Tag: roman-empire

K. M. Weiland, Structuring your Novel (PenForASwordPublishing 2013)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18371991-structuring-your-novel?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_22

This how-to manual goes over not just how to Outline your novel, but how to structure it.
The dramatic elements necessary for a good hook. An opening line must have character + action + setting.
The first 20-25% is the setup, in which you develop personality + motivation + beliefs. Make clear what they stand to lose. Every scene must matter, like dominoes up to the 1st plot Point.
The inciting event = sets the story in motion. (when the crime happens)
The key event = is what the story is about. (when our man takes the case)
Use your characters’ personal surroundings, tells us about how they live, how they are reacting to things, etc. and the earlier the better-before the 1st plot point. Use all the senses.
The 1st Plot Point-25% mark-moment when character crosses her personal Rubicon, often including change in physical setting or cast of characters, something to which Prot reacts very strongly. Make it cataclysmic.
1st Pinch Point – around 3/8th mark. She runs afoul from reacting to 1st Plot Point.
Midpoint- at the 50% mark. Prot’s reaction to the 1st Plot Point, point at which she can never go back. Prot stops reacting and starts acting, arc of personal growth
3rd Act-Slugfest
2nd Pinch Point-At 5/8th mark-showcases the Antagonist, how Ant is capable of defeating Prot.
3rd Plot Point -at the 75% mark. She responds in a completely different way with action and fights back.
Climax- last 10%. Shows a glimpse of how Prot has changed- a relaxed moment when we see her in the middle of her new norm.
The anatomy of a scene = scene (external action) + sequel (internal reaction). Goal + Conflict + Outcome. The sequel = Reaction (period of introspection) + Dilemma (Review + Analyse + Plan) + Decision.
The anatomy of a sentence = Motivation + Reaction; Cause + Effect; 1. Feeling/thought 2. Action or response 3. Speech.
It also features Dos and Don’ts on Dialogue, Conflict, Disasters, Telling and Showing and general Writing Style.
A lot of stuff you may already know, but it never hurts to have it all laid out for you.

Martin J. Bird, Destoyer of Worlds (Melville House 2024)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/216981753-destroyer-of-worlds?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=WCN0xuq1YL&rank=2

A space fantasy in Douglas Adams style with a truly innovative plot.

The story begins with a great first line: ‘I’m not a deep enough thinker to be troubled by existential conundrums’ followed by many paragraphs of existential conundrum—narrator Rintoul son of Starveall explaining how he came to leave his home planet and became a Black Robe. It’s not always the most exciting place to start, with a bunch of backstory, but this first chapter sets the tone, letting us know that we are in for a humorous ride.

After reciting prayers, ‘a series of sounds without meaning’, and imbibing a dark red narcotic substance made from leather-bark fruit, Rintoul has a mystical vision—a prophecy?

He wears a magical ear circlet ‘communicator’ given to him by his wife Elaine as a wedding gift. Their love story is romantic. He rescues her from shipwreck; she has some kind of magical power.

Bird emulates Adams’ humorous, self-deprecating Voice, not funny ha-ha or jokey, but rather sardonic and witty. The world is vaguely mediaeval, vaguely Celtic, yet the narrative style is modern and colloquial. Rintoul exclaims ‘God’s b****x’, after his vision. His apprentice is ‘freaked’.

Often, this makes for anachronism, but in a sci-fi fantasy makes for a light, comic narrative style. Some lovely metaphors are timeless—’the thread of my thoughts whiffled into thin air’. Some lovely mash-ups: ‘in for a ring, in for a torc’; ‘a few cucumbers short of a jar of pickle’. A cute nod to Mae West: ‘Is that you, or just me thinking it’s you?’

I loved: ‘I was gradually becoming used to the idea of scary technology from other worlds’. I suspect a lot of the computer analogies were à propos, but being a self-professed technophobe, they washed over me. More savvy readers would find them funny.

To world-build without info-dumping, Bird uses the effective and entertaining device of having the narrator commenting on things to ‘you Earthlings’. His wife Elaine and her uncle are outsiders, hinting at a reason for their strange abilities, so they present a world upon which Rintoul’s is the external viewpoint. They reveal their strange abilities and their extra-Themis-estrial origin to Rintoul bit by bit, in the midst of end-of-the-world ticking time bomb suspense, which reminded me of the wacky manic science of a Doctor Who episode. It’s all the more suspenseful as the ETs themselves don’t quite understand what’s going on.

I would have appreciated more action and plot before the story of the vision, which is mostly internal monologue, to give us more time to suspend disbelief and get hooked into the world and the Protagonist. His quest or goal—saving Themis from his prophecy coming true?—could have been clearer, yet he wasn’t clear on it himself. First, we have to figure out what ‘the stone sphere’ is all about—but maybe that is a feature of the Adams-esque genre—wacky stuff happens out of the blue to people in space, and we have to work out why from comedic comments based on the (real Earth) human condition.

In the end, the conclusion is the same as in Hitchhiker’s. Life goes on, much as before, often hilariously, with or without the presence of aliens.

This review first appeared in Reedsy Discovery.

Robert J. Lloyd, The Bedlam Cadaver (Melville House 2024)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/198919150-the-bedlam-cadaver?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=p1bIhsqcP8&rank=1

1681 Restoration London. The king’s brother James, a Catholic, is heir to the throne, but there is rumoured to be a ‘black box’ containing evidence that the king’s illegitimate son, the Duke of Monmouth, is the rightful heir.
In the heat of summer, rich young women are being kidnapped and murdered. First is Diana Cantley, then Elizabeth Percy Thynne. Harry Hunt, formerly of the Royal Society, comes falsely under suspicion. Harry’s quest to clear his name takes him all over the 17th century city, to the doors of Bethlehem (Bedlam) Hospital, into the studio of royal mistress portrait painter Peter Lely.
It’s a historical thriller, an interesting retelling of a real historical murder, with a cast of characters famous from history—King Charles II, Christopher Wren, Robert Hooke (architect of Bethlehem Hospital)—and other dignitaries introduced by the artful device of a dissection demonstration at Gresham College. But, it’s the wrong cadaver, which makes for a brilliant Inciting Incident.
This period of history is full of intrigue, with Protestants and Catholics vying to put their candidate on the throne.
On the run for his life and his reputation, Harry is swept by the Thames as far as Rotherhithe, affording us a tour of the Docklands area with all the infrastructure and the guilty detritus of colonialism and the slave trade. I love how he communicates with Hooke from a distance.
Harry finds the missing woman but doesn’t let us know until page 316. We also hear nothing about the ‘black box’ until this point.
The genius loci is beautiful, including even a public execution at Tyburn. The exposition of the political debates and events of the period is well done. There’s a lot to get across, and Lloyd does it mainly through dialogue, without sounding forced.
Book 3 in the Hunt & Hooke series.
This review originally appeared in Historical Novels Review.

Ruthvika Rao, The Fertile Earth (Flatiron Books 2024)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/195790527-the-fertile-earth?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=oFpJUiPYHA&rank=1

A gorgeous story of star-crossed lovers across the class divide in volatile 1960s India

In Irumi, ten members of the wealthy Deshmukh family are executed, their heads put on spikes in a paddy field.
Then we go back in time. Four Telegu children—Vijaya and Sree from the Deshmukh family, Krishna and Ranga sons of a family servant—dare an expedition into the forest to hunt down a man-eating tiger, an experience which has disastrous consequences for each of them.
The disaster has real intensity of emotion yet is still from a child’s simple point of view. The ramifications of the event reverberate differently for each of the four, ‘shards of that day rain[ing] down’, making for intricacies of character. Powerful emotions are portrayed extremely well. The way a smell can fill a person with rage, as it evokes memories of an experience.
It’s difficult to convey political arguments in fiction without it sounding like authorial intrusion. Rao does this by having Krishna a semi-reluctant attendee to meetings led by his nationalist friend Gagan.
Years later, when violent uprisings and the Naxalite movement threaten their village, Vijaya and Krishna are drawn back to each other.
The setting is gorgeous, with culturally-appropriate metaphors: ‘green tops of palm trees rustling and swaying like so many paintbrushes against [the] hot blue sky’; ‘mud pouring down the hillside, thick as grease’; jungle ‘clinging to the mountain-sides like moss’, filled with tigers and monkeys ‘chattering like inseparable old women’.
There are some fantastic examples of understated Showing. Vijaya counts the few instances of her name in the letter from her overly-critical, unloving mother. Relationships are nuanced, multi-layered, sometimes too subtle. I had to read a few passages twice.
In the shocking climax, the children’s subjective experience is revisited through Sree’s childlike point of view in an absolutely brilliant way.
A glossary would have helped with the Hindi and Telegu vocabulary.
This review originally appeared in Historical Novels Review.

Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (1846; this edition Penguin 2003)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10210.Jane_Eyre?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=oaBrnY74RN&rank=1

Were anyone to submit this in 2024, we would undoubtedly critique it. The wordiness verging on the pompous. The miserable orphanhood and the sojourn with the Rivers family are far too long. The mad first wife in the attic would be criticised as a clichéed trope if it weren’t that Brontë invented this trope.
It is of its time, and as such, is fantastic. The powerful emotions still speak to us, and the intricate exposition of what is and is not true love are as relevant as they have ever been. We cannot help but rejoice at the famous line: ‘Reader, I married him.’
The erudition is such that we just don’t see in modern works. Where have we ever seen the metaphor (ok, simile) ‘like Nebuchadnezzar in the fields’? I don’t even care that I don’t know what it means—I’m too poorly educated to catch the reference—it’s just so sumptuous.
We stand on the shoulders of giants; so, for all they have to teach us, we must read ‘the classics’.

Jonathan Lunn, The Road to Poitiers (Canelo Adventure 2024)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/202517754-kemp?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=yIXC8T2bZX&rank=1

September 1356. Martin Kemp and his archers ride with the Black Prince and the Anglo-Gaston army, pillaging their way across France. Their aim is to rendezvous with the Duke of Lancaster’s forces at Châtellerault, but they find all the bridges across the Loire destroyed. Will Kemp be able to rescue his lady love Ysabeau and win her hand?
The story begins right in the heat of battle—the enemy ‘less than a furlong behind him’—almost too exciting, because unless we’ve read Books 1-7 (this is Book 8 in the Arrows of Albion series) we’re not yet familiar with the protagonist.
A rich period of history, many many characters. The varied viewpoints are hard to keep up with, in places, but they add to the feeling of breathlessness of pace and keep faithful to the real history.
Besides Kemp’s’ sworn foe, the Chamberlain Geoffroi de Charny (owner of the Turin Shroud), whom he once enjoyed ‘p***ing on’, and my ancestors the Douglases, there are some surprises as to who is marching with the French.
The genius loci is so good you’d be sure the author must have been there. We feel the hard-bitten partisanship, the ‘bile rocket[ing] up [their] gullets’; we hear ‘the jingle of crotal bells’ of the pursuing enemy. We learn details about mediaeval warfare and enjoy discussions of religious philosophy that were common at the time.
The dialogue and the rough talk of the soldiers is vivid and believably of the time. The French calling English archers ‘les goddams’ referencing their constant cursing (e.g. ‘Go… fry mice, ye mumping carrion crow’); the English denying King Jean II’s right to the French throne by calling him ‘the Crowned One’.
Fans of military fiction will love this. Spoiler alert: the English win this one, but the French eventually win the war.
This review first appeared in Historical Novels Review.

Francesca de Tores, Saltblood (Bloomsbury 2024)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/199689207-saltblood?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=BHXB0kfSU9&rank=1

What a juicy subject for a historical novel—an infamous female buccaneer during the Golden Age of Piracy and her infamous shipmates, Anne Bonny and Calico Jack Rackham.
Mary’s life begins in hardship. She masquerades as a boy to solicit financial help for her mother from her brother’s paternal grandmother. Making her way through early 1700s society dressed as ‘Mark’ in service as a footman, she is pulled toward that wildest of man’s worlds—the sea.
A woman dressed as a man to become a sailor is a common theme in the mysogynistic world of bygone cultures, but this one goes deep into the psychology, as Read seeks a ‘name that fits her skin’. She marries and puts on a dress, and they run a tavern in Flanders. The men all now treat her differently, and Mary struggles to teach her husband that ‘the stuff between her legs is not the end of what she is’.
All the while, the dampness that seeps into their floorboards threatens to reclaim her for the sea. Perhaps a sailor is something else, neither man nor woman but an identity unto itself. Read’s love of the sea, tinged with fear of its power, shines forth from the pages. The crow that follows Read around—a symbol of death—is an apt metaphor.
This is a great work of literature, historically correct and beautifully written.
The characters are richly nuanced—the ‘specimen’-collecting captain and his ‘invisible’ wife, the eloquent Jack, free-spirited Bonny, Read’s hard-bitten laundress mother. I loved the laundress’s ‘constant battle against colour’, beautiful metaphors like the ‘curved blade’ of a smile, ‘we wait like tubers for spring’, the ‘crabwise patience of shelled things’ and other gorgeous details of humanity, of ‘casual fond brutality’ and ‘gallows fellowship’, and of battle, death and pirates.
The review first appeared in Historical Novels Review.

Valerie Bennett, Lidu’s Awakening (Kindle 2024)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/209324860-lidu-s-awakening?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=xnqdOK6Oev&rank=1

Young Paleolithic hunter Crik is over-anxious to prove himself in this test of manhood, his first solo hunt. If he could bring down a bison, he might look worthy in the eyes of his tribe to be their leader in the future as his grandfather was today. He notices wolves are stalking his prey, as well.
Gatherer for the tribe, Lidu has made a Great Mistake. One day she accidently picks purple coloured berries instead of the blue ones, setting off a chain of events that changes her destiny. People get ill from eating the berries, and the women shun her.
Kylo and his brother Aneko struggle for dominance within their pack of teen wolves, who are closing in on a herd of bison. Since he was a pup, Kylo had known that he was destined to one day be alpha.
Crik creeps into position, eyeing the bison, when suddenly one of the wolves lets out a howl, spooking the herd into stampeding off.
The wolves prepare for the big pursuit, Kylo and Aneko in the vanguard.
Lidu, shunned by the other gatherers, goes out berry-picking on her own. She discovers that applied topically, the purple berries have healing qualities. A large cave lion surprises her, but leaves her alone.
Crik continues his stalking. A wolf howls, but the bison are not spooked. Just as he throws his spear, the bison is spooked by something on its other side—two large wolves. Crik is seriously injured, gored by the terrified bison.
The chase is on, and Kylo charges too soon, leaping into the air only to be met by a massive horn. Gored, Kylo fell to the ground. Nearby was Aneko and next to him an unconscious human boy.
Lidu hears two howls, one from a boy, one from a wolf. She heals them both, winning respect first from the wolves, then gradually from the humans.
This is largely the story of a Paleolithic hunt, told first from the humans’ point of view, then from the wolves’, and the events that followed that hunt. We see the primitive structure of the human’s society. Occasionally we glimpse the thinking processes of the wolves, which is quite interesting.
The humans have to learn bigger lessons than how to make a successful kill. They learn the values of honesty, humility and gratitude, that there is possibility for individuals to step outside their assigned gender roles and that being a leader means more than showing off before one’s mates.
The wolves learn—sometimes, humans can be trusted.

Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (1847; this edition Penguin Classics 2014)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32929156-wuthering-heights?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=TmryfBleJl&rank=1

If such a novel were to come to me today, I’d critique it quite heavily.
The society portrayed is so antiquated as to be almost incomprehensible to the modern reader. I found myself wondering, ‘Are Cathy and Heathcliff ghosts? Are they servants?’ ‘Are we talking about Catherine the mother or Cathy the daughter?’ I constantly lost track of who is living at the Heights and who at the Grange. I had to go to Wikipedia before I got the characters straight. It’s way too long; I had to skip the last 10 or so chapters.
The twisted love affairs and ingrained resentments are revealed in a flashback through the voice of servant Nelly Dean’s filling in the new tenant Mr Lockwood on the family’s backhistory. The dark backstory goes on for most of the entire novel without so much as a breather to put a new log on the fire. In Chapter 13 the narrator POV shifts to Isabella, presumably a letter to Nelly Dean, with long passages unclear as to who is the ‘I’ referred to, and Mr Lockwood is only brought back into the story at the end of Chapter 14, leaving us to wonder ‘are we still in the backstory, or in present time?’. Structurally, it’s a mess, 2 out of 10 at best.
However, I give it 10 out of 10 for mood and atmosphere. You can just hear the whistling wind of the desolate Yorkshire moors. It’s the most Victorian and most Gothic novel ever, complete with grave-robbing, ghosts seen in mirrors, haunted rooms in dark decaying manor houses with portraits of ancestors on the wall, crumbling gravestones covered in ivy, mothers languishing and dying of consumption or childbed, people lost on the moors at night in the rain and women left deceived and abandoned with child.
And 10 out of 10 for character development; the characters are deeply intricate. The dialect-talk of the servant Joseph is almost entirely incomprehensible to me, but it is believed to be accurate for a Yorkshire dialect of the time, so, this work is also of anthropological value.
Cathy is an entitled Little Madam, what we nowadays would call a Histrionic Narcissist, believing ‘though everybody hated and despised each other, they could not avoid loving me’; Heathcliff is a Malignant Narcissist. ‘The more the worms (his family) writhe, the more [he] wants to crush out their entrails’. Together they form a folie à deux, ruining everyone in their wake.
From adopted child spoiled by the old master of Wuthering Heights, Mr Earnshaw, Heathcliff grows up resented by his brother Hindley, who marries Frances. Of the children at Thrushcross Grange, Edgar despises Heathcliff. Cathy loves him, though she marries Edgar, because Heathcliff is ‘so low’. Heathcliff loves Cathy, but he marries Isabella, just to spite everyone. These unions have children, and much vengeance is enacted.
A recurring theme of storm and calm after a storm is a powerful metaphor for the battling civilised and wild sides of Man’s nature, and the bleak beauties of the Yorkshire moors are a perfect setting for it. Cathy, in her anguish, is desperate to open the window and feel on her face the wild wind of the moors, where she once roamed free with Heathcliff.
At the time it was published, it made quite a stir, for its portrayal of cruelty and challenges to classist assumptions. It was criticised for ‘vulgar depravity and unnatural horrors’. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who loved the book, called it ‘an incredible monster’.
What a contrast to Jane Austen, where intricate emotions have to be delicately winkled out, imbedded in elegant, wordy conventions of social politeness. Here, all the beastliness of Man’s nature (and mind you, there’s no sex) is exposed on the surface like festering wounds.
In that sense, it reminds me of the 1975 film ‘Mandingo’ about the depravities of slavery, which upset me so much that I vomited after leaving the cinema, and since that day I refuse to watch any film, documentary or read any book about slavery unless I am promised some kind of happy ending.
I had to force myself to read it, but I’m glad I did. This is not a love story; as Cathy dies Heathcliff curses her soul to ‘live in torment’. Yet it’s one we will never forget. A dark masterpiece with no happy ending, may induce vomiting.