There’s a moment near the end of Vajra Chandrasekera’s brilliant debut novel, The Saint of Bright Doors, where the narration pulls the rug out from under the reader in a startling, audacious reveal that recontextualizes everything that’s gone before.
It’s a perfectly-executed trick – clever, thematically apt – that made me want to clap like a trained seal when I read it. The reader gets only one prior clue: a single line, a few chapters previous, dropped in without explanation, which interrupts the hitherto-seamless third-person narration and then leaves us guessing.
Reading that one line, I vibrated with excitement, because, oh yeah, there was more going on here, on top of the carefully-constructed setting and the lovely prose and the complex characters and the chewy themes. Gimme gimme gimme. It was wonderful.
Then, I wondered if I would dare do something like that in my own work.
Maybe, I decided. But maybe not. Maybe I would have edited it out, anticipating concerned feedback. This confused me. I think it might trip the reader up. Maybe I would even have given similar feedback myself, if the same line appeared in a friend’s draft and not a published novel.
I don’t think that’s because I’m a lazy, ungenerous reader. It’s certainly not the case for the friends and fellow writers I trust with my drafts, many of whom have helped me dig deep and make those stories into the best, most honest and exacting versions of themselves.
But we have all been trained, in ways both acknowledged and unspoken, big and small, to assume a reader who is – who will walk away, or demand to speak to the manager, on encountering a hint of challenge, instead of reacting with anticipation or delight. Much common writing advice is just good sense, and of course, writers should take on board whatever helps them create the work they want, the way they want.
Some of it, though, encourages us to underestimate readers and to curtail our ambitions, our weirdness, our deep and messy emotion, in response.
Thing is, writers are readers, too – and as a reader, I reacted with delight to that brilliant, destabilising rug-pull. The way it recontextualizes and alters the narrative of the book mirrors one of its major themes: the way those in power are able to rewrite reality, history, even geography, to suit themselves, and the persistence of a different stratum beneath these rewritings. What initially appears to be a snag in the novel’s fabric becomes part of a complex pattern. The novel works so well because it trusts its reader. It trusts us to be open to having our assumptions turned on their heads, to be able to put theme and plot together without hand-holding and see for ourselves how they mirror each other. That’s the reason it’s been living in my head rent-free since I read it, where easier, more seamless books get forgotten.
There are a couple of other pieces of fiction that have been occupying valuable brain-space recently, and as I thought about Saint, I realised that those, too, break with some common assumptions about how writers should make our work palatable for an imagined reader. One of them is the long-running horror-fantasy manga series Berserk, which I expect will be keeping me occupied for some time to come, because there’s a whole lot of it. The other is Paddy Figgis’s 1999 novel, On the Bright Road.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep (and no, I’m not giving you a map)
On the Bright Road is a strange, mesmeric, thoroughly idiosyncratic novel. Its action time-slips between the life of its present-day protagonist, Cathal Kerr – a Londoner who finds himself no longer able to face big-city life and retreats to a cottage in rural Wales – and that of a sixth-century tracker living in and around an Arthurian hill-fort or dinas. The book has no truck with explanations or SFF conventions. These two lives simply slide together and apart again, the outer landscapes of the village and the dinas sometimes echoing and sometimes seeming to overwrite the inner worlds of their inhabitants.
Figgis offers her reader no logical handholds. Nor does she offer the emotional ones of obvious sympathy. Cathal, a middle-aged man who has never before cooked a potato for himself, is frequently insufferable. His distaste for “cash-and-nooky-land”, as he calls London, spills over onto his wife, Gemma, whom he comes to view as the kind of mummy-jailer figure almost obligatory in tired narratives of straight male rebellion. He may or may not kill her, later on. We are never told what ‘really’ happened. Nor do we learn whether Cathal is in control of his own actions, or a victim of the sinister priest who alternately taunts and coaxes him into the past. It hardly matters. He wouldn’t be a particularly likeable figure in any case, and the novel doesn’t care.
On the Bright Road is supremely uninterested in concrete answers, or in making us empathise with its main character in any conventional sense. Its language is dense as a booze-soaked fruit cake and occasionally obscure – it sent me to the dictionary at least once – but also rich and rewarding.
As writers, we’re told to aim for transparent prose. Ornate or unusual language, we’re told, will just interrupt the reader’s experience of pure plot – or worse, make them feel ignorant. But as a reader, that’s never been my experience. Discovering a new word, precisely used, or stumbling over an odd-but-perfect turn of phrase like a quartz on the beach, is part of the fun. In fact, it’s one of the specific parts of the fun that makes me reach for prose fiction instead of a comic or a movie. Why not play to our strengths?
That’s what On the Bright Road does. Figgis is interested in the places where past and present, human and inhuman, reality and dream, slide together, and takes the willing reader on an intoxicating ride through those interstices, using language to make of the real world something hallucinatory and weird.
In its strangeness and lack of concessions, it’s a novel utterly and completely itself, a spiky, fully-realised statement. It made me wish our current publishing landscape held more space for books like it alongside the easier reads.
Don’t save the cat
If you’ve spent any time in online writing spaces, someone will have either recommended that you read Blake Snyder’s screenwriting book, Save the Cat, or offered you a potted version of its titular piece of advice.
Saving the cat is, essentially, getting the audience on your main character’s side early on by having them do something nice. Helping a small child or an animal is extra good. You’ll find similar advice about making your protagonist likeable or relatable all over. In some cases, for some kinds of stories, it makes perfect sense.
Kentaro Miura’s manga Berserk is not that kind of story.
(At this juncture, I’ll note that while I’m about to tell you how good I think this series is, it certainly won’t for everyone – it’s a gruesomely violent horror-fantasy that handles rape and sexual assault with varying levels of sensitivity. Nothing wrong with deciding that’s not for you.)
When we’re introduced to the series’ protagonist, Guts, he’s violent, callous, and generally as unpleasant as possible to everyone around him. In one of the early volumes of the manga, he advises a traumatised child who’s just seen her father turn into a monster that she may as well kill herself now, because life isn’t going to get any better. Cat very much un-saved. As a reader, you’d be forgiven for thinking, “Well, why should I care what happens to this dick?”
The series asks us to care anyway. It takes us back in time to show us what made Guts the way he is, and in doing so, unfolds a deeply compassionate, often heartbreaking story about trauma, power and survival. It’s all the more powerful because it refuses to blunt its sharp edges.
None of its characters are model victims. Many of them live by the sword or profit from having others do violence at their behest. Some react to abuse by becoming abusive. Others are so afraid of vulnerability they lash out angrily at the world and drive away anyone who tries to help them.
The manga insists that they matter anyway, and that their pain deserves to be portrayed with humanity and tenderness. It’s less palatable, and asks more from the reader, than stories about inspirational victims who become stronger and kinder after healing from their pain. It asks us to extend compassion to characters who are not always likeable or kind themselves – and in that, it feels more honest and is ultimately more moving. Trauma narratives are evergreen, but very few stick in my head the way Berserk does.
So what?
So, why have I written nearly 1500 words about these three stories and the brainworms they’ve given me? What am I taking from this, as a writer?
The most obvious thing is that, the longer you write for and the clearer your idea of what you want to do with your work, the more likely it is you’ll cherry-pick which bits of received writing wisdom you want to hold onto, and which you want to throw in the bin. That’s pretty obvious, and probably a place most writers reach after a while.
More than that, though, I’ve been thinking about who I picture as my reader. Bluesky user BeijingPalmer posted recently about the “defensive crouch induced by social media” in which authors can find themselves, overexplaining or tidying away complexities for fear of being misread. This assumes a reader who is, at best, unwilling to be challenged or surprised and ready to walk away as soon as they’re asked to sit with uncertainty; at worst, reading in bad faith, eager to jump on the worst possible interpretation of any plot point, emotion, or moral ambiguity not crystal clear and diamond-cut. I’m certainly sometimes guilty of that defensiveness myself.
But that’s not how I read. That’s not how anyone whose opinion I trust reads. There are a handful of friends and acquaintances who I think of as my ideal readers – Yes, if this person likes it, I must be doing something right! – and all of them approach nuance and strangeness and uncertainty with joy, not resentment. I trust them.
And as a reader, I inhabit a book far more fully when I feel that the author is trusting me to grasp it, including the thorny, unanswerable questions, the weird vocabulary, and the messy, complicated characters that inhabit its pages.
So, I want to write for my best possible reader, not the worst one I can imagine. I want to write for a reader I trust.
I’m sure I won’t succeed all the time. Trust is fragile, hard to come by.
But it’s damn well worth a try.
Writing news
Edits are done, so hopefully it will be online soon -- my short story, "Small Passengers", will be appearing in an upcoming issue of
. This is in some ways an unusually nice story, for me -- a magical tattooist and a moment of connection in a dispiriting world.
AWW
make all their stories free to read online for a limited time, though of course, if you want to support the magazine, you can always buy a copy.
"Vintage Fur", my story about a disillusioned selkie which originally appeared in the
Hidden Villains: Arise
anthology, is going to be reprinted in
later this year, so there's another chance to read it (and support Wales' only speculative fiction magazine in the process!)
Lastly, this news is not mine, but it's something that means a lot to me, so I'm sharing it here to spread the word. Last year, thanks to the baffling news that the Books Council of Wales had decided to stop its funding of
New Welsh Review
, it looked as though that long-running magazine and champion of new Welsh writing, along with its New Welsh Rarebyte publishing arm, which put out
The Word
, would be lost.
NWR have now announced they will be putting out at least two issues this year in partnership with Parthian, and Parthian will also be taking on the Rarebyte list of books. Of course, that's a great personal relief, but it also mitigates the damage of what could have been a swinging act of cultural vandalism, and preserves some important opportunities for Welsh writers. You can read the full post at the NWR website
.
What (else) I've been reading
I'm partway through Mariana Enriquez's
, which is the second collection I've read by her, and cements her as one of my favourite contemporary authors. Her stories are grotesque, unflinching, sometimes surreal, and always chillingly beautiful.
What I've been watching
Honestly, not much new. It's mostly been a month of old comfort-watches, which my migraine-addled brain appreciates. That said, my partner does occasionally try to rectify my woeful lack of classic film knowledge, so I watched
Scarface
for the first time recently. That was pretty good.
What I've been listening to
The
podcast has done a couple of recent episodes on stories by Arthur Machen. They did one on "The White People" before Christmas, and I recently spotted that they'd also discussed "The Great God Pan". The hosts are smart people who clearly have a lot of love for the Gothic -- both episodes are well worth a listen.
That's all from me for this month. 'Til next time.
JL