Character-driven? Plot-driven? WTF?

Is your car engine-driven, or is it wheel- and tire-driven? Or maybe you have one of those transmission-driven models.

That's all pretty stupid, isn't it? But that's how I feel when I read about "character-driven" or "plot-driven" popular fiction, as if one is possible without the other.  (I don't recall seeing any book described as "setting-driven." Instead, one reads of a given novel that "the setting is a character," often preceded by "It's a cliché to say so, but ... " Well, yes, it is a cliché.)

I thought of this when reading Gene Kerrigan's Dagger-winning novel The Rage this week. I suspect readers will be riveted by the police protagonist and by a murderous thug named Vincent Naylor, and even more so by the supporting character of a nun whom the former tries to save from the latter. So that makes The Rage character-driven.

Except that all the good characterization serves to make the suspense of the book's final portions sharper, as cop and criminal race to see who gets to the nun first, and Kerrigan's resolution is shocking and, to me at least, unexpected, so the book is plot-driven. But much of the book's drama and pathos come from moral decisions the characters make or have made. Does that make the book character-driven, or is it part of the plot?

Except that the novel is leavened with brief but effective references to hardships endured by ordinary Dubliners because of the misdeeds of the country's bankers. So the setting is a character.

Except that— Except that I should thank God that, as quickly as The Rage moves, I have seen no references to it as pacy.

What critical catchphrases and buzz words drive you nuts?

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Social decay at home and abroad

I hopped into a cab in Montreal this morning, and the driver immediately turned down the volume on his radio. Such unbidden courtesy would be unimaginable in Philadelphia or New York, I thought, and I was grateful for the civility of a fellow Canadian.

Alas, when I arrived at the airport, I was reminded I was flying to the United States. United Airlines charged me $28.75 for my one checked bag. At 7:20 on a Monday morning, the dense, snaking lines for security and U.S. Customs were more typical of a holiday weekend "Due to the current budget situation limiting the number of border agents at the airport," as several signs informed me.

The one-two-three punch of private-sector cupidity, governmental paralysis, and bad grammar (the adjectival due to misused for the adverbial because of) should have prepared me for the overzealous inspection agent who had me hauled aside for an interview that left me worried I'd miss my plane. But I got to the gate in plenty of time to find out that the United Airlines fight would be delayed by mechanical problems long enough to make me miss my connecting flight. As of this writing, I hope the American social fabric holds together long enough to get both me and my luggage to Philadelphia by this evening.

Speaking of social fabric, two Irish crime novels I'm reading show sharp awareness of Ireland's financial troubles. Alan Glynn's Graveland has a pair of bankers being murdered and, though the novel is set in New York, I suspect strongly that Glynn, a Dubliner, had his own country's problems and the impunity of those responsible for them very much in mind.

Gene Kerrigan's The Rage, winner of the 2012 CWA Gold Dagger for best novel, meanwhile, includes bits such as these:

"Not bad enough the pay's shit — he's just had a wage cut, he's paying shitty levies the government takes to bail out the fucking banks."

and

"Trade unions are out of fashion now, but everything we ever got we had to fight for it —money, hours, conditions. Today, it's like everyone's grateful to be a unit of labour."

and

"My father was a die operator in a plastic extrusion factory — small place, non-union. Only time you got to open your mouth was to say `yes, sir.' What he said to me — you get there habit of bowing and scraping, it becomes part of your nature. Don't get the habit, he said."

Now, off for some coffee so I don't sleep through announcements of the next delays or cancellation.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Books, books, books: Liam O'Flaherty and Gene Kerrigan

The first of these authors supported the Republicans against the government of the Irish Free State in 1920. The second is writing today.

O'Flaherty, who may be best known in North America as the author of the novel on which the movie The Informer is based, caught my eye with this staccato, non-nonsense opening to his novel The Assassin:

"At three o'clock in the afternoon, Michael McDara alighted from a tram-car at the corner of Findlater's Church. He crossed the road and moved northwards until he came to the corner of Hardwicke Street. He halted there and looked around him cautiously."

I'd say those sentences do a good job of creating suspense through their rhythm even more than through their content, perhaps surprising for a thriller published in 1928.

Gene Kerrigan's Hard Cases is a collection of true-crime stories from the novelist and journalist who also has written Little Criminals and The Midnight Choir. I'm not normally a fan of true crime, but Kerrigan brings a storyteller's delight to these tales:

"There was a knock on the door. Conlon had a story ready when he answered the knock. He didn't live there, he would say. No, it wasn't that he lived there, because the flat was derelict now, what he was doing here, you see, he was collecting his grandmother's furniture from the flat. Which is why he was here, sorting through the furniture, OK?

"It might have worked, had the guy who knocked on the door not been the one who owned the flat. And it wasn't Conlon's granny who lived there, it was this guy's aunt."

The last sentence of the first paragraph in particular attracts me the way a good piece of comic crime fiction would. I hope to provide a fuller report once I can mount a more ambitious attack on the imposing pile of books that is occupying ever more space in my luggage.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008