Monday, January 26, 2009
Forward, O Peasant (book review and more)
Anyone who has read Tom Sharpe’s South African novels (Riotous Assembly and Indecent Exposure) knows the humour that can be extracted from the depiction of a rotten regime.
Forward O Peasant by Maclean Storer follows, to some extent, in the footsteps of these novels above, chronicling the adventures of a British aid worker who finds himself thrust into the corruption of the Vietnamese ruling clique in Saigon.
It’s an excellent read, with a plot that kept me entertained, and glued enough to the book to finish it in one sitting. A wide range of comic characters, not all of whose motives are well-understood or explained fully, add to the confusion of the main character as he finds himself tangled in the Party bureaucracy and the hellish lowlife of Saigon’s foreign community. Storer himself spent fifteen years in Vietnam, which has given him the authority to write definitively about the societies there, both that of the native Vietnamese, and that of the foreign expatriate and backpacker/tourist. My brief experiences as a (non-backpacker) tourist there some five years ago obviously did not qualify me to write about the Party organization or the home lives of the Vietnamese, but what I saw corresponded to a large degree with what Forward O Peasant describes as the public face of Vietnam, and I could easily guess that what I did not see is also described by the book. Highly recommended.
Since I actually know the author as an e-contact, and he has very kindly agreed to look over my “Japan novel”, he and I have been in mail contact discussing various aspects of writing. There are certain similarities between our novels, in that both describe a familiar character (a Briton in both cases) in an environment that is familiar to the writer, but not to the reader. Snow, Storer’s British protagonist, is unfamiliar with Vietnam, while my protagonist has lived in Japan for fifteen years.
There are other little coincidences in our stories, but the main problem we have both faced is the one of introducing the reader to the strange environment in which the protagonist finds himself. Storer does this to a certain extent by introducing different points of view and focussing on different characters in order to present a broader viewpoint, whereas my story is seen exclusively through the medium of one protagonist. Both of us use characters whose primary function is to explain aspects to the reader and the protagonists, but I also used an omniscient present tense point of view, in (I had hoped) the way that John le Carré sometimes breaks into the present tense and distances himself from the action in order to explain the background. It is a device I like, but Storer made some valid criticisms of this method, so I am starting to revise this way of doing things (I am not le Carré and I do not have his narrative skill).
In my mail from Storer I also received some comments on writing and the artistic process by various writers. One of the best pieces of non-trivial technical advice comes from Elmore Leonard, who tells us “Never use the word “suddenly” or the phrase “all hell broke loose”“. I spent a happy hour taking out all the “suddenly"s from my MS - there were far too many, and the writing really was much more lively without that cliché.
A lot of work to do on characterization, too. My main character is rather aimless, and though the plot is interesting enough, it’s hard to be interested in the book for the character’s sake. Though he’s not a cardboard cutout, he certainly could do with a bit more 3D modeling, and this is what I am currently working on.
Incidentally, Forward O Peasant is not self-published, though it is published on demand, and comes over as a very professional volume. Now if only more publishers were prepared to take this attitude of risking relatively little capital to make things happen…