Customer Comments ~ The Problem with Sequels

One of our regular customers is an avid reader of fantasy fiction and this morning, eyes gleaming with pleasure, she came in clutching the latest book in Robin Hobb's The Rain Wild Chronicles, City of Dragons.  I thought she would secret herself away in one of our little alcoves and loose herself along the banks of the Rain Wild River for an hour or so and therefore, in anticipation, readied our eternal coffee pot. But then I noticed that beneath the joy of expectation there was also an air of apprehension, so, I got out an extra coffee cup, joined her and asked her what was wrong.

There are many problems with sequels, not the least the concern that the new volume will fail to live up to those which have gone before.  There has been much speculation in the press in the last couple of weeks as to whether or not Hilary Mantel will have been able to 'do it again' with her follow-up to Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies.  However, this wasn't what was troubling our customer.  No, she was worried that given all she had read between volume two of Hobb's trilogy and this, the third in the sequence, she wouldn't be able to remember who everyone was and what the plot line had been so far.  Should she have re-read the other two before picking this one up from the library?

We know this lady well enough to be aware that she was perfectly capable of doing this.  After a very long hiatus in one particular series she re-read all eight of the preceding books in preparation for the publication of number nine.  Fortunately, ten to fifteen came out in fairly close order!  And, many of our younger visitors habitually re-read the existing Harry Potter books every time a new one was announced. One mathematically minded young lady even used to work out how many chapters there were already available and then begin her re-read so that she read a chapter a day finishing just in time to pick up the new volume on publication morning.  However, think what this means in lost reading time.  Think of those eight missed books.

I don't actually have the problem with re-reading that some of our customers do.  We have several regulars who would never dream of picking up a book for a second time.  They know how it ends, what more could they possibly get out of it?  Well, I think there are some books that do benefit from a second, and sometimes even a third, read, but each to his own point of view.  However, re-reading because you can't remember what happened is another matter entirely.  Isn't it actually the author's responsibility to make sure that there is enough information in the first couple of chapters of the new book to nudge your memory in the right direction?  In fact, as I recall, it was one of the markers of J K Rowling's development as a writer that she got very much more skilful at doing precisely that as the series progressed.  The opening of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets was clunky to say the least.

The trouble is this customer has now got me worried.  I'm eagerly awaiting my own copy of Bring Up the Bodies but it is, after all, now three years since I read Wolf Hall.  Perhaps I should dust down my copy and start all over again. But then what should I do when the third volume appears?  We do have one customer who flatly refuses to start a sequence of novels until they are all published.  Where my favourite writers are concerned I don't think I have that level of control but it is certainly one answer to the problem.

Eavesdropping ~ Professional Exaggerator

It's amazing what you hear wandering around the cafe with even just half an ear open.  Today it was someone who claimed that his most creative role in life was as a professional exaggerator.  Now there's a career choice you've probably never thought of.  The trouble is that from the bits and pieces I overheard I suspect that all of us at sometime or another are at the very least amateur exaggerators because apparently what this involves is simply claiming just that little bit more for ourselves than a close examination of the facts might bear out.  And, if we're honest, how many of us can truthfully say that we've never added just a smidgen of a gloss to our achievements?  How far did you walk last weekend?  Just what was your position in that company you used to work for?  And, so it seems from something else that was floating around in the ether today, how many of those books you boast about having read are you truly familiar with?

Apparently, 40% of us claim to have read a book that in fact we've never so much as opened and the novel that comes at the top of the exaggerating charts is Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice.  Given how often this has made it in adaptation form to either the small or the large screen, I suppose we shouldn't be too surprised.  I would imaging most people think they've read it even if they haven't just because it's been pretty hard to avoid over the last three or four decades.  Then there are those cult novels that everyone is talking about and you simply can't be seen to be missing out.  Well, next time you're tempted to bluff your way through what appears to be an informed conversation about the latest blockbuster remember in any group of five there's a good chance two others are bluffing as well.

Perhaps we should have an honesty board in the cafe

 ~ Novels I Have Never Read ~ 

I could start with Wuthering Heights  and Ulysses.  Any other suggestions?

Romeo and Juliet in Baghdad

The Iraqi Theatre Company's production, Romeo and Juliet in Baghdad, took me completely by surprise. Even though I'd listened to its director, Monadhil Daood, talk about it and knew something of the way in which he had adapted Shakespeare's original play to reflect the current situation in his country I still hadn't been prepared for the force of his creation.  Daood does not pretend to have been completely faithful to the Elizabethan text.  His Capulet and Montague are half brothers, and Romeo and Juliet have known and loved each other hopelessly for nine years when the play begins.  Nevertheless, there are aspects of the Iraqi story that I'm sure Shakespeare would have recognised immediately, perhaps identifying with even more strongly than the modern Stratford audience can do.

The most obvious of these was the religious divide between the two families.  While the terms Sunni and Shia were never mentioned, the difference in the beliefs of the two groups was clear and the resulting hostility the trigger for much of the violence.  That the two parties shared the same immediate ancestor, that they came from the same root, just made the animosity the more tragic.  In a culture that is increasingly secular, this may not be something with which we easily identify, but Shakespeare's audience at The Globe, still all too aware of the terror a split in the Christian community could give rise to, would have understood immediately what was happening and why.  Daaod may not have been completely true to the story we all know, but he was certainly true to the emotions that fuelled it and to the daily fear that many Elizabethan would have lived with.  Perhaps the most concerning aspect of watching this production was realising that while I could come home to the relative safety of an English city, the people on stage were going to have to pack up at the end of the week and return to the atmosphere of constant anxiety they had depicted so disconcertingly well.

Cambridge ~ Caryl Phillips

 I was surprised how well this afternoon's discussion of  Caryl Phillips' 1991 novel, Cambridge, went because I didn't think I had prepared throughly enough.  We ranged over far too many topics to consider here, shifting our way through his development of themes, style and character development.  However, what I found myself most interested in as my thoughts were clarified by other people's comments, was his use of the written first person format for the main sections of the text.

The book tells the story of Emily, the daughter of the owner of a failing West Indian sugar planation and of Cambridge, one of the workers on her father's land.  In terms of interaction their paths hardly cross, they are most closely linked by the light their histories shed on the themes of identity, displacement and migration, but I was most fascinated by Phillips choice to have them tell their stories in the form of written narrative.  The first two thirds of the book consists of Emily's journal, while the bulk of the remainder is Cambridge's life story written on the eve of his execution.  Some of the events about which they write are shared and it is this fact that throws light on the way in which a written narrative is more likely than the spoken form to be shaped to suit the needs of the writer.  The opportunity to take time to consider what is written, to go back over it and re-edit means that the author of the text can choose what to communicate and have greater control over tone and emphasis.  With Cambridge's narrative coming second we are perhaps most conscious of those things that Emily has chosen not to tell us but which he sees no reason to conceal.  However, the very fact that he has cast doubt on the completeness of her truth causes the reader to question also what Cambridge has chosen to omit or to show in a different slant of light.  We are forced to consider how reliable either one of them might be as a narrator.

Who writes the history and how they shade it to suit their own purpose is one of Phillips major concerns and his choice of format for this novel emphasises how unreliable any account of any event should be thought of as being.