I'm somewhere between a third and halfway through The Charm School by Nelson DeMille. I can't tell exactly since I burned the whole thing onto one CD. I can say that I just started Part Four.
DeMille did something interesting for the last several hours (couple hundred pages?). He conveyed the sense of the story through his style as much as through the words. What I mean is that he told us that Russia is tense and dangerous, but that the KGB isn't actually around every corner. They're less omnipresent than they want you to believe, but they are also unpredictable and dangerously powerful. Then he writes the book that way.
He writes page after page of tedious detail as the protagonists actions follow their stated plans. As each scene unfolds we expect trouble to interrupt. And each time they carry through their intentions unscathed we feel a little further out over the edge. Through long passages of dreary settings and mundane detail we appropriate Moscow's bleakness. DeMille knows that we sophisticated readers don't believe he would ever tell the same story twice, so tension builds as we wait for the other shoe to drop. And then at the end of Part Three, just as we've decided that they will get away and this novel will have a very different second half, we get rudely and brutally kidnapped by the Comittee for State Security.
I remember an issue of Cerebus where Dave Sim used this technique. He also pointed out that he was doing it so that even stupid comic readers like me would understand. Instead of writing "the moment seemed to last an eternity," he wrote about twelve paragraphs of material that bogged the reader down. He sought to have time dialate in the reader's perception in the same way it did for his characters. I don't remember the story being very interesting, but I did remember the technique and his subsequent discussion of it. Dave does a better job at telling a story graphically than verbally.
Posted to Books at November 18, 2004 10:09 PM