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Throwback Thursday: Book Review: The Pillars of the Earth

Posted on 02/04/202028/03/2020 by Ndrw

First published: 16/09/2019

SPOILER ALERT

While every effort has been made to avoid spoilers in this post, anyone who has not read The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett is hereby advised that this post may contain a few unavoidable spoilers.

This review reflects only my own personal opinions and impressions.

Well last week it was all about children’s books; this week I’m reviewing a book that is definitely not suitable for children. The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett is a hefty tome about the building of a cathedral in the fictional town of Kingsbridge in 12th century England. It’s full of lovable and deplorable characters, political intrigue, technical details about medieval construction and just a little bit more sex and sexual violence than was necessary.

One of my favourite things about this story was how well paced it was. Given that this is a story about building a cathedral and is set over a period of several decades, and also bearing in mind that thrillers are Ken Follett’s usual racket, there was a very real danger of this story either being an absolute drag or being inappropriately fast-paced. I needn’t have worried. The blend of fast scenes and slow scenes is beautiful and appropriate, making this lengthy novel a constant page-turner from start to finish.

Now let’s talk characters. I honestly can’t decide if the characters in this story are one of its best qualities or one of its worst. In some ways I liked them. They’re all quite distinctive with clearly defined personality traits and its also pretty clear that each character is driven by firmly established motives and goals. Very good indeed. If we know what drives a character, it’s easy to care about what happens to him, even if the subject matter is foreign or uninteresting to us. This makes The Pillars of the Earth a real page-turner when it could have just as easily been a bore.

When I first began to talk about the idea for Pillars, some people hated the idea. “Nobody cares about building a church in the Middle Ages,” they said. But readers will care about it if the characters care.

Ken Follett, Goodreads Notes and Highlights on The Pillars of the Earth

Having said that, there was also something a little bit tedious about some of the characters (with the major exception of Philip and, to a lesser extent, Jack). The female protagonists are strong and beautiful (oh and Aliena has huge breasts, we’re constantly reminded); the male protagonists are brave and noble and the antagonists are devious and brutal. William Hamleigh, the primary antagonist, is the worst for this. He’s devious, cowardly, violent, greedy and licentious with absolutely no redeeming qualities. But just in case we’re in any doubt that he’s the bad guy, he rapes way more people than is necessary for one story. Seriously, this guy does a lot of raping, pretty much whenever he’s not tormenting the poor or burning villages. The good guys in this story never rape of course, but they do have lots of consensual sex to the point of implausibility. While most of the sex scenes are not explicitly described (though a few are), some of the characters are portrayed as being at it on a several-times-a-day-every-day basis and still find time to build a cathedral, overcome one disaster after another and fight the bad guys. I dunno, maybe they’re just really good at organising their time, but between this and the manifold references to the size of Aliena’s breasts, it sometimes just felt a bit like the authors’ mind was wandering. That’s just my opinion though.

In many respects, this is a story with several different layers to it. There are several protagonists whose stories we follow, each overlapping and interacting with one another while yet remaining distinctive. Tom wants nothing more than to build a cathedral but cares for his family. Jack is a boy who lived in the forest, now growing into a man who is consumed with questions about his deceased father. His very much a coming-of-age type story. Aliena is the daughter of a disgraced earl who has sworn to help her brother reclaim the earldom, and finds herself constantly pulled in all directions by her sense of duty to others. Prior Philip is driven by his zealous faith in God and his sense of righteousness. He tries earnestly to do what is right on earth and to glorify God by the building of the cathedral and yet is in constant conflict with his own sense of pride and self-doubt. These are just a selection of the main players in this story, all of whose individual story-lines overlap and diverge to create an intricate tapestry of skilfully executed fiction. It really is a thing of beauty.

All in all, The Pillars of the Earth is a great story. It’s got plenty of excitement, plenty of sentiment and ~~Aliena has big breasts~~ all of the characters are driven by goals and motives that we really care about. The many threads that comprise the plot are magnificently woven together to form a novel which is well constructed and handles potentially dry subject matter in a way which is enjoyable and entertaining. Worth a look, even if it’s not your usual preferred genre. Just don’t read it to your kids.

My rating: 🌟🌟🌟🌟

Buy Pillars of the Earth on Amazon

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Every Tuesday, I post a new edition of Spotlight: a short post which shines a proverbial spotlight on a published novel or collection of short fiction. If you would like to have your book considered for a future edition of Spotlight, drop us an e-mail including a short synopsis of your book and a link to where we can buy it. Better yet, send me a copy of your book and I can include a mini-review.

I’m still looking to interview fiction authors here on Penstricken, especially new or indie authors. Whether it’s books, plays, comics or any other kind of fiction, if you’ve got something written, I want to hear about it. If you’re interested in having your work featured on Penstricken, be to sure to drop us an e-mail or message us on Facebook/Twitter/Pinterest.

Please be advised that due to a recent surge in interest, I am presently committed to a significant number of reviews/interviews over the next couple of months. If you would like an interview or review, I would still love to hear from you, though it is unlikely that I will be able to begin work immediately.

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Monday Motivation

Posted on 30/03/202028/03/2020 by Ndrw

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Book Review: Beyond

Posted on 29/03/202028/03/2020 by Ndrw

Spoiler Alert

Anyone who has not read Beyond by Georgia Springate is hereby advised that this post may contain a few unavoidable spoilers.

Beyond by Georgia Springate follows the story of Alex Duncan: a fourteen year old boy who finds himself consumed with anxiety about what happens to us after we die when his sister is diagnosed with terminal cancer. Struggling to cope with the impact of his sister’s prognosis and feeling neglected by his family, Alex turns to the pastoral support teacher, Mrs Moss, who encourages him to research what lies beyond this life while he continues to face the added struggles of every day teenage life: bullies, friends, girls and school.

As always, good characters are what make a good story and Beyond is no exception. Most of the main players are teenagers or young adults and Springate captures the strange dynamics of the teenage social structures as well as the individual goals and motives of each character in a way which feels natural and believable.

The protagonist and POV character, Alex, is by far the best example of what I’m talking about. He is anxious about his sister’s eternal destiny and this motive provides him with a clear goal which he pursues diligently throughout the story; however he is also burdened by the things that all teenagers are concerned with. He learns that the rest of life will not stop for him while he deals with his sister’s prognosis, forcing him to juggle school work, budding romance and the treacherous waters of teenage social structures under inordinate pressure with little support from his parents. Springate has manifested this complex web of life in Alex in a way which is absolutely believable and relatable, creating a character we can really care about.

I can only imagine what a challenge this novel was to write thematically, not just because of the emotive subject matter (though that is also undeniable) but because the protagonist’s goal is so heavily focused on finding out, with reasonable certainty, what happens to us when we die. This inevitably puts the author in the position of having to either come up with a single decisive answer (this would create an instant ‘preachy’ novel which would annoy most readers) or else leave the question unanswered but teach the protagonist something even more valuable in the process. The author has, quite rightly, done the latter and has walked the line between a hard preachy epiphany and meaningless fluffy one as well as could be hoped for.

A story like this one runs the risk of having a meandering pace as the protagonist wanders from one inevitable hospital visit (with more bad news!) to another; one inevitable person with an opinion on death to another; one inevitable encounter with the school bully to another until Jenna inevitably dies and Alex has his inevitable epiphany. Beyond doesn’t feel like that. True, the protagonist does spend a lot of time visiting people with opinions on death and avoiding the school bully, but each scene moves the plot forward, creating a definite sense of anticipation which makes this book unputdownable. No small achievement when a discerning audience should realise from the outset that Jenna is almost certainly going to die and Alex is almost certainly not going to find a decisive answer to his question.

While the main plot is expertly paced and drawn to as satisfying a conclusion as is possible for a story of this type, some of the less central elements of the plot seem to fizzle out a little towards the end, particularly the business with the school bully, Duce. This altogether unpleasant little bully torments most of the other characters throughout the novel, culminating in him leaving a threatening note in Alex’s locker only to suddenly change his ways and become a nicer person in the final chapter. Personally, I think a more decisive resolution to the bullying subplot would have really tightened up the ending.

This isn’t really the kind of book I normally like to read. While I generally reject any advice about avoiding certain subjects while writing a novel, a lot of books of this type are either clumsy and insensitive or else are so overloaded with sentiment that it dilutes the substance of the theme. Not so with Beyond. It is sensitively written, drives the protagonist towards a reasonably satisfying resolution and takes the audience on a coming-of-age odyssey of the full tapestry of teenage life. A strong debut from a promising new author.

My rating: 🌟🌟🌟🌟

Buy Beyond on Amazon

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Monday Motivation

Posted on 23/03/202021/03/2020 by Ndrw

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Throwback Thursday: ‘Hills Like White Elephants’ – A Masterclass in Dialogue

Posted on 19/03/202020/03/2020 by Ndrw

Originally Published 20/03/2016

There is an old and for the most part true adage among writers that a good writer will ‘show and not tell’. In other words, a good story ought not to be a technical report of events; rather, the reader should be made to mentally witness the events and understand for themselves what meaning there might be hidden behind them. In my opinion, there are very few authors who do this quite as well as Ernest Hemingway, and for the sake of this post I want to take a look at the way he accomplishes this using character dialogue in the short story, ‘Hills Like White Elephants’ (first published in Men Without Women 1927).

‘Hills Like White Elephants’ is set in a bar at a train station in the middle of nowhere and focuses on a very awkward conversation between an American man and a girl who have been apparently having an affair. The girl is pregnant and is travelling for an abortion. She is having second thoughts about it, or perhaps more accurately is having second thoughts about the affair she is having with this (perhaps older) man. He, on the other hand, is desperate for her to have the abortion so that their life can continue as it was before she got pregnant. What is so remarkable about this story is that absolutely none of this is explicitly stated. It is simply implied, not only through what the characters say but what the characters are also not saying. Indeed, there is very little narration in the story at all (only three or four short paragraphs); the vast majority of the story (which is just shy of 1500 words long) is made up of dialogue between these two (ex?)-lovers.

This is ‘showing, not telling’ at its very finest. There’s lots that can be said about this tiny little gem but the thing I really want to talk about is Hemingway’s extraordinary use of dialogue through-out this story.

The first five hundred words or so of the story feature the two characters having the most trivial of discussions: what they are drinking. They simply do not mention their relationship, their feelings about each other, the pregnancy, the abortion or anything else of significance before this point.

Five hundred words! That’s almost a third of the story done with already and they haven’t given any hint whatsoever that they are anything more than casual acquaintances. I should also mention that during this time, the characters knock back no less than three drinks each. This is a long, drawn out conversation about nothing punctuated by awkward silences. Hemingway doesn’t need to describe the awkward silences. They’re apparent to the reader through the fact that they get through so many drinks while saying so little. If we had any doubt that the silence was a tense one, we only need to look at how quickly their trivial conversation turns into conflict:

‘Yes,’ said the girl. ‘Everything tastes of liquorice. Especially all the things you’ve waited so long for, like absinthe.’
‘Oh, cut it out.’
‘You started it,’ the girl said. ‘I was being amused. I was having a fine time.’
‘Well, let’s try and have a fine time.’
‘All right. I was trying. I said the mountains looked like white elephants. Wasn’t that bright?’
‘That was bright.’
‘I wanted to try this new drink. That’s all we do, isn’t it – look at things and try new drinks?’
‘I guess so.’

~ E. Hemingway 1927

Maybe I’m just more laid back than most, but it strikes me that these two characters are having anything but a ‘fine time’. This is a tense and awkward discussion about anything other than the one thing that’s on both of their minds.

When the conversation finally does come around to ‘the operation’, the two characters continue to dance around the subject and each other. They never once talk about a baby or an abortion, or even the fact that they have had any kind of physical relationship. Instead, Hemingway nudges the reader towards an understanding of what is going on for these two characters through their vague and awkward dialogue. The best clue we have that the girl is going for an abortion (rather than some other kind of ‘operation’) is that they are both clearly very uncomfortable about it. They talk about it with euphemisms, like how it is a ‘simple operation’ to ‘let the air in’ and so forth. This euphemism itself also gives us a clue that the girl is having something removed from her body… something they’re both embarrassed to talk about but are both desperately concerned about.

Hemingway goes on to make it apparent, through the characters’ dialogue, that these two characters have very different feelings about their situation. The man consistently tries to goad the girl into going ahead with the abortion using reassuring phrases such as ‘It’s perfectly simple’ and ‘You don’t have to be afraid. I’ve known lots of people that have done it’.

There is one interesting point where the girl explicitly asks him, ‘And you really want to?’

Does he give a straight answer? No. Instead he tries again to persuade her:

‘I think it’s the best thing to do. But I don’t want you to do it if you don’t really want to.’

Even in the middle of this conversation about the actual issue they are both facing, the two characters utterly fail to communicate. They’re playing verbal tennis with each other but it is clear that they are on different wavelengths entirely. The man continually tries to persuade her that everything will be all right and that their relationship will go back to how it was when the abortion is complete; the girl, on the other hand, increasingly realises that this is not the case. When she does, she drops the conversation. She’s no longer interested in hearing his persuasions; her mind is set. Again, this is not explicitly stated by any narrative; it is simply made clear by the dialogue:

‘I don’t want you to do anything that you don’t want to do -‘
‘Nor that isn’t good for me,’ she said. ‘I know. Could we have another beer?’
‘All right. But you’ve got to realize – ‘
‘I realize,’ the girl said. ‘Can’t we maybe stop talking?’

~ E. Hemingway 1927

Notice how the girl interrupts the man by finishing his sentence for him. She knows what he’s going to say. She’s heard him spin this line a million times before (he certainly spins it often enough during the story and goodness knows how many times before the story actually begins!). She isn’t interested in hearing it any more. In spite of his assertions that he cares about her needs, the man actually has no idea what the girl needs and is more occupied with his own fear that she might actually have this baby. The girl, on the other hand, seems to mature in wisdom almost immediately before our eyes.

This is all made clear to the reader with the narrator barely uttering a word through-out the entire story. Instead of simply being told the facts, the narrator leads us to this train station in the middle of no where and leaves us there to eavesdrop on a private conversation so that we can glean all the details for ourselves as we go.

Now that is what I call showing, not telling.

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Monday Motivation

Posted on 16/03/202014/03/2020 by Ndrw

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Book Review: Chino & The Boy Scouts by Nancet Marques

Posted on 15/03/202014/03/2020 by Ndrw

SPOILER ALERT

Anyone who has not read Chino & The Boy Scouts by Nancet Marques is hereby advised that this post may contain a few unavoidable spoilers.

I’ve written many a book review here on Penstricken before, but this is a first for me. Most books I review here are written by authors whom I have little or no prior relationship with but I consider Nancet Marques, author of Chino & the Boy Scouts, to be a personal friend, as well as my colleague. I see him every day in life and I know exactly how much work has gone into this novel and how excited he is to finally have it completed. I’ve promised him an honest review and that’s what I intend to deliver but I don’t mind telling you I feel a both delighted and burdened by the responsibility of writing this review, so I do hope you’ll bear with me as I share some of my thoughts and impressions on this debut novel. So here we go.

In preparing for this review, I’ve spent quite a bit of time considering which audience Chino & The Boy Scouts is best suited to, as I always do whenever reviewing a book. I’ll be honest and say it is difficult to pin down an obvious target audience. For the most part, it reads like a YA fantasy, vaguely reminiscent of Harry Potter: the main characters are all teenagers and the action largely concerns school, scouting and the hunt for a legendary artefact, all of which suggests a novel ideally suited to young adults or older children. As such, there is a lot of ‘coming of age’ material where the teenagers go on a quest, endure hardship, suffer loss, and come out the other end a little more mature for it. That being said, I have a small note of caution for any parents out there: this story does include a small smattering of words you might not want to teach your children and a few scenes which may be a little too dark for children.

The plot itself tells the fun and occasionally dark tale of a group of boy scouts and a secret quest to find the fabled Golden Whistle. Digging a little deeper, we find there are also more profound themes at play such as friendship, family and ambition. If you like a story with a goodly helping of both heart and adventure with a surprising twist at the end, you will definitely like Chino & The Boy Scouts. I don’t want to give too much away about what happens, but suffice to say it is revealed that there are darker forces at work than was previously imagined, leaving me eager to read the next instalment in the series while the coming-of-age themes are handled with a delicacy and je ne sais quoi which made it easy to care for the characters and their goals.

The characters are, for the most part, reasonably well developed, some more so than others. All of the key players, at least, have reasonably well defined goals and motives, distinctive personalities and simple but well structured character arcs which make for a well rounded and satisfying conclusion. The minor characters could have perhaps done with a little bit more development to make it easier for the reader to keep track of who was who. They were okay, they just weren’t quite distinctive enough for my taste given the sheer number of them.

I believe this novel is a significant accomplishment for the author, not only because he has written an enjoyable story, but also because he has written it entirely in English, despite the fact English is not the author’s first language. While it could have benefited from one more re-edit, I nevertheless believe this is an achievement not to be sniffed at.

All in all, a very entertaining read. I enjoyed this novel. It was a good story with all the mystery, excitement and emotion a story of this kind needs and I, for one, am chomping at the bit to find out what happens next in this promising saga.

My rating: ⭐⭐⭐

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Throwback Thursday: 5 Simple Steps to Avoid Becoming a Writer

Posted on 12/03/202007/03/2020 by Ndrw

First published 13/03/2016

So, there’s a writer inside you and he’s already sowing the seeds of a best-seller in your brain. Your inner-writer’s urge to write that story is overwhelming. Night and day, he nags you to let him write. You fear that it may only be a matter of time before you have to quit your miserable office job that you love and become a professional author instead – all because you couldn’t silence the voice in your head which said ‘Let me write!’. Because the urge – no, the need – to write is so powerful, you know you’ll never be able to simply ignore it.

All you can hope to do is keep your inner-writer at bay by pacifying him with false promises of writing. So if you want to make sure that best-seller of yours never makes it to the first draft stage (never mind the best-seller shelf!), here’s a few simple steps you can follow.

1 – Find New Writing Equipment

Remember, the trick is to make your inner-writer feel good about himself without ever letting him do any writing, so set aside your manuscript (‘just for a second’) and fire up your preferred app store or shopping website and start hunting for new equipment or software that might help you to become a better writer.

The reason this is such an effective means of dodging that completed manuscript is simple: it feels like you’re helping your inner-writer to accomplish his goals when in fact you are simply wasting his time. Because there are so many resources you can spend your time perusing, you can easily spend your entire day doing it instead of actually writing. The obvious thing to look for is new software that you can write your novel with (or perhaps some nice new stationary, if that’s how you roll); perhaps something that allows you to organise your notes and drafts in a particular fashion, or perhaps you would prefer to look for an app like the Hemingway Editor which marks your writing style for you.

2 – Study Your Craft

The only danger with the previous step is that if you do happen to find the perfect writing software (i.e., Scrivener), your inner-writer will insist you buy it and then let him start writing his novel with it!

If this happens, quickly appeal to your inner-writer’s sense of vanity. It is his greatest weakness! Tell him you want to make sure he writes to his fullest potential… and to do that, he must learn all about the art of writing before he can write in a way which does justice to his natural genius.

The internet is your best friend to this end. With just a few well-phrased search terms, you will soon find that you’re absorbing the wisdom of writers and writing-coaches from all the four corners of the world. The more you read, the more excited your inner-writer will become about how great a writer he is going to be – not realising that hours may have passed without a single word of fiction actually being written by you.

3 – Figure Out Whether You’re a Planner or Not

So, you’ve got your brand spanking new notepads, pens, writing software, chair and everything else you need to write and you’ve finished reading up on how to be a writer (not that you’ll ever truly read everything the internet has to offer!). Suddenly you’re struck with a horrifying thought:

I have no more excuses not to write!

But don’t give up! You still have a chance to kill time. Remember what the internet taught you about planning your novel: that some people naturally need a plan to write successfully and others naturally do better without a plan. So, waste a bit more time trying to figure out which applies to you…

4 – …Then Plan/Do Not Plan Accordingly

If you have decided that you are a planner, then plan. Plan, plan and plan some more. Plan until you are up to your nose-hair in character profiles, chapter layouts, back stories, mind-maps, doodles and whatever else you can think of to refine your story without actually writing a line of narrative. If you’re struggling a bit, get back on the internet and research your subject. Is your antagonist a pirate? Then be sure to research everything the internet has to offer on piracy and don’t stop refining that antagonist’s profile until he accurately reflects all the facts you’ve learned. Plan until there’s not so much as a hint of a rough edge left anywhere in your story. I can guarantee that you will never actually start a draft.

If, however, you have decided that you’re not a planner, then write without a plan. Remember all that stuff I said last week about knowing what your story is about? Forget I said it. Write fifty odd chapters, or more if you can manage it! Then, when you finally realise that your story can proceed no further, spend a few weeks or months feeling dejected. Repeat this process as many times as required until you finally give up.

5 – Tell Everyone About the Great Novel You’re Writing

If, by some miracle, you have actually managed to complete all of the above steps and you still have a little time left over to write your novel then stop.

You’ve already got your new writing software. You already know how to craft and structure the perfect novel (and have the jargon to prove it!). You have completed all the planning you need. Your inner-writer probably feels pretty smug about the fact that he is ready to write a killer novel and still has a few spare hours to do it. Your last hope is for you to tell all your Facebook friends and Twitter followers all about the exciting story you’re writing. Perhaps even post a little excerpt to demonstrate to everyone what a truly splendid writer you are and maybe get them to critique it for you.

While you’re here, have a look and see what everyone else is up to on the internet, especially other writers. There’s nothing your inner-writer likes more than to feel like he is a contemporary of your favourite published authors. This is also a good place to look at up writer’s memes, or something along those lines. This will make your inner-writer feel good about himself, because he gets all the jokes that include literature jargon about narrative voice and what-not.

These five steps should be more than sufficient to waste every precious minute of your inner-writer’s writing time. So long as you’re procrastinating, you’re not writing and if you’re not writing, you’re not a writer. If you find you still have time to write then I can only conclude that you are simply not procrastinating hard enough and are spending far too much time writing your story. I’m sorry to be the one to tell you this but if you find yourself in that position then I fear that you may, finally, be a writer.