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The Character: ‘Rustam’

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I thought I would tell you about some of the characters in my novels: how they came to ‘life’, and something about their personality and the role they play in the book.  I’m going to start with the character ‘Rustam’ in The Iranian Scorpion. 

Rustam appears for the first time as the boy who lays out a carpet for his father, Wahab, and Azizullah to sit on while they negotiate the price Wahab will pay for the cakes of opium which Azizullah has brought with him to Wahab’s opium-to-heroin conversion ‘factory’.  I hadn’t planned that an Afghan boy would have an important role in the novel: he just grew into it.  At first, it seemed logical that Wahab would have his two sons working with him at the ‘factory’.  It is an important element in the story that Robert, the Drug Enforcement Agency operative, understands how opium is converted to heroin in rural Afghanistan.  I had planned that Azizullah, the opium grower, would have a falling out with Wahab and would capture the ‘factory’.  But what adult male Afghan would be willing to leave Wahab’s village, relocate to Azizullah’s village, and manufacture heroin there?  The solution: the boy Rustam is taken prisoner when the adult males are killed in the fire fight during the capture of the ‘factory’.  Rustam is saved from execution by Robert (in disguise as Abdullah, an Afghan field hand).  Robert questions Rustam and finds that he knows the conversion precess, which is unknown to Azizullah and his field hands.  So Rustam is taken prisoner, and to prevent him from fleeing back to his village, he is chained to Robert, who has every incentive to treat Rustam well.  The boy begins to trust the disguised DEA agent, and a psychological bond begins to form between them.  Rustam tells Robert about the girls of his village and discloses his sexual longings.

Robert wants to enter Iran, illegally, to trace the flow of heroin.  Once again, Rustam has the knowledge: he has entered Iran several times with his late father, and knows that someone called The Scorpion is the principal buyer.  But how can a chained boy be brought into Iran illegally?  Robert decides to persuade Azizullah to unchain the boy and give him a powerful incentive to stay with Azizullah’s team: a wage and a wife.  Rustam becomes engaged to a 23 year-old war widow.  He is overjoyed, but he lacks the mahr, the mandatory gift from husband to wife in an Islamic wedding.  Robert provides a ruby ring, and the wedding takes place between Padida, the 23 year-old widow, and Rustam, the very eager young man.

Rustam accompanies Robert into Iran, and having learned his true identity, travels with him to meet The Scorpion, to attend a celebratory orgy arranged by the Scorpion, to travel secretly to Kerman (where the heroin is packaged for shipment) and on to Bandar Abbas (where the shipment leaves for New York).

Rustam grows from an insecure and frustrated boy to a knowledgeable family ‘man’ whose wife is expecting a child, and who is facing important decisions about his future.  His relationship with Robert is vital in the story.  It is Rustam who discovers the method of packaging the heroin for shipment to the US, and it is he who saves Robert’s life.  He can be naive, as when he asks Robert, at a fast food restaurant in Bandar Abbas: “What kind of animal is a ‘burger’?”  He can be deadly serious as when he foils a robbery attempt by slashing a thief with a concealed knife.  And he can be whimsical as when he jokes with Robert about working with him “on the Rio Grande”.

I hope you like Rustam as much as I do!

Childrens’ Books

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Last week, I found myself in a position where I was reviewing a child’s book.  I had signed up with the Readers’ Favorite website to a contest.  I sent a book in to be reviewed, and one of the conditions was that I would review someone else’s book.  I could choose which book I wanted to review, and Readers’ Favorite would send the book to me (as long as I lived in the States).  I thought I would select a book, and buy it on amazon.co.uk.  When I began to search for a book on the Readers’ Favorite site, they all seemed to be ebooks.  I finally noticed a button labelled ‘Find a Hard Copy Book’.  I clicked in that button an one (1) book appeared on my screen: it was a childrens’ book.  When I queried the website whether there really was only one hard copy book available, I was told that for the time being, that was the case, because they were prioritising books which had been entered in the contest.

When I read, I much prefer to be holding a hard copy book, rather than a screen, so I thought, what the heck, I’ll review the children’s book.  I bought it on amazon.co.uk; it arrived, and I read it twice.  I can’t tell you the title of the book or the author’s name because Readers’ Favorite has a (quite sensible) rule that only they can post reviews on the internet.  (What follows could be considered a review.)

The book was about a baby animal which is born in winter and is brought into the family house and raised until it is old enough to join other animals of the same kind.  The story featured some of the pranks the animal got up to, as well as what its human carers learned in the process.  It was a cute story, and the author and publisher had obviously gone to a good deal of trouble to produce the book: it was hard cover with lots of colour illustrations.  The back cover had the author’s photo and bio.  There were also comments by local people about the story.  There were several informative pages at the back of the book where one could learn more about this particular animal. All well and good.

But . . . I felt that the story was told from the perspective of the animal’s carer (the author), rather than the perspective of a child.  In this sense, there was too much detail about things that were of concern to the carer, but which would be of little interest to most children.  There were missed opportunities to explore the feelings of the carer and to guess at the feelings of the animal in particular situations.  Many children find stories which provoke or include feelings quite interesting.

The illustrations were in colour, placed adjacent to the relevant text, and quite appropriate.  But for me, they were complete pictures, leaving no room for a child to add to the image from his imagination.  I believe that the most effective illustrations in childrens’ books are either fanciful or are incomplete in some way, thus provoking the child’s imagination.

So, for me, this particular child’s book should get a good score for effort, but it missed one important point: catering to the reader.  Of course all writers have to keep the reader in mind as they write, and this must be more of a challenge when an adult writes for children.

Writers without a Genre

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Iain Banks, a Scottish “novelist of hallucinatory brilliance who attracted notoriety with his grotesque and bizarre tales” died last week at the age of 59.  His obituary in The Daily Telegraph says that until his first book, The Wasp Factory, appeared, he “plastered the walls of his room with rejection slips”.  I know the feeling!  The Wasp Factory was a controversial first novel which brought Banks notoriety (1984).  “Even before its appearance, one publisher claimed that the book had made him vomit into his waste paper basket.  It had a similarly emetic effect on many reviewers: ‘a repulsive piece of work’; ‘silly, gloatingly sadistic’; ‘a work of unparalleled depravity’ were among the judgements of the newspapers.  Many, though, also conceded the hallucinatory brilliance of the author’s imagination, and there was widespread acknowledgement that Banks’ control of tone and language were more assured than that of many established novelists.”

“The defining qualities of Banks’ novels, whether mainstream or genre, remained a macabre black humour and a taste for the bizarre and the Gothic. . . . In 1987 he published Consider Phlebas, the first of the Culture novels; thereafter there was, for a time at least, a clearer distinction between his science fiction output and his more conventional novels, which tended to appear in alternative years.  His space operas, which combined political musings, scientific speculation, mordantly funny asides (the names of the artificially intelligent spaceships were a long-running joke), and violent, frequently gruesome action sequences, brought him a new, large and enthusiastic fan base.”

My reaction is that Banks was one of those rare novelists who had two distinct audiences: a mainstream audience and a science fiction audience, although it has to be said that some of his works had their feet planted in both camps.  One recent commentator expressed the view that “not since Robert Louis Stevenson, has a writer so successfully bridged multiple genres”.  As a child, I was a fan of Robert Louis Stevenson; I liked Treasure Island and Kidnapped, and I thought of him as a clever novelist.  I decided to look him up, and I found that he, too, was a Scot.  His Wikipedia listing has him as a “novelist, poet, essayist, and travel writer.”  In fact, Stevenson wrote twelve published novels, five collections of short stories, six uncollected short stories, five volumes of poetry, seven volumes of travel writing, and a long list of essays and other works.  In addition to all that, Stevenson ” wrote over 123 original musical compositions or arrangements, including solos, duets, trios and quartets for various combinations of flageolet, flute, clarinet, violin, guitar, mandolin, and piano.”

Unfortunately, he died at the age of 44, probably of a stroke, having suffered from poor health for much of his life.  With the rise of ‘modern literature’ after World War I, Stevenson was seen as a second class writer, specialising in children’s literature and the horror genre.  The 1973 edition of the Oxford Anthology of English Literature (2000 pages) does not even mention Stevenson.  But later in the 20th century, his reputation began to re-ascend with recognition of his literary skill and imaginative powers.  Setting the critics aside, he is the 26th most translated author in the world.

So, sometimes specialisation is not necessary.

Instilling a Need to Read

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In the Daily Telegraph, about 10 days ago, there was an article by Jonathan Douglas, Director of the National Literacy Trust (literacytrust.org.uk), a “charity that transforms lives through literacy”.  The first two sentences in the article caught my eye: “Reading for pleasure at the age of 15 is a strong factor in determining future social mobility.  Indeed it has been revealed as the most important indicator of the future success of the child.”  This finding is the result of research carried  out by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.  The research examined education and reading as factors in promoting social mobility.

I suppose many parents who read the article would readily agree with this conclusion.  Douglas said that the research distinguished between different motivations for reading: whether the reading is the result of parental carrots and sticks, or whether it is entirely voluntary.  The research suggested that those who read for their own pleasure have a desire to “engage with stories, texts and learning.  Reading for pleasure therefore reveals a predisposition not just to literature, but to the sort of lifelong learning that explains increased social mobility.”

Douglas goes on to talk about different formats for reading.  By way of example he points out that emails typically use different language than a written letter.  He says, “Analysis so far on the  impact of digital literature is that it can play an important role in building core literary skills, but there is an ongoing debate about whether it conveys the same benefits as reading a physical book.  Initial research in the Unites States would appear to suggest that it doesn’t.”

Douglas points out that there are differences between boys and girls in terms of their reading for pleasure.  “In Britain, girls read more and have  more positive attitudes to reading than boys.  This is not a universal phenomenon. In India, by contrast, it is the other way around, though that may have more to do with questions of gender and access to society.  In Britain, it is about gender and attitude.  The reluctance of boys to read for pleasure seems more social than biological.”  A recent study by the National Literacy Trust found that reading for pleasure was not something that “boys wanted to be seen doing.”

Douglas argues that reading for pleasure will result only from teenagers having access to books that interest them. “If that means car manuals or books about football for boys, then so be it.”

On the subject of classical vs. modern young adult fiction, Douglas says, “There is a balance to be struck, and this goes to the heart of the current debate about whether a canon of classics needs to be imposed on teenage students in our schools.  Some say that this proposal is wrong and the way to get them reading for pleasure is to give them complete freedom to choose.  Others say that without a knowledge of the classics, they are being failed by the education system because the will miss out not only on great literature, but also on a vital part of their own cultural identity and heritage.”

What is your view?

Happy Endings

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My wife and I had some good friends over for dinner on Saturday.  They asked me to tell them about my latest novel Sable Shadow and The Presence – as yet unpublished.  I ran through a synopsis of the novel and explained the key messages.  They listened attentively, and when I finished, Barbara said, “I’m glad it has a happy ending.”

I said, “Well, it’s not exactly a happy ending, but it did turn out a lot better than the key character might have expected.

“Barbara said, “It seems to be the fashion in fiction these days that every novel has to end in tragedy or at least in a down beat conclusion.”

I don’t know whether it’s true that fiction is in a depressed mode nowadays, but I know I couldn’t write a novel that ended badly for the characters.  In the first place, literature is supposed to be thought-provoking and entertaining.  For me, tragedies are not entertaining, and the only thoughts tragedies provoke are gloom and doom.  So, I don’t do outright tragedy. Yes, bad things happen to some of the characters (sometimes as a result of their own doing), but I give them the chance to make at least a partial recovery.  I think the average reader is more interested in the how and why of the recovery than s/he is in the tragedy itself.  We all know that tragedies happen; what we’d like to know is how people recover from them.  My view on writing about tragedy is probably influenced by my attitude toward life.  I’ve had my share of hard knocks, but I’ve managed (with God’s help) to get past the knocks, and I think that most people can do the same.  For example, a friend of mine referred me to a YouTube video of a man who lost a leg in a motorcycle accident.  He had been a very keen golfer.  Now, he’s back playing what looks like very good golf standing on only one leg.  It’s amazing that he can keep his balance while swinging his driver on one leg!

If I look back over my novels, Fishing in Foreign Seas could have ended very badly for Jamie, who is the lead character.  He could have lost his wife and his job.  He did lose the big order which he thought would make of break his career, but his wife forgave him, and his career was actually boosted by his efforts to win the order.

In Sin & Contrition, none of the six characters had their lives unfold as they had hoped and expected.  But, when I interviewed each of them at the end, they all felt – to varying degrees – that the good aspects of their lives outweighed the bad.

Efraim’s Eye ended rather badly for Efraim, the terrorist, but, so far, no readers have really lamented this.  Paul thought he would lose Sarah, the woman he intended to marry, but when he gave up Naomi, he was able to get Sarah back.  Naomi gave up Paul and her job, but she got the kind of life she really wanted in Israel.

In The Iranian Scorpion, Robert was condemned to die by hanging is a prison in eastern Iran, but at the end we find him planning a trip to Dubai with his girlfriend.

I suppose I am what you might call an incorrigible optimist.

The Hare with Amber Eyes

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I’ve just finished reading The Hare with Amber Eyes by Edmund De Waal.  It was highly recommended by my cousin, Peggy, and it won the 2010 Costa Biography Prize and was a Sunday Times best seller.  I dutifully bought a copy and read in during a recent trip to Sicily.  In many ways it is a fascinating book.
The hare in the title is a small ivory netsuke from a collection acquired by the author’s great grandfather’s cousin in Paris in the second half of the 19th century.  Netsuke are small, precious, hand-carved and polished figures of animals and people, made in Japan by skilled craftsmen of ivory or unique hard wood, like boxwood.  The collector, Charles Ephrussi (born 1849), was from an extremely wealthy Jewish family originating in the Ukraine.  The family made their money buying and selling grain from the Ukraine and later in a banking empire.  The story traces the lives and life styles of the family from Odessa in the Ukraine to Paris to Vienna to Tokyo to London (where the author now lives) alongside the collection of 264 netsuke that were passed through the family.  The collection is quite extraordinary in that all 264 pieces of the original collection have survived several transfers between family members, including temporary custody under the mattress of a ladies maid during the Nazi occupation.  The pieces, while extremely valuable as a collection were also very precious to their various custodians.
But it is not the netsuke which take centre stage in this story, which is really about the lives (good times and bad) of the family members.  Particularly fascinating are the descriptions of the life styles in the second half of the 19th century and at the beginning of the 20th century.  They are life styles which we would not recognise today.  For the family, things started to go very wrong with the rise to power of the Nazis.  But post-war, with family members scattered through Europe, America and Japan, lives became stable and even improved.
The book strikes one as a very learned biography.  It is erudite, and colourfully descriptive, with an extensive vocabulary and frequent phrases in French or German.  But it is the descriptions of people’s daily habits, their attitudes, priorities, activities, dress, etc., in the various cities over a period of 15 decades which are most fascinating. 
The family characters are real, but they seem suitably distant and untouchable.  We know them from a distance.  The descriptions of settings and the author’s reflections on what he has learned are sometimes too copious, but I suppose the author wants to immerse us in the results of his very extensive research, from which he, himself, took great pains and satisfaction.  In fact, I find it rather startling that De Waal was able to take two years away from his family (married with three children) and his occupation (world-famous ceramic artist) to do all the necessary research.  But he deserves our thanks for creating a fascinating biography and a literary treat.

Fiction Writing Tips

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Melissa Donovan has 42 Fiction Writing Tips for Novelists on the website “Writing Forward”.  You can view her entire list here: http://www.writingforward.com/writing-tips/42-fiction-writing-tips-for-novelists.

I have picked out my top ten of her tips, and give my reasons for the selections below:

  • Don’t lock yourself into one genre (in reading or writing). Even if you have a favorite genre, step outside of it once in awhile so you don’t get too weighed down by trying to fit your work into a particular category.  (This particular piece of advice appeals to me because I haven’t selected ‘my genre’.  [See the post on Genre.]  I think this advice is especially appropriate for reading.  Reading different genres can definitely open the mind.)
  • Don’t write for the market. Tell the story that’s in your heart.  (This advice is related to the item above.  It seems to me that some writers have a genre which the market – and readers – recognise.  Sticking to that genre and their market can make them financially successful.  Think J K Rowling.  But even she has branched out with an adult story she wanted to tell.)
  • Make your characters real through details. A girl who bites her nails or a guy with a limp will be far more memorable than characters who are presented in lengthy head-to-toe physical descriptions.  (This is a very good point.  I think that what the writer should try to do is to stimulate the reader’s imagination, and a small, but telling detail is probably the best way to do that.)
  • The most realistic and relatable characters are flawed. Find something good about your villain and something dark in your hero’s past.  (In Efraim’s Eye, the villain has a  past which distorts his view of women, and one tends to feel sorry for him.)
  • Avoid telling readers too much about the characters. Instead, show the characters’ personalities through their actions and interactions.  (To this I would add, what the characters say.  The words a character chooses and the way they phrase their opinions can say a lot about their values.)
  • Every great story includes transformation. The characters change, the world changes, and hopefully, the reader will change too.  (I think that we’re all interested in important change – as long as it doesn’t hurt us.  We like to see how and why others change, and the effects on them.  In Efraim’s Eye, Naomi goes through a major change: from being an unfulfilled nomad to setting down nourishing roots.)
  • Aim for a story that is both surprising and satisfying. The only thing worse than reading a novel and feeling like you know exactly what’s going to happen is reading a novel and feeling unfulfilled at the end — like what happened wasn’t what was supposed to happen. Your readers invest themselves in your story. They deserve an emotional and intellectual payoff.  (Very true!)
  • Let the readers use their imaginations. Provide a few choice details and let the readers fill in the rest of the canvas with their own colors.  (I think this advice is particularly appropriate for sex scenes.  I used to think I had to paint a complete picture; now, I believe that a few brush strokes are sufficient to engage the reader’s imagination.)
  • Appeal to readers’ senses. Use descriptive words that engage the readers’ senses of taste, touch, and smell.  (To this I would add the reader’s sense of hearing.  Sometimes it’s appropriate for the reader to hear what’s going on.)
  • Apply poetry techniques to breathe life into your prose. Use alliteration, onomatopoeia, metaphor, and other literary devices to make your sentences sing and dance.  (This is about engaging the reader’s brain at another level.  Ms. Donovan has another point about ‘crafting compelling language’.  When we surprise the reader, we get him/her thinking.)

There are plenty of other excellent suggestions on the website!

 

Lady Chatterley and Sex in Writing

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The Daily Telegraph carried an article last Tuesday in which the author Julian Barnes suggested that the failure of the Lady Chatterley’s Lover obscenity prosecution in 1960 opened a whole new world for writers. Barnes won the 2011 Man Booker Prize in for The Sense of an Ending.  He said that upon hearing the outcome of the prosecution when he was 14, “At last, I remember thinking, British literature would be able to catch up with foreign, especially French, literature, which for a century had been far more truth-telling – and far more titillating than its British equivalent.  But having a new freedom and knowing what to do with it were two quite different things.  Instead of a blanket prohibition, there was almost the reverse: not a writerly desire, but a commercial obligation to write in a detailed way about sex.  And sometimes all that happened was that the misleading old euphemisms were replaced by new misleading cliches.

“It’s easy to mock, and each generation will mock the previos one because each generation needs to imagine that its attitude to sex strikes just about the right balance; that by comparison its predecessors were prim and embarrassed, its successors sex-obsessed and pornified.  And so writing about sex contains an additional anxiety on top of all the usual ones: that the writer might be giving him or herself away, that readers may conclude, when you describe a sex act, that it must have already happened to you in pretty much the manner described.”

This is an interesting point of view.  Some I agree with; some I don’t.  While the Lady Chatterley prosecution may have been a watershed at the time, in my opinion, it has little effect on literature today, 50+ years later.  What affects literature today is what the public wants to read and what critics think they should read.  Critics don’t speak with one voice on the subject of sex: some criticise authors for attempting to write about it, and others point out the blank space left by its omission.  Some readers today may be ‘prim and embarrassed’, but others, as the success of Fifty Shades of Grey shows, are quite happy to be immersed.

For myself, I don’t feel any ‘commercial pressure’ to include sex in my novels.  I include it because it helps to define the personality and values of the characters involved.  Here, for example, is a passage from Efraim’s Eye:

Paul was suddenly awake.  There was someone in the room.  A slight, pale figure had slipped almost soundlessly past the door.  The figure made no threatening movements.  He tried to see through the gloom.  Like a butterfly shedding its chrysalis, the figure dropped its robe.  It was Naomi.  She lifted the bed covers and climbed in beside him.  She was trembling.

“What’s the matter, Naomi?”

“He tried to attack me.”

“You’ve been dreaming.”
”It was horrible.”

Still trembling, she clung to him.  Gently, he stroked her hair, which cascaded across her face and shoulders.  There was peaceful, utter silence in the room.  She lay on her side, against him, her head on his shoulder.  He kissed her forehead, and stroked her back.  Gradually, he felt the tension seep out of her.  There was the faint scent of her perfume.  He felt one of her breasts against his chest.

“Thank you, Paul.”

Desire swept over him.  “I want you Naomi.”

She said nothing.

She stroked his chest, and her hand strayed down across his belly.  “Oh!”  For some time she continued to hold him.  “Do you have a condom, Paul?”

“No, but I’ve had a vasectomy, and . . . and I have no . . . “

“no STD’s,” she finished the sentence for him.

She continued to caress him.  Then deliberately and languorously, she slid on top of him.  Reaching down for him, she guided him.  She gave a little groan of pleasure and began to move.  He was almost passive, knowing that his time was later.  He caressed her face, her breasts, her back, her arms.  “God, you feel lovely!”

She gave soft mewling sounds as her passion flamed higher, and the pace of her movements increased.

Then, suddenly she convulsed, buried her face at his throat and gave a long sighing groan.  He could hold out no longer, wrapped his arms around her, and succumbed to the surge of ecstasy.

They floated down; lay on their sides, her back against his chest, pressed tight against him, his arms still around her.  She felt blissfully safe.

They fell asleep.

This passage is intended to reinforce several points about the characters.  Naomi can be child-like and she is very frightened by the terrorist; she views Paul almost as a father figure; she did not come to him for sex, but for security.  Paul admires Naomi, and would not normally have tried to seduce her, but her naked presence is too much for him.

I don’t agree with Barnes that the ‘old euphemisms’ and the ‘new cliches’ are necessarily ‘misleading’.  It is not a word I would have chosen.  I think what he probably means is ‘ill-conceived’.  For me, this is the challenge: how does one choose the right words and construction to have the reader feel what the characters are feeling – no more, no less?

I think that Barnes has a point when he says that ‘readers may conclude, when you describe a sex act, that it must have already happened to you in pretty much the manner described.’  I had a friend who emailed me after reading Efraim’s Eye to the effect that he felt he now knew me better, “including your sexual experiences ha ha!”  My reaction on reading the joking email was to shrug.  He doesn’t know as much as he thinks he knows.

 

Empathy

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In my post ‘Emotion’, I have touched already on the importance of a writer of fiction feeling the emotions of his characters.   This is a kind of follow-up on that post.

The other evening at about 6:30, my wife came home from her work.  I was in my office upstairs working away on my latest novel.  She came upstairs and put her head in the door.  “Why are you crying?” she asked.

“Henry’s son was just killed,” I said.  (Henry is the key character in my fifth novel.)

“Oh,” she said, “I thought something was wrong.”

In fact, something was very wrong: William, Henry’s son, for whom he had great admiration and fondness, had been killed.  For me, this felt like a tragedy.  One might ask, ‘Is it really necessary for a novelist to get so emotionally involved with his characters?’  Perhaps it is possible for a writer to maintain a level of detachment, but for me, that wouldn’t work.  One might also ask, ‘You knew that William was going to get killed – in fact, you plotted his killing – how can you be so sad when you kill him?’  First of all, I didn’t kill him.  I wrote about how he was killed fighting Somali pirates.  And secondly, fore knowledge of an event doesn’t necessarily protect us from an emotional response to the event itself.  For example, when you know that your daughter is going to get married, you may also know that you’ll be feeling a little weepy (as I did), but that slight anticipation doesn’t stifle the watery eyes when you start down the aisle.  At least it didn’t stifle the tears for me.

Emotion is one of the features of humanity which makes us so interesting, and separates us pretty definitively from the rest of the animal kingdom.  (As a dog lover, I knows that animals have feelings, but not the grand passions of their human masters.)  Emotion, or the lack of it, can go a long way to define our character and our values.

For me, Van Gogh was an artist who understood the power of emotion, and his canvasses reflect this understanding with their powerful brush strokes, brilliant colours and fluidity.  Just look at ‘Starry Night’:

Starry NightFor me, Van Gogh has captured the wonder we feel looking up at the night sky.  In a similar way, I believe that the novelist must try to capture the feelings of his or her characters.  And what better way to capture them than to feel them yourself.  Emotions are only real if you can feel them; if they are not felt, they are only synthetic.  To feel the emotions of a character, one must know him or her, and to know her, the writer must define her.  Then, one can begin the process of empathising: I am him, in this situation, how do I feel?  Angry?  How angry?  What’s unique about my anger?  If my anger is only a stereotype, it doesn’t define me as a person.  The writer not only has to empathise with his characters, he has to capture the feelings of the character in distinctive language.

Death

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My wife and I went to the States this past week to attend the funeral of a niece.  She was not someone with whom I have had much contact, but as the daughter of my brother-in-law, who was absolutely devastated, I felt we should go.  She was about the age of my children (40’s), and she died in a tragic skiing accident.  She was an avid and very good skier, skiing with the man she hoped to marry.  She had stopped on the slope to clean her goggles, and was struck from behind by an out-of-control skier.  She was wearing a helmet, but the impact was so great that it broke her neck and she died instantly.  The out-of-control skier was not injured.

Many of us have had our parents, friends and relatives die, but I feel that the death of one’s child, particularly so un-necessarily, is the ultimate tragedy.  Our children are the ones who are carrying into the future not only our genes, but our values, beliefs and aspirations.  The death of a child not only leaves us in deep mourning, it constricts us: heart, mind and soul.  And in this case, one cannot help but wonder what if.  What if her goggles didn’t get fogged?  What if she had been three feet to the right or the left?  What if the other skiier hadn’t been so stupidly careless?  What if her man had been standing directly behind her?  (He was standing beside her.)

Death features prominently in the writing of many novelists.  A death is often used to make a point, and often the point is that death is senseless, un-justifiable, un-reasonable.  Often, in real life, that is exactly the case.  And some writers go on to make the point that if death is senseless, there cannot be a loving God, because a loving God would never allow a senseless tragedy to happen to His people.  But, in my opinion, this argument overlooks an important point: it may look and feel senseless to us.  However, in an unknowable, cosmic context it may make sense.  Why is it unknowable?  Because if it were knowable, we would also know God, and if we really knew God we would not have free will.  Why no free will?  Can you imagine that anyone who really knew God, and therefore knew his plan for us, would actually do something that God didn’t like?  In other words, I believe that God’s gift of free will carries a price: we can’t know everything.

Looking back on my writing, death and its messages have been present in all my novels.  In Fishing in Foreign Seas, Jamie’s father develops incurable cancer.  He is terrified, but, gradually, he comes to terms with his life and the blessings of his sons and wife.  In Sin and Contrition, Gary, the ego-centric politician from a poor background, is approached by his long-absent father for money for a vital heart operation.  There is an argument, the two fail to agree, and the father dies.  Gary’s mother has dementia, but Gary leaves her care entirely to his sister.  Gary later regrets his behaviour.  Efraim’s Eye portrays the mind of a pathological terrorist: so committed to revenge that killing on the way to his grand attack is incidental.  In The Iranian Scorpion, the Iranian gallows casts its shadow over Robert and his father.  And in my fifth novel, Henry slides into deep depression after his exceptional son is killed in combat.  But in each case, there is some redemption, as, I think, there usually is in life.