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Welcome

I started this blog in 2013 to share my reflections on reading, writing and psychology, along with my journey to become a published novelist.​  I soon graduated to about twenty book reviews a month and a weekly 99-word story. Ten years later, I've transferred my writing / publication updates to my new website but will continue here with occasional reviews and flash fiction pieces, and maybe the odd personal post.

ANNE GOODWIN'S WRITING NEWS

Parallel Narratives: The Living by Anjali Joseph & When We Were Alive by CJ Fisher

11/3/2016

9 Comments

 
With the echos of each other in the titles, I couldn’t resist pairing these two novels published this month, both involving parallel narratives. As I’m playing with a similar structure in my current WIP, I’m also interested in what these novels can teach us about a form that’s more difficult to pull off than we might think.

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Myles is a young man who struggles with the outside world, but finds refuge in writing monthly letters to the mother he’s never met. Bobby is a shy twelve year old wanna-be magician, who finds a friend in Rose and gradually falls in love. Consumed with self-loathing, William has gone to prostitute himself in Las Vegas, when another lost soul, Dawn, suggests they get married. Three men from different time periods search for beauty in sadness, until their stories meld together in a poignant, shocking and immensely satisfying way.

But this reader almost didn’t get there. While things happen to the characters – you could say too much happens in a novel that references two world wars, 9/11, cancer, Alzheimer’s disease – the only real plot is in their interconnections, and CJ Fisher keeps us waiting a long time for that. All three strands come with a cast of minor characters, who show us the world from their perspective, so if you put the book down for too long you’re liable to forget who belongs with whom.  Furthermore, everyone’s an amateur philosopher, as Myles says, not fully understanding “the rules that determine which things matter enough to be told” (p62), so we get semi-stream-of-consciousness and meandering dialogue.

When We Were Alive is an ambitious debut novel about love and loss and the struggle of being human. Thanks of Legend Press for my review copy.
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Claire is a thirty-five-year-old single mother, her days bounded by tidying up after her son, the routine of her job in one of England’s last remaining shoe factories and her own fear of change. Estranged from her parents since their unsupportive response to her pregnancy, she worries about her son’s future while hoping for love with a man she meets at the pub. Arun is a sixty-seven-year-old grandfather who makes hand-crafted chappals at home. A recovered alcoholic, veteran of a long-ago extramarital affair, he rails at the indignities of old age, his troublesome prostate in particular.

Despite their self-pity, these two point of view characters are engaging and satisfyingly complex, and their sections sufficiently long (the book is divided into four sections in total) for the reader to become absorbed in their lives. The writing is fine, with touches of humour, but I wasn’t sure if this qualifies as a novel. While I applaud the portrayal of ordinary lives in literature, including an emphasis on work, which can be overlooked by writers who only really know about writing, the footwear fabrication connection between the two seems far too tenuous for me. My favourite part, a reminder of how, in a simple Indian village house, “the walls smelled of ash and cow dung, smoky and rich” (p81), might not be so evocative for other readers. Perhaps I was expecting too much as Anjali Joseph’s debut novel, Saraswati Park, published in 2010, won a clutch of awards, but this, her third, reads like the result of a talented writer’s struggle to meet a publisher’s deadline. Thanks to 4th Estate for my review copy.
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As my regular readers will be aware, and quite possibly tired of hearing/reading about it, multiple early drafts of my debut novel, Sugar and Snails, were narrated from three different points of view. While I am completely convinced that dropping the voices of the parents has made it a better novel, I still miss those characters. My next novel, Underneath, also has a single first-person narrator, although he speaks in three different voices: a jailer; a young child; and an increasingly disintegrating forty-year-old man. For what I hope will be my third novel, Closure, I’ve gone back, with some trepidation, to three distinct (third person) narrators whose stories intertwine throughout the novel. I think that’s the right way to tell that particular story, but how can I be sure?

The parallel narrative makes significant demands on the reader. The wider apart the different strands are, the more difficult it is to keep those different worlds in mind. There has to be a significant payoff for this extra effort: exquisite writing; lively characters; a satisfying integration towards the end. Writers who have done this well, in my opinion, include Anna Hope for her portrayal of a doctor and two inmates of a Victorian asylum; Tanya James who has ventriloquised a filmmaker, a poacher and an elephant in The Tusk That Did the Damage; both Carys Bray and Celeste Ng for their sympathetic portraits of various members of a grieving family; and one of my favourite writers, and fellow East Midlands resident, Alison Moore, who creates such deliciously quirky characters. I’m sure you could suggest some more – and perhaps some male writers (!), as I don’t think this is approach is solely confined to women, it’s just that these were the authors who jumped out at me when I glanced up from my screen to my shelves.

I think the parallel narrative is less effective when it’s the result of a single strand not seeming enough (although would anyone admit to this?); when the additional strands don’t add anything extra to the single perspective; when there are no clues as to how they’ll come together (or when they never achieve that integration); when a novice writer is trying too hard to impress (and who doesn’t initially?) or when an experienced writer isn’t trying hard enough; or when they make the book overly long and complicated (yeah – a bit like this sentence!). All of these I need to be continually asking myself about my current novel. Can you add anything to this checklist?

Thanks for reading. I'd love to know what you think. If you've enjoyed this post, you might like to sign up via the sidebar for regular email updates and/or my quarterly Newsletter.
9 Comments
Charli Mills
12/3/2016 01:52:14 am

This topic makes me jittery! In my first novel (unpublished) I aimed for one narrative, although there is an intrusive almost final scene. I wanted a simple story to build upon. Now I worry it's too simple. For my next novel which is gathering dust motes as a first draft, I used two narrative voices because it is the telling of a place, of climate change from two different cultural perspective. Their stories do intersect. For my third, currently in revision, I have three narrative voices. Ugh! What am doing? Adding one more voice each time? I have a better explanation. Rock Creek is about an incident between two men, one of the most debated western gun fights in history. But no one ever considered the women involved beyond fantasizing love triangles. So I'm using those three women to show who these two me are at that particular place and time. Arguably, one voice is the lead (Sarah's) because she outlived them all and was the secret-keeper. I worry all the time about parallel narratives working. But my "style" is story-telling, which fits the western historical genre and having multiple narrators allows me to tell the story from different perspectives. I can relate to your long last sentence! And I don't know if I added anything useful in response.

Reply
Annecdotist
12/3/2016 08:04:44 am

Interesting progression, Charli, and strikes me as one that might well work. But didn’t want to scare anyone with this post! However, for me as a reader, I like there to be a fairly even balance between different narrators – hence my complaint in a recent review about one of the voices disappearing about halfway through – but I don’t think everyone is so bothered. Sometimes that balance is hard to achieve when you don’t want anything in the story that isn’t essential. I was having that problem until recently with my current WIP. The social worker’s point of view was essential to the telling of the story but I wasn’t finding her nearly as interesting as the other two characters. Then I had the idea of something she’d done wrong which impacts on the plot, so much happier now. Fascinating how these matters unfold. Thanks for sharing your experience.extremely useful!

Reply
Poppy link
12/3/2016 12:06:29 pm

I'd definitely add Maggie O'Farrell as she really is a master of writing parallel narratives, with just the right balance of detail and journey in each installment to keep you gripped while swapping between the strands... and always a very satisfying conclusion.

Really interesting post and I will be seeking out both books and your recommendations as it's a structure I'm contemplating... I have 3 key characters - each with their own story BUT all are connected. I'm having great debates & agonies with moving forward with them as 3 individual projects or one.. or even one singular and just two combined... waiting for that eureka moment!

Reply
Annecdotist
14/3/2016 12:26:31 pm

Thanks for the reminder of Maggie Farrell, Poppy. She is indeed a prime example, especially in Instructions for a Heatwave which taught me so much:
http://annegoodwin.weebly.com/annecdotal/-instructions-for-a-novel-some-things-ive-learnt-from-instructions-for-a-heatwave-by-maggie-ofarrell
I’m also reminded of Jane Rogers’ novel Mr Wroe’s Virgins – Jane wrote out the whole story from each of the point of view characters separately and then selected those sections which best told the overall story. This seems such a sensible way to approach it, and I assumed that was what I would do with my WIP, but doesn’t seem to be happening that way, partly because I need to be thinking about each character simultaneously to get the overall drift.
I hope you’re enjoying musing on yours and wishing you the best with it.

Reply
Poppy Peacock link
14/3/2016 08:43:27 pm

Thanks Anne... will look at your review & Jane's book too😊

Geoff link
15/3/2016 12:26:49 am

Graham Swift nailed the multiple narratives in Last Orders, his Booker, just to add a man to the list (well other than me of course, as I used that in my last book having used a single point in my first). I agree that the characters must have a significant role. One damage that I've seen is where a second and third narrator come in to ensure that the big reveal is postponed and that is just plain irritating.

Reply
Annecdotist
15/3/2016 10:31:46 am

Thanks for adding both of these, Geoff.
And nothing worse than the introduction of a narrator you've no interest in and keeps you away from the main story. (Actually there's a lot worse, but I'm allowed to use cliches in my comments.)

Reply
Norah Colvin link
17/3/2016 01:07:58 am

I have nothing to add to the discussion by capable experienced novelists with a huge number of WIPs each! :)

Reply
Annecdotist
18/3/2016 09:41:11 am

Thanks for adding something by adding nothing!!! Always great to hear from you here.

Reply

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