Five Decembers Q5: Pace and action

NeilNjae

The framing of the book (the blurb, the cover painting, the setup) are unashamedly drawing on pulp novels. But this book isn't all two-fisted action; it has long periods of reflection and waiting. McGrady spends a lot of time doing unproductive legwork, and even longer trapped in a Japanese house. Was the pace engaging? Did the book hold your interest? Were you surprised by the pacing the book turned out to have?

RichardAbbott

I thought I'd start with an easy discussion starter

Yes, I was surprised, not so much with the legwork part, which seemed to me to go along nicely with the type of story, but more with the gaps. It was really a story of Two Decembers, with an inconvenient hiatus in the middle. I had started to wonder how James Kestrel was possibly going to get five Decembers out of the story when the first one took rather over half the book, and then realised that we were just going to skip over the intervening three or so years.

I have to confess I found the idea that McGrady had spent, those three or so years successfully hiding in the middle of a Japanese city rather improbable, but I was sufficiently taken with the rest of the story that I'm happy to pass over that as an oddity but nothing more.

That said, given that Kestrel wanted the first part to be before the US entered (or was brought into) WW2 and the last part to be afterwards, it's hard to see how else to do it. It would not, I think, be plausible to have McGrady intermittently get some clues over a three year period but be unable to pursue them. So in the end I was OK with it, although it continues to feel a little artificial.

But yes in response to the other parts, the book did hold my interest, and the pace within the two time periods in focus worked for me. I haven't read much pulp fiction other than trashy SF a long time ago, so don't have a basis of comparison for that.

Apocryphal

The book held my interest all the way through, and I had no issue with the pacing. I didn’t find the book flagged during the ‘basement’ scenes, but it did feel to me that the first sex scene (with Molly) was kind of an odd interlude that broke the pace and didn’t really fit. The rest I was ok with. I can easily see that some might say the book was trying to do too many things, but ultimately I liked the mix.

I breezed through the book in a couple of sittings. Actually, I read the first part last week, then decided it was going too fast, so I set it aside to read another book and came back to this one a few days later.

NeilNjae

@Apocryphal said:
but it did feel to me that the first sex scene (with Molly) was kind of an odd interlude that broke the pace and didn’t really fit.

As an aside, I initially thought Molly would be a mythical figure, only appearing in notes and phone calls, and it would be a recurring theme that McGrady would be a constant long-distance relationship. That idea was quickly discarded.

But that scene did remind me of another aspect of McGrady's character, his naivete about women.