…but first, a warning:
THE FOLLOWING POST CONTAINS EXPLICIT, DETAILED SPOILERS FOR THE END OF BLACKOUT/ALL CLEAR, AND SOME VAGUE SPOILERS FOR ANATHEM. READERS WHO HAVE NOT READ THESE TITLES AND CARE DEEPLY ABOUT HAVING KEY PLOT POINTS REVEALED TO THEM SHOULD GO AND READ BLACKOUT/ALL CLEAR FIRST, AND THEN POSSIBLY ANATHEM, (not so much because I spoil anything, but because it is a damn good book and everybody should read it eventually) AND THEN COME BACK AND READ THIS JOURNAL.
YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.
IF NOT, KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON…
I should by rights be doing something worthwhile, not writing a journal which shall doubtless never be posted (unless I decide otherwise later). But I have had the most unsatisfactory night, and I was not able to find rest until I thought this thing through and out the other end, and so I feel I owe it to myself to write down the solution I came up with.
Last night (or very early this morning) I finished All Clear, the second volume in the two part novel Blackout/All Clear by Connie Willis. Connie Willis is a very great writer, whose books come in two varieties (mostly): Funny and Sad. Until now I had been too cowardly to read any of her Sad books, after being frightened by my mother’s reaction to Doomsday Book. But she had (my mother) said that Blackout/All Clear was not really a Sad book or a Funny book, so I thought I’d give it a try.
And she was right. It is not a Sad book or a Funny book. It has funny bits and sad bits and I think if I had to pick one word I’d call it bittersweet. It is, by all measures, a very good book… I think.
And yet when I was done with it I found I was not at all happy with it. It left me with a twisty, unsatisfied feeling that was quite different from what I expected, and it kept me up well into the night trying to figure out what was wrong. Because it could have been something wrong with the book, or it could have been something wrong with me.
I have had, as of this writing, a remarkably happy life. Nothing particularly tragic has happened to me… yet. So, I thought, maybe I just didn’t get the tragedy. There is a character in the novel, you see, whom you come to like very much, who dies near the end of the story. This is a delicate thing for me: I’ve seen enough stories where characters die unnecessarily that I am extremely critical whenever a character is killed. Because I take the lives of characters very seriously indeed, and I truly believe that the difference between stories and real life is that in stories everything really does happen for a reason, and so you better have a damn good reason for killing a character.
When a character’s death is required to move the story along, that is a good reason. In fact, I consider it the only reason. If the story does not require someone to be dead then don’t kill anyone. And even then, a character’s death should be given the refractory period it deserves. People don’t just shrug off the death of a loved one, and readers don’t shrug off the death of a loved character either (hello, contributors to the Ianto Jones memorial in Cardiff!). It’s important to give the surviving characters a chance to grieve, not only because that is what they would do, but also (and more importantly) to give the reader time to grieve. If you kill off a character and never let the reader grieve, they will still be grieving, they’ll just be doing it while you’re trying to get on with your story. They’ll be distracted; upset. They will not be paying attention, and they will not like your story so much. Even if it is a good story. Even if that character had to die.
This is the problem with the end of All Clear, I have decided. For the character dies, and his friends mourn him and are in denial and are sad—all the emotions the reader is going through—and then the reader discovers that he is not really dead, that he faked his death and is still alive, working to save the other characters. But because of the disjointed way the book is presented (it is a time travel mystery, after all) we are provided with hints that this character will ultimately die. We see it coming, even if he doesn’t. But even then it is not made explicit until very near the end of the book. We are left in a state of limbo (is he dead, is he not? The author has jerked us around on this fact before…) until almost the last scene. And by that point it is because one character is telling another character who thought he had been dead the whole time that he is… in fact, really dead.
So even though the other characters are given a chance to grieve, the reader really isn’t. You’re left on tenterhooks until the last minute, and then there’s no time because the rescue party is here and we’re going home after all.
And all the reader thinks is: Mike is dead. After all that, he died. And… wait, it’s over?
One can’t begin to grieve until one knows for certain that someone is dead, and having been too easily convinced once, the reader will need more concrete evidence the second time. So all the hints, all the foreboding, all the allusions, though in any other instance might have been enough, in the case of All Clear they are very much not enough. Because we have been jerked around and made to think other characters were dead who turned out not to be. Multiple. Times. So now we have to know. We have to be told for certain. And we’re not given that until practically the very end of the book. Too late.
Having blown what I like to call the Death Refractory Period would be enough to leave me unsatisfied, but upon further thinking I find there is another reason Mike’s death rankles me.
However beautifully and realistically constructed the story, I could find no good reason for Mike to actually die. His death doesn’t help accomplish anything—though his fake one does—he had already done everything he needed to do by the time he dies. It’s not like [name redacted] from Anathem, whose death, though tragic and sad at the time, ultimately facilitates the happy ending. No, the only reason for Mike’s death in All Clear that I can see is this: Well, it’s set in World War II, and it’s very dangerous, so some people are killed.
I wonder if it’s some agreement all writers have to make: that because a story is set in World War II some people have to die. It is simply too happy to be World War II if they all make it out alive.
Whatever is actually the case, Mike’s death feels very much like that: the pound of flesh; the compulsory sacrifice. Meeting a death quota. No reason, just: well, it’s very dangerous out there, isn’t it? People do die suddenly and for no reason… in real life.
But, as I may remind you, this isn’t real life: it’s fiction. Everything happens—must happen—for a reason. For the story. “It’s World War II and it’s very dangerous; people die” is not a good enough reason. Not for me. Maybe—maybe—you could get away with that if you gave the reader enough time to properly grieve, but Willis doesn’t, and I’m a little disappointed about that.
So Mike’s death fails on two counts: it fails to have a good enough reason, and it fails to have a sufficient refractory period. It leaves this reader frustrated on two counts as well: that she has to work through her feelings after the book is over, rather than while it’s going on, and she has to lie awake at night figuring out what the hell went wrong. And it’s this second count that particularly annoys me: as a reader I am irritated at being ill used, but as a writer I am frustrated at the technicality of the mistake. I want to fix it. Fix the book. Not save Mike. Fix the book. It’s like I’ve found a critical error in one of my own works and I can’t rest until I’ve straightened it all out.
But it’s not my book. So I can’t. The most I can do is write petulant journals on the subject, and go reread Anathem.
*
Goldeen Ogawa is a spoiled young artist and writer who on the whole likes Connie Willis very much. In fact that’s why she’s bothered to write this journal at all. You don’t see her writing journals about the atrocities of Russell T. Davies, do you? I thought not.
Comments, responses and/or refutations can be sent to goldeenogawa@gmail.com, or posted in your own blog and tweeted to @GrimbyTweets.