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Babel Q2: Murder and consequences
A lot of people were murdered in the second part of the book. Lovell, Remy, the rest of the Hermes conspators, Griffin. Was this in keeping with the "ivory tower" tone of the first part of the book? Why do you think Kuang made the transition between the two halves of the book?
Also, the murders were described viscerally and had profound effects on the people around, as opposed to the more sanitised deaths of other styles of fiction. Did that tone work in this book?
Comments
So, here's an interesting thing. While I was reading this book, I was also listening to another book called The Science of Storytelling by Will Storr. This book is about the aspects of a story that makes it pleasing to the reader, and it should be called The Psychology of Storytelling, but I digress. Storr describes the ideal novel with having 5 acts, and at the end of the first 4 acts the protagonist must face a major decision point to either stick with his guns or change course. In addition to the 5-act structure, Storr tells us there's a major twist in the middle of the book. As examples of books of this structure, he gives The Godfather (in some detail), The Remains of the Day, and others.
Well, to my surprise while reading, Babel follows this structure exactly! She even calls the 5 sections 'Acts'. There's a major plot twist right in the middle (the perfessor bites it) too. So it began to dawn on me that Kuang has quite possibly read Storr's book or a similar one (I mean, if it really is the 'ideal structure' surely others have written about it) and looked for ways to follow the structure.
So, there you go. It's a polemic against colonaliasm turned into an 'ideal novel' by following the formula, and using a somewhat nonsensical word-silver thing so that the author could write what she knows.
Now, maybe that's not really a problem - I don't have anything fundamentally against reading a novel with a formulaic structure, nor against a novel with a political message, nor with writers writing what they know (or assume they know) - except that in this case, the execution maybe wasn't all that greats, and I've looked behind the curtain and can't unsee what I've seen.
> So, here's an interesting thing. While I was reading this book, I was also listening to another book called The Science of Storytelling by Will Storr. This book is about the aspects of a story that makes it pleasing to the reader, and it should be called The Psychology of Storytelling, but I digress. Storr describes the ideal novel with having 5 acts, and at the end of the first 4 acts the protagonist must face a major decision point to either stick with his guns or change course. In addition to the 5-act structure, Storr tells us there's a major twist in the middle of the book. As examples of books of this structure, he gives The Godfather (in some detail), The Remains of the Day, and others.
How interesting! I hadn't come across that theory before, though I have heard about the theory that films ought to have a 3-act structure with a decision point at the end of Act 2 (one of the Aliens films, maybe Prometheus, takes this to the extreme that one of the characters even says something like "shall we go on boss?"). Presumably films need a simpler structure, which is logical as the flow of story past you as viewer can't be easily altered, and you can't easily flick back to remind yourself what happened. Maybe this is why film adaptations of books are hard to do?
Now, I got into literary structure a bit a while ago, in particular older patterns of ring structure or chiasmus, where the crucial turning point is at the centre. So storytelling structure is (IMHO) by no means a universal constant, and I do sometimes wonder if all of these theories are kind of chicken-and-egg. But thanks again for this connection which bears thinking about.
There are plenty of "ideal story structure" frameworks around, such as the Campbell Monomyth used as the basis of Star Wars, and so on.
The question is, how much artifice in a book is too much? Assume @Apocryphal 's characterisation of this book is accurate, of being a not-great execution of a good structure. Should we care? Would we care about the formulaic structure if it was better-executed? Or would only a less-rigid adherence to the structure be adequate?
Personally, I'm happy with a fair bit of artifice in stories: the plot structure is just one way in which published novels aren't "real". Could the inclusion of explicit decision points be a way of getting the reader to reflect on the decisions Robin is faced with, and asking us to consider how we would act in a similar situation?
A related (and to my mind even more challenging) question concerns whether an author attempts to imitate speech of some historical period (to the extent that we know it) or just "upgrades" to modern speech. At one extreme you end up with things like "darest speak to me thus, wretched knave? Unhand her this instant, lest I split thy gizzard with my trusty rapier". On the other you end up with anachronisms, like the inclusion of words like magnesium or adrenalin in books of ancient history. I recently read a book set in ancient Doggerland (the land mass in the North Sea between East Anglia and Holland/Denmark) where the author had chosen to have everyone speak in modern transatlantic fashion "Sure, OK" etc. Now, we have no idea what folk of that era sounded like, though it's a fair bet that one strand was proto-IndoEuropean, so to some extent it's up for grabs. But personally speaking this didn't work for me (especially as they sounded American rather than north European). However, it got me thinking - how would I expect dialogue between people of about 10,000 BCE or thereabouts to sound?
... and we're back to translation, and what counts as "accurate".