The ragged edge

You know those conman-led heist movies? Ocean’s 11 would be an example, or American Hustle. There’s plenty of mystery as the things are playing out (Why did X do that? What is Y building? Why is Z dressed as a motorbike courier?) but the final reveal explains everything. Once you have the whole story in your hands, it has the feel of a glossy and finely machined puzzle, every part locking smoothly into place.

It’s tempting to think that this is how story works – how it has to work – and of course at a broad level, that’s true. When you finish a whodunit, you want to know whodunit and why and how. Likewise with a romance, you want to know what kept the guy and the girl apart, and how that obstacle can be overcome. And so on – stories are a process of puzzle and explanation, no matter what genre you’re talking about.

But especially at a micro-scale, you can get excellent results by just taking your reader to the edge of the unexplained – then leaving them there. Here’s an example of what I mean. The passage is an excerpt (edited for length) from Anthony Doerr’s All The Light We Cannot See:

Number 4 rue Vauborel. Still intact…

A single airplane tracks across the deepening blue, incredibly high. Von Rumpel retreats down the long ladder into the tunnels of the fort below. Trying not to limp, not to think of the bulges in his groin. In the underground commissary, men sit against the walls spooning oatmeal from their upturned helmets. The electric lights cash them in alternating pools of glare and shadow.

Von Rumpel sits on an ammunition box and eats cheese from a tube. The colonel in charge of defending Saint-Malo has made speeches to these men, speeches about valor, about how any hour the Hermann Goering Division will break the American line at Avranches … but von Rumpel is thinking now of the black vine inside him. A black vine that has grown branches through his legs and arms … Only a matter of time until the black vine chokes off his heart.

‘What?’ says a soldier beside him.

Von Rumpel sniffs. ‘I do not think I said anything.’

The soldier squints back into the oatmeal in his helmet. Von Rumpel squeezes out the last of the vile, salty cheese and drops the empty tube between his feet. The house is still there. His army still holds the city.

There are two senses in which this passage evades explanation – and will go on doing so, no matter how much more of the book you read.

First, we just don’t know why the soldier thinks Von Rumpel said something. Did Von Rumpel sob? Or make some other noise? Or was the soldier just hearing things? We can’t say. The interchange is never explained, an oddity.

But a deeper part of the passage’s elusiveness comes from the way it combines ingredients:

• Some data about the world we’re in (Saint Malo, an aeroplane, a fort)
• Von Rumpel’s cancer
• Some nonsense about an imminent German victory.  We know, as von Rumpel does, that his side is going to lose.
• Weird food: cheese from a tube, oatmeal from a helmet
• Weird lighting: alternate pools of glare and shadow
• A weird interchange between Von Rumpel and the soldier
• A weird statis: the German army still holds St Malo, though a massive, and ultimately successful, assault is coming.

How do you put all those together? How are you, the reader, meant to feel as you assemble those things?

With some scenes, it’s really obvious how you meant to feel. Supposing for example, the ingredients were these:

• A rose-covered cottage
• A cream tea
• A grandmother meeting her elderly beau
• A spaniel snoring on a sofa
• The chime of church bells
• A good-natured discussion of the couple’s current story-predicament

If I gave you that lot to assemble, you have the mood instantly. The scene practically assembles itself – and no wonder, since it is taken from the Great Book of Cliché.

The Von Rumpel scene is the opposite of that. Indeed, its defining feature is its oddness: odd food, odd lighting, odd conversation. And you have the disturbing intrusion of cancer, the imminent assault, and so on.

The scene dislocates you. That’s its job. The reader becomes like the characters themselves: static but dislocated, out-of-body.

The purpose of this email is twofold. The first is to say that it’s perfectly OK if now and again things just don’t make sense. If some logical explanation is withheld or just not available. That gives a nice, ragged edge to a scene – a vivid, lifelike quality. Books are better for some roughness. I like quite a lot in mine.

But also there will be times when your character is driven to the edge. How do they feel when they’re there? The chances are that they feel strange, in which case your scene-making needs to reflect that.

That’s not just another thing to add to your very long to do list. It’s a joyous opportunity for fun.

I once placed Fiona Griffiths on a fishing trawler in the teeth of an Atlantic storm with some seriously bad guys coming on board. Fiona was there as a cleaner/cook/skivvy. She’s asked to keep the fish processing room ‘vaguely’ clean, a task that includes disposing of anything unsaleable caught by the ship’s nets. She says:

‘One time, the pile [of discards] includes an eel – or something like that, a sea serpent, I want to say, a python of the deep – and the damn thing evades my shovel every time I try to lift it. Slithering away as if still alive. A six-foot cord of black and glistening muscle, ending in a mouth large enough to swallow itself.’

She tries to shovel the eel into the slops bucket, but fails. She’s been awake twenty-one hours and she’s feeling exhausted and – well, dislocated.

Then the scary ship’s mate, Buys, approaches:

‘Demented as I am, as he is, I think, He’s going to hit me. I can’t get the eel into the bucket and Jonah Buys is going to hit me. I sort of accept it, too. There’s an internal logic in my head which says, That’s only fair. Your job was to get the eel in the bucket and you were given a fair old try at it. You’ve no reason to complain.

But Buys doesn’t hit me. Just takes the shovel from my hand, and with three or four smashing blows splits the eel into rags. Doesn’t divide it cleanly, by any means, but leaves the thing in a series of bloody stumps, connected by tatters of skin and the white threads of exposed nerves.

Buys fixes me with that bloodshot eye, nods, goes back to his knifework. My shovel has no problem now heaving the mass into my bucket. It feels as though the world has become more orderly. Ah yes, that’s how you clean a room. You smash any once-living creature into fist- and foot-sized fragments, then just shovel it away.

The scene is totally irrelevant to the story. As with Doerr’s little conversation, you could cut it out of the book completely, leaving the rest wholly intact. It’s also crazy. It starts with a ‘python of the deep’ with a mouth large enough to swallow itself. It ends with what has to be the world’s worst ever lesson on domestic cleaning.

Yet the strange, mad episode sets the scene for the action climax that is it to follow. A crazed foreshadowing.

I definitely recommend the technique. You probably can’t include too many of such things in a single book, but they’ll be high impact ones when you do.

And that’s not the best part.

The best part is simply that the damn things are crazily good fun to write. I like that eel-smashing scene so much, I want to snip it out and send it to Marie Kondo. Dear Marie, that’s not how you tidy a room. This is how you tidy a room …