Some rushed thoughts on narrative pacing…

I have started thinking about the question of narrative pacing or, to phrase it another way, literary rhythm and tempo. This rhythm is at work at the level of the sentence, the paragraph and the text as a whole. It is vital to the success of any piece of writing.

The best texts show an awareness of this. Just think of the way that the rhythm of Elizabeth Gaskell’s ‘condition of England’ novel Mary Barton (1848) markedly changes in its final third. Here, we find a kind of literary accelerando as the characters set off on a river chase. Think, too, of something like Proust’s modernist masterpiece, À la recherche du temps perdu (1913-27), which, despite its immense length, manages to engage with the reader every subordinate clause. For the mature Marcel, of course, this was simply a question of style.

Classic murder mystery texts can be a little one-paced at times. Whilst there is an inevitable speeding up of events as we approach the great detective’s gripping dénouement, the tone is too often too even, the beat just a little flat. From the opening line clues are scattered in front of us. Everything is important, even the unimportant red herrings. And, let's admit it, in this genre the writing is usually quite workmanlike. Neither Dame Agatha Christie nor Dame Ngaio Marsh were great prose stylists. Description is often left at the door.

It is for this reason that certain texts stand out. Take, for instance, the last book in the Poirot sequence (although far from being the last written), Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case (published 1975). This has an altogether different structure and pace. This is a murder mystery that for the most part lacks a murder. This a text of foreshadowing and nostalgic reminiscence.

For all that I love the classic mysteries I often wish that they were more stylish.

On not setting myself ‘reading goals’.

I have never set myself ‘Reading Goals’ – you know the kind of thing: ‘I will read 50 books this year’; or, ‘I will read 25 “classics” this year’.

Many other readers do and I am not criticising them for it. I am glad that those readers are reading so voraciously.

The reason I do not approach my own reading in this manner is that it presupposes I have a certain number of set outcomes that I wish to achieve. It presupposes that I know in advance what I want to find in the chosen texts and that I will, without question, find it there. The novels piled up before me have, as it were, made plain their meaning to me in advance.

At worst, this attitude to reading threatens to turn a careful and attentive approach to meaning into an exercise in which you simply place ticks on a kind of cultural checklist. (Although it doesn’t do this as a matter of course.)

In my work as the Literary Critical Detective my approach to reading is not without purpose. Far from it. In each of my 'cases' I solve literary-critical mysteries that were not even mysteries. I can only do this through a structured response to image and metaphor. However, I am happy to pursue the vicissitudes of study.

An example of my reading: at the beginning of 2011 I reread the first half of Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1747-8), a text that I had first read in its entirety 13 years earlier. Once I’d reached the half way stage in this miraculous novel, and Clarissa herself had been firmly established in London, I put the book down and picked up another – namely, Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. This in turn caused me to return to Freud and then, in a sharp turn, to read Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf

Those of you who kindly pay attention to my scribbled thoughts will know that I have written of ‘readingtrajectories’. Now that I think about it, I find this term uncomfortable. It lacks the appropriate level of uncertainty. Perhaps I can only know in which direction I am travelling but not exactly where I am.

At the moment I do not know entirely know where I am. I have lost my book mark. However, I do know where I am heading. When I have finished reading Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment I will read:

Agatha Christie, Hercule Poirot quitte la scène (Librairie des Champs-Élysées).

This is the French language translation of Agatha Christie’s Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case. I shall read the two texts (original and translation) alongside each other, with a French-English dictionary to hand.

I then expect to read:

Albert Camus, L’étranger.

However, we shall see.