or hurt someone. That can be as potent, if not more, than any physical apocalypse.

Consider the following examples. In The Lie, Daniel, a soldier returning from the First World War, dreams of being reunited with his first love, whom he’s known all his life. Does he manage? No. He finds out that in his absence, she’s married, had a child, and been widowed. Author Helen Dunmore further complicates this already awkward triangle by making the late husband a soldier too, so that Daniel has to sympathize with him, even as he resents the rivalry.

In Blood & Beauty, as soon as Lucrezia Borgia finds a man who truly cares for her–as opposed to using her as a sexual or political object–her father and brother contrive to get rid of him. Sarah Dunant uses these brutal setbacks to disillusion Lucrezia about her male relatives (whom she’s always worshiped), the possibility of love, and her place in the world.

Thomas Keneally’s Daughters of Mars are sisters in blood and profession, as nurses who may or may not have hastened their mother’s death to relieve her sufferings from cancer. The younger sister, Sally, has always wanted to be closer to the elder, Naomi. But they’ll forever be estranged unless and until they can speak of what happened to their mother–and of course, they can’t.

Conclusion? I find that the books that have the most emotionally powerful “no–and furthermores” feel inherently important, whereas those that don’t fail to move me. The books I put aside are generally those whose protagonists face external barriers that are merely circumstantial and exert too little pull.

What do you think? What books compel you that way, or don’t?

Disclaimer: I borrowed my reading copies of these books from the public library.

More fine print: This week, I’m on vacation, so will post only once.

Looking for a Home, and Himself

27 Monday Oct 2014

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

≈ 9 Comments

Tags

Cornwall, Dunmore, First World War, Historical novel, lyrical

Review: The Lie, by Helen Dunmore
Atlantic Monthly Press, 2014. 294 pp. $25

“A memory like mine is more a curse than a blessing. It cuts into the past, as sharp as a knife, and serves it up glistening.” So observes Daniel Branwell, a British soldier returned to his native Cornish village in 1920, where he hopes to make a life after the Great War.

But Daniel has no home he may call his own, living in a cottage informally bequeathed him by an elderly woman whom he tended in her final illness. He worries that he’ll be turned off her property and prosecuted for having buried her on her land, as she wished, instead of the village cemetery.

From this seemingly modest premise, Helen Dunmore has created a page-turner of extraordinary depth and beauty, which has touched me ever since I finished it and probably will for a long time. Daniel’s homelessness is a metaphor for his struggles to find a place in the world, which have plagued him all his life; I love novels whose premise is itself a powerful, elegant image. But Dunmore takes this further, for her protagonist has an even more serious problem, an inability to find a resting place within himself.

Daniel’s sharp memory overwhelms him. The rocks, the sea, the pathways around the village, everything reminds him of Frederick, his closest boyhood friend who was killed in France, while he, Daniel, survived. Frederick’s sister, Felicia, Daniel’s first love, still lives in the village, which brings up more memories. But usually, he relives the war, which Dunmore renders mostly in words of one or two syllables, as with this passage, which narrates his thoughts during a visit to Felicia, now a war widow with a young child:


This is what we dreamed of, in France. Fire, and four walls, dry feet, a belly warm with food. Children’s toys on the floor. We talked about such things as if they were gone from the earth. You couldn’t believe in them. I still can’t, even though I’m here. I say Frederick’s name, but the room doesn’t answer.


The many lyrical passages like this convey Daniel’s longing, his pain, and, elsewhere, his rage–at the world, for passing him by, or the villagers, who treat him like an intruder, a shameful reminder of what they themselves escaped. But his trauma seems a quiet desperation, even when he’s reliving blood and thunder, the sort of understatement I find more compelling than the sound and fury that so often describes a mind torn by combat.

Perhaps most impressive about The Lie is the author’s range. I had read two historical thrillers of hers, The Siege and The Betrayal (can we say Dunmore likes simple titles?), which, though excellent, differ from this novel.

Do read The Lie. I haven’t been as moved by a novel about the First World War, one of my favorite subjects, since I finished A Long, Long Way, by Sebastian Barry.

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Recent Posts

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