John Dickinson

Time’s Chariot is a science fiction novel with a strong element of detective fiction. A future society has developed time-travelling technology. The technology is under the monopoly of a College, charged with making sure that the lessons of the past can be observed and used without history being disturbed. But rogue elements are up to something sneaky. Their tentacles penetrate high into the organisation and far back into the past. And our misfit hero – an officer of the College - is bent on defeating them.

Ben Jeapes is another of David Fickling’s authors, and David expects his writers to have a certain something (though we say it who shouldn’t). He looks for what he calls ‘narrative’, which I think means he expects us to tell a story capably in the good old way without too many gimmicks or wanderings. Now, I have to confess that I struggled with Time’s Chariot to begin with, partly because there’s a large cast of characters with strange names and it took me a while to sort out who was who. But then the story woke up, the game got afoot and I’m now reading with real pleasure.

The challenge with a time-travelling novel is how you deal with the paradox – the moment when someone goes back and changes the past in a way that affects a part of the story that’s already been told. It’s tough to do, because story-telling is by nature linear with a beginning, a middle and an end in that order, and a successful story must follow that pattern even if it doesn’t appear to. The easy way is not to have any paradoxes, or to invent reasons why they don’t happen. That seems to me to be a cop-out. In Jeapes’s story, paradoxes clearly can happen. So far they’ve happened off stage. You learn about them in asides from the main characters. We haven’t yet experienced one up close. But I’m reading on in hope. I have a theory that the bad guy whose death was faked at the beginning really will die in that incident, and has been dead for five thousand years before the main story began. Let’s see…

PS. Yes, there was a paradox. But it wasn’t what I expected!

Solaris is a fascinating novel. A friend asked me if I had read it, after he had had a look at the typescript of my forthcoming science fiction novel WE. (More on WE in due course). I said I hadn’t. He kept asking me, and I kept saying I hadn’t. In the end he sent it to me.

It’s just as well I didn’t pick it up until WE was out of the door. If I had I might have despaired.

It’s fascinating in several ways. On the surface it’s a book about scientists confronted by a phenomenon that is simply impossible to understand. At the end of the story they still don’t understand it. This is a direct and fundamental challenge to those of us who believe that we can, in time, get the measure of the universe we’re in. And since the author, Stanislaw Lem, does not suggest there is anything like a god to cling to either, he leaves us in a pretty dark and cold place.

It’s also interesting because although it is classic science fiction, Lem isn’t interested in much of the science. Travel across inter-stellar space just happens. He doesn’t explain how. His planetary station moves on some kind of anti-gravity system, but he doesn’t describe it. That’s not why he’s chosen an SF setting. What he wants to do is isolate a small group of people and have them witness things that are completely out of human experience. The most important of these experiences - meetings with people whom the characters know are dead - could easily have been set in a gothic novel or psychological thriller. But in gothic or psychological novels we don’t expect to end up finding out all the reasons for things. In SF we do.

Then there’s the story-telling. The book is brilliant in building up the nightmarish atmosphere inside the station. The station itself is seedy and disordered. Many of the most disturbing things are only glimpsed by the reader, but amplified to us by the reactions of the characters. (Can a straw hat be terrifying? Yes it can. Read this, you lovers of explicitly gorey horror stories, and see how it can be done!) The situation builds and builds into an atmoshere of sustained chronic madness. And then… it goes away again. Nothing the hero does affects it. He is left contemplating loss, and futility. And so are we.

Does it work? I’d say not quite. What happens is that the hero wakes up and finds that matters have simply been resolved while he was asleep. In theory this might enhance the sense of futility, but I don’t think it does. I was left wanting more struggle and tragedy before the ending. It seems to be a classic example of a book where the author was more interested in getting into a situation than he was in getting out of it again. But it’s still a classic.

They’ve even made films of it - although I believe they’ve messed around with the ending.

I won’t name the book I’ve been reading.  I will say the writer is talented.  The setting - a seedy Jewish colony - is beautifully realised.  The (male) characters are grainy, flawed to the point of the grotesque.  Some of the scenes are mesmerising in their intensity.  And that’s why I found the novel overall such a disappointment.

It is a detective story, and a successful detective plot is very hard to do.  At the end of it readers must see that the answer was there for them all the time, if only they had looked at things in a slightly different way.  The stages by which the story reaches that answer are crucial.  And in this case, well…  The chief conspirator and the murderer are not simply disguised.  Up to the moment they are unmasked they do not appear to be actors at all.  Both confess when they have little need as characters to do so, but they have to do it because the storyteller needs them to.  And the central conspiracy, which the hero unravels on a single clue, proves to be an international CIA-style plot of the sort we have all read and watched many many times before, but which in this author’s hands feels flimsy and unconvincing beside the solidity of much of the rest of his book.  Grrr.

And you say - ‘Hang on, we’re talking about a detective novel, and you’re worried about plausibility?  What’s more implausible than the standard detective plot?  (Except the standard fantasy plot, Oh Writer of Fantasy Fiction?)’  Sure I’m worried about plausibility.  I do not mean real plausibility.  It is entirely plausible, in the real world, that villains might be inconsistent in their actions.  But with a novel there’s a reader, and the reader needs a satisfactory framework with which to understand the villains’ inconsistency.  If I tell you at the start of a story that this is a world in which there are fire-breathing dragons, you will be ready for them when they appear. If they appear without warning in the final scene and toast the baddies just as the hero is about to go under, you think ‘hey, where did that come from?’  This sort of plotting is the bones of all storytelling, but particularly so of detective fiction.  Are great scenes and complex characters a substitute?  They are not.  They are just beautiful skin.  Beautiful skin cannot mend a broken back.

I put my first review of a book on an internet site the other week. Another milestone, approached with trepidation, passed without calamity. In the end it wasn’t very hard. I was able to say I’d liked it. I was able to give three reasons why, and also to suggest three (small) ways in which I thought it could have been stronger still. And then I came to the bit where I had to give a star rating. One to five.

All right. So here’s this novel that the author has been working on, day in, day out, for years. (I don’t know how long, but my guess would be around ten.) It is not an ordinary book. It is long, complex, carefully written. Now let’s stick a lable on it. One, two, three, four - or five? And remember that this what any reader will look at first, to see if they even want to read the review.

I could, I suppose, have refused to rate it at all. I’m not sure if the software would have allowed that. But the truth is that I find star ratings useful in other contexts and I cannot with honesty argue that they shouldn’t apply to books. Also I’ve been fairly lucky - hitherto - with the ratings my own books have received. It’s not true that authors hate being labled. We just hate it if the lable is a bad one.

It is also true that from the point of view of the consumer - the reader - the rating doesn’t have to be fair. It’s going to be subjective anyway. Why shouldn’t it just be wrong? What the prospective reader needs is rapid selection. So it doesn’t matter (much) if one really good book gets under-rated and one pretty bad one gets a string of five stars. In a market of tens of thousands of books and umpteen hundreds of thousands of readers that is going to happen. The reader will still find something they like. That’s what’s important.

So I would give it a rating. Immediately I felt that I needed more than five options. One to five was too crude. I wanted one to ten, because the ability to award seven or nine suddenly seemed seductive. Hell, doesn’t Which? rate products in percent? But the very crudity of the five-star system is what give it its clarity. Clarity is more than truth. I gritted my teeth and awarded four stars. And I promised myself that this would be my benchmark. For any novel to get five from me, it would have to be still better than this one. I swear it on the hilt of my keyboard.

And the book in question? It was Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. It was of course safe from any judgement I cared to pass.

I read for three reasons - guilt, study and fun.

Guilt is a poor motivator. My guilt book is still Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov (See “Currently Reading” 13 May 08).  I haven’t turned a single page of the thing since my last entry. But I made that promise and it stays on the list. As it happens, my wife and I visited St Petersburg last month and spent an evening walking around the Sennaya Ploschad area, which has changed a lot since Dostoevsky’s day but still has a seedy air. With the light fading and those wide-faced Russian men looming out of the twilight at me it was a bit creepy. I started acting like your classic jumpy tourist, staring at people who came near and crossing the street when I didn’t have to. Needn’t have worried - it was fine. Well, I did fall foul of a pickpocket gang - but that wasn’t until the following day and it was somewhere else in the city.

For study, it’s Classical and Modern Physics by Harvey E White PhD. This is by way of research for my science fiction novel WE. I have of course already written the novel but it’s not until I reach this stage that I start to get nervous about the science rather than the fiction. Can I really attribute those properties to a magnetic field and not be laughed at by every GCSE student in the country? I went to check my facts with the local professor of Physics. It was extraordinarily like being back at university again, trying to defend my essays in front of top-ranking academics who had forgotten more than I would ever know about the subject I was addressing. ‘You have a lot of catching up to do’ said the professor in a kindly manner. And he loaned me his primer. It dates from 1940 and among other things contains probably the first public prediction of the possibility of an atomic bomb. (Atomic bombs do not feature in WE.) So I have that to read, and must finish by the time we get to copy-editing. And you might think that it is rash of me to embark on research so late in the day. And maybe you’re right. But I don’t think so. I have a fair idea of the problems I might discover and of how I might fix them. So long as my own confidence in the story stays intact - and I think it will - then it should be just a matter of tweaking.  That’s the power of fiction, you see. 

The Fun slot on my list is currently vacant. It was Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, which I enjoyed hugely on my second attempt.  What next? Probably it will be Shadow of the Wind, by Carlos Ruiz Zafon, which I was given at Christmas and seems to be just my sort of thing. But it might be Conversations at Curlow Creek by David Malouf. (I read An Imaginary Life earlier this summer.) Or it might be something quite different. I’ll be passing the bookshelf some time in the next few days and one of them will come away in my hand. Until then, see ‘guilt’ and ’study’ above. 

I once heard that a comedy scriptwriter said he did not enjoy watching comedy. If it was any good, he said, he felt intimidated. And if it wasn’t he felt irritated. Similar things happen to this writer when he opens a book. I am shamefully bad at reading. I am far too ready to reach for things I feel safe and familiar with, and to leave the unknown-and-looks-intimidatingly-good still waiting on the shelf. But yes, I have a reading pile. And it goes like this.(1) Dostoevksy’s Brothers Karamazov. Untouched for six months. There was a dowdy, greying Russian woman in the middle of Central Asia who assured a roomful of international delegates that wars could be stopped by reading Dostoevsky. I wish I could convey to you the depth of politely stunned silence that fell on that assembly of representatives from NATO, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Georgia etc when she said this. The silence endured when it was time for questions. The Turkish chairman assured her that this was because everyone had understood her perfectly.