Albert Camus // Penguin Modern Classics // 128 pages
(Originally published in French as L’Étranger)

L’Etranger can be translated variously as (most obviously and most commonly) ‘The Stranger’, ‘The Outsider’, or even ‘The Foreigner’. Questions over naming are indicative of the book itself: three distinct translations exist, differing substantially in tone. This Penguin Modern Classics edition from 2000 opts for The Outsider as a title and reprints Joseph Laredo’s 1982 translation of the text, generally seen as striking a balance between the formality of earlier translations and the perhaps overly casual approach of an American translation made at around the same time as Laredo’s. Such variations aside, the basics are well-known: the ‘black foot’ Mersault kills an Arab man in a sudden and unexpected act of violence after a long, hot day on the beach and thereafter mulls his fate in prison.

The Outsider is usually described as an Existentialist novel while Camus himself was regarded (and identified) as an Absurdist. I think that’s debatable – Mersault and the novel are more than a little Nihilistic (Camus, though, most certainly was not).

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Lusophone - one who speaks Portuguese natively or by adoption; also connotates one with a cultural identity linked to the Portuguese language; part of the Portuguese-speaking world. Sometimes includes the Galician language spoken in Spain. The word derives from the Roman province of Lusitania.

In the news today because of this: Brazil Embraces Spelling Reforms

The idea of similar reform of English is occasionally mooted, often by well-meaning educationalists who seem to believe the convoluted nature of our language holds children back. To those who suggest that phonetic spelling is the answer, I have just one question: How are we going to spell the world castle?

Will it be carsul, as the Queen’s English would presumably render it, or cassul, as even my own relatively mild Yorkshire accent does? Or are we going to end up with (at least) two written forms of the language in England alone, one for the North and one for the South? There’s vast phonetic differences between the English used in different parts of the Anglophone world; trying to render the language into a single written form would leave many people, as before, forced to use spellings which in no way represent their pronunciation of the word, which rather seems to defeat the object, doesn’t it?

Christopher Hitchens // Atlantic Books // 320 pages // Non-fiction

When this book was published in the US, it was subtitled How Religion Poisons Everything (a phrase which appears repeatedly throughout the text of this version, too). That, if anything, is the more accurate title – a few occasional side-swipes at the Creator’s paradoxical inconsistency aside, this is the case against religion more than it is the case against god (though Hitchens clearly relies upon that argument having already been made by many of his contemporaries, most notably Richard Dawkins).

Hitchens’ approach is essentially a threefold one: First he recounts many of the most well-known religiously-inspired (or religiously-sanctioned) atrocities, such as the Srebrenica massacre, the Rwandan genocide, suicide bombings across the Middle East and beyond, and religion’s staunch opposition to contraception. Secondly he points to many lesser known harms attributable to religion (as with the outbreak of herpes amongst young Jewish boys in New York, responsible for at least one death, stemming from the traditional practice of orally removing the circumcised prepuce; or Chapter Seventeen’s suggestion of regimes from Stalin’s Soviet Union to the Kims of North Korea as stemming from religious thinking). Thirdly he attacks religious beliefs themselves as irrational and therefore inherently erring towards harm, based partly upon the origin of most modern religions as little more than the parochial desert squabbles of long-ago tribes, and partly upon their demonstrable scientific and philosophical unsoundness.

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I’ve just seen The Dark Knight, so have compiled my thoughts for this blog. This is more of a critique than a review, so if you haven’t seen the film yet, you might like to wait until you have before reading the entirety of this article. As far as the typical ‘review’ part of this post goes, suffice to say I largely agree with a very good review I heard on Radio 5Live last week, from Mark Kermode, which you can listen to here. The remainder of this post is, as I’ve said, more a critique than a review, so it might contain information you’d rather not read before seeing the film (though I’ve endeavoured not to include any obvious ’spoilers’). You’ve been warned, so click ‘more’ and read on at your own peril.

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Gav left a comment on the previous post, but I thought it warranted a full enough reply to become a new post in it’s own right, so if you haven’t read the previous blog, and the associated comment from Gav, you may wish to do so first. Right, here goes…

Do you think that all adaptation is doomed to failure?

No, I don’t think they’re all doomed to failure, but I do think that one of the characteristics of true greatness is that it’s something which could only have been done by a particular person at a particular time. Dickens, Orwell, Tolkien and so on produced great works that really couldn’t have been produced by anyone else at any other time. In that way, greatness isn’t just the product of its author, but of its circumstance too (and that’s why even the most talented have to be lucky to achieve greatness, or be recognised for it).

I also think it’s a defining characteristic of greatness that it explores and uses its medium every bit as well as it explores and uses its content – being not only a great story, for example, but also a great novel; ditto for a great song needing great composition, arrangement, playing, etc, or a great film needing cinematography every bit as great as any profound truth revealed in the words of the script or the portrayals of the actors.

Both of these factors, to my mind, militate against the chances of an adaptation being particularly good. As regards the first point, an adaptation is usually (though not always) out of time and circumstance with the original work, hence it’s unlikely to be able to recapture whatever it was that meant only that person could do that thing at that time; and as regards the second point, adapting means recreating a work in a new medium which, given the connectedness of work and medium, I think is difficult, if not impossible, to do with the same degree of success.

There is a reverse to this, of course - there are many adaptations which are vastly superior to the original, because the original chose its medium poorly and the basic idea is actually better executed in a different way. This can be true of remakes, as well (which I consider to be part of this whole discussion, as a form of adaptation). So it’s not that I think all adaptations are doomed to failure; I think that the quality of the original counts inversely against their chances, it’s adaptations of the best, most popular and most well-known stories that are therefore most likely to fail - sadly it’s just that kind of adaptation which is tried most frequently. I also think that attempting such a thing is slightly pointless, since there’s a better alternative, as I’ll explain in the next part of the question…

By that I mean something that perhaps goes the whole hog of reinventing a character into a different setting - would Sherlock Holmes (as depicted in the stories) as a character translated to a different (i.e. non-Victorian London) setting always offend? What if Holmes stayed the same character but was transposed to a modern setting, facing mysteries of a contemporary nature and armed with modern technology?

I think this is where inspiration becomes a better bet than adaptation. Inspiration is a factor in everything we do, so we needn’t on the one hand be afraid to admit to it, or on the other feel so beholden to our inspirations that we have to emblazen their names and faces the bastard offspring we create. Sherlock Holmes can be - and doubtless has been - successfully translated to a different setting, facing mysteries of a contemporary nature and armed with modern technology, but it’s under a different name completely, with no reason to pretend he’s Sherlock Holmes anymore. I’d actually say the television series House is an example of this. House is clearly inspired by Sherlock Holmes, but it’s not an adaptation of it. Wouldn’t it just be completely tedious if it was actually called Sherlock Holmes, M.D., and leave everyone wondering, ‘er, why have they made him a doctor?’. More of this in the next part of the question…

Is not the problem with some reinventions that they don’t reinvent at all, but sort of smudge stuff around a bit, losing the essential essence of the originals but not adding anything?

Yes. The basic problem with adaptations is that if they lose the essence of the original (i.e., the thing that made it interesting and made someone want to adapt it in the first place) then it begs the question, why adapt it at all? If it keeps the essence, but changes everything else, then I think it’s really a case of working better as inspiration rather than adaptation. Adaptation brings constraints which inspiration doesn’t, and I think ultimately it’s those constraints which flaw most adaptations. Adaptation is about details while inspiration is about basics. When you adapt something, you retain details - sure lots of things change, but details nonetheless remain, even if it’s only a name or a crucial plot point or whatever - and yet on the other hand, in an adaptation, details are precisely the things you’re forced to change, so adaptations sort of slit their own throats in that regard. The details you keep in order to prove it’s an adaptation really only serve to highlight the compromises and misjudged changes made elsewhere. Better to wholeheartedly abandon the detail, I think, identify the basics, and use them as inspiration (and once you do that, of course, you can still use all the details you want, as long as you’re not relying on them to the point of ripping off - House, though not Holmes, has a drug addiction and lives at 221b).

So, in short - my opinion: adaptation’s alright for the evolution of species, it’s a bit wank for films ‘n’ that.

Right, that’s it.

Matt

Haven’t blogged in a while, so what I intend to do – if I can get my arse in gear – is write a few short(er) blogs over the next few days touching on a few topics.

First off, theme.

Gav Thorpe recently posted a blog on the subject, and it’s something I’ve talked to various people about (Gav included) at length in the past. I don’t really want to go into a huge amount of detail on the specific subject of theme – read Gav’s excellent blog for that – but what I do want to do is use theme as an example of what I would describe as a forgotten element of composition.

When preparing to write a novel, everyone knows they need to come up with an idea for their story (the plot), and work out who their characters will be. They also know that when actually writing it, they’ll need to use a good standard of English (or whatever language they’re writing in). That’s all well and good as a starting point.

Looking a little deeper, writers may look to the various books, and increasingly websites, on the subject of writing for advice. This, too, is all well and good, except that in a great many cases the advice given there is really only concerned with those immediate and obvious facets of novel-writing: the story and the characters. Well-regarded sources like the Turkey City Lexicon do contain a great deal of useful advice, but almost all of it regards plots and characters, or the actual writing as it relates to those things (i.e., writing as a way to move the story along or develop characters). What you won’t find in places like that is a great a deal of advice on how to introduce themes – and themes aren’t the only area of writing which I feel are overlooked by those offering this kind advice.

Stories don’t appeal, and certainly don’t endure, on face value alone. It’s the deeper, hidden elements – the theme, the tone, the style – that speak to us and appeal to us, even if they’re not explicitly described. If you like, you can think of a novel as composed of two parts: it’s described elements (the plot, characters and setting), and it’s implied elements (its theme, its tone, its meaning). In most of the advice you’ll read about writing, plenty of attention is paid to the described elements, much less so to the implied elements, yet to my mind they are of equal merit – both are required for a great novel.

I’m not suggesting you throw out the kind of advice you find in the Turkey City Lexicon or books like Character and Viewpoint by Orson Scott Card. What I’m suggesting is that you view such advice in context – as advice specifically concerning certain, very obvious aspects of writing – and bear it in mind alongside considerations of theme, tone and the other less obvious, but equally important elements.

There is a mantra I try to remind myself of when writing to avoid forgetting these other, subtler elements. Here it is:

Character, not biography.
Theme, not subject.
Tone, not setting.

None of this is to say that your book won’t contain biography, won’t have a subject and won’t have setting – of course it will, but these are products, end results created by the other stages of composition. They are not requisite parts in the way that character, theme and tone are, hence my distinction between them. I’ll go into a little detail on these comparisons.

The fact that John was born on the 11th of December 1957 is biography. The fact that John is cautious is character. The difference should be obvious.

Likewise, you can describe your setting in all the detail you want, but nothing will immerse the reader in your book anywhere near as well as the proper tone will. You can spend as long as you like building a world, but it’s the evocation of surroundings as familiar as, say, a fog-bound street at night which will really make your reader feel like they know exactly where the story is taking place.

Tone pervades everything – not just the scenery, but the characters’ dialogue (old-fashioned, formal speech if your story is set in the past, for example), your choice of words, particularly your number and use of adjectives and adverbs; it influences your characters’ names, their appearance, perhaps even the length and number of your chapters. Tone is the shade in which you paint the story you have created – it needs to be the right one. The tone itself is only implied, but it is the tone in which everything else is described. Without tone, even good writing will have no colour (or no darkness, if that’s what you’re aiming for).

This started with a discussion of theme as one overlooked aspect of composition, and I’ve mentioned a few more. The above, though, is certainly not exhaustive. You can break the writing process - more accurately, composition - down into as many parts as you want, and someone else will always think of some more. That’s fine, there’s no exhaustive list (and anyone trying to create one would likely be on a hiding to nothing) but the point remains this: there is, when composing a novel, a great deal more to be borne in mind than it might at first appear. Even following all the usual advice there is, I’d argue, still more to think about.

Matt

Following on from the recent frenzy of blog-ranting on the subject of narrative styles, I thought I’d post a few examples of some novels which I think demonstrate clever use of the omniscient narrator. Note that I’m focusing specifically on books about the legendary/historical characters that my earlier blog posts centred on - I think we’ve covered that plenty enough already, and besides which I think there’s an interesting discussion to be had about the use of narrative mode more generally. These then, are simply three books which spring to mind as good examples of narrative modes other than the most common third-person limited narrator. All three also employ other noteworthy techniques as we shall see…

You can use the comments thread below to leave your own recommendations, and read on to see mine…

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Gav Thorpe has posted some thoughts on the use of different forms of narrative over on his (we)blog, Mechanical Hamster. As part of the ongoing debate, the question has arisen as to why storytelling styles change over time…

In large part, I think, it’s simply changing fashions. Tastes change over time and commercial publishing compounds that as publishers focus on what is currently popular. Writers aiming for publication follow suit and implement those styles in their own writing. Fashions continue to change, of course, and will change again. How quickly and how likely that change is to come about is of course down to how broadly followed the fashion is, which is one of the principal reasons I argue for the use of a greater variety of storytelling techniques.

In the particular case of the omniscient narrator, I suspect one reason for its decline in popularity is the separation of fact and fiction. The words ‘story’ and ‘history’ share a clearly observable common root and once upon a time the two words meant the same thing. Look at any work of literature from the middle ages or earlier and it’s clear to see that it contains elements of both what we would now call fact and fiction; history and story. Indeed, this was the case as recently as the 17th century; it was only the application of Enlightenment era thought to the arts and humanities that produced the idea of history as a discipline where factuality was paramount, and separate from fiction.

With that distinction made, the narrative forms used for fictional and factual writing diverged – journalistic forms of writing, for instance, developed around this time, with the subsequent emergence of the first daily newspapers. The omniscient narrator mode – with its seemingly boundless knowledge and a voice clearly external to the story – has many similarities to those styles used in factual writing, and may for that reason have become unpopular amongst writers (and readers) of fiction.

For the most part, the choice of the limited mode for narration of modern novels is a wise one. That’s not to say, though, that it suits all subjects or all kinds of stories, and to return to the original subject of this discussion, the historic, mythic and epic are stories to which, it seems to me, the third-person limited narrator is particularly ill-suited, and I really think its for the simple reason of the nature of those stories and the characters they contain.All reading, and therefore all writing, is ultimately an experience shared by the reader and the characters in the story; a connection between the two, you might say. Most beloved of the modern novel in achieving this is a sense of empathy, and it’s for that reason that the third-person limited perspective is so favoured. Empathy, though, is in itself a sign of modernity…

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As noted in my previous post, my friend and one-time (strictly speaking, two-time) colleague, Gav Thorpe, has recently started his own blog. He’s even put gone to the effort of writing an interesting post. The post in question is this one, and what particularly interested me was his discussion of the difficulties of writing a novel about what might loosely be termed ‘fabled’ characters.

In Gav’s case, this means Malekith, the Witch King of the Dark Elves in the mythology of the Warhammer World. Malekith is an invention of not more than about twenty years vintage, but given that the character is portrayed as an ancient figure from the pseudo-mythology of a tabletop wargame, I think it’s fair to say that many of the difficulties that apply to writing a novel about Malekith also apply to novels about Alexander the Great, King Arthur or Robin Hood.

There are a great many such novels; novels which attempt to chronicle the life of some great figure from history, or depict some great episode of our past, or further embellish some ancient legend or other. There are lots of these books, more are being released all the time. They seem to be quite popular. I’ll start off by saying that they’re almost universally cack.

I think this, principally, because they are cack. No, sorry, that’s not what I meant to say. My main objection to them is that for the most part they singularly fail to capture the ethos of their subject, or to tell the story in the manner such tales deserve. They take individuals like Achilles and Alexander the Great, whose names echo down the centuries, and churn out either the kind of melodrama that makes them look like characters in a particularly bad run of Eastenders, or the kind of bloated, completely witless action shite that makes them look like Steven Seagal characters. So many of these books just lack any of the pathos or profundity such stories and such characters simply demand.

This acute failure to produce worthwhile tellings of our oldest stories is, I think, peculiar to novels. I could have put it down to the fact that any fictionalised telling of history is doomed to failure, but I don’t think that’s true. In the modern age, cinema has succeeded admirably many times. Why do novels fail so badly so often to achieve the same? I don’t think it’s that the medium of the novel is inferior or inadequate, I think it’s more a case of how it’s used.

(My) Point of View…

In almost all modern novels (no matter how long ago the events depicted may have occurred) you have the viewpoint character. An equivalent does not exist in cinema. In cinema, we are seeing the film through nobody’s eyes but our own, and we know full well we are looking upon it as if through a window – we are seeing a scene of which we are not a part. This is different to the novel where, to at least some extent, the viewpoint character is the reader. Even if it’s not quite as literal as that, we are in fact relying exclusively on the viewpoint character to inform us and describe for us all that is proceeding in the story. That creates a very unique relationship between the reader and the viewpoint character, and it’s this which makes the use of established characters or historical figures in novels so problematic…

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I’ve just posted a new article - Tolkien: A Novel Approach, which originally appeared in issue 3 of Death Ray magazine. You’ll find it in the articles section of the website.

Regards,

Matt