points of view
Ira Levin: another masterclass
I have to confess the closest I’ve got to the American novelist/playwright, Ira Levin, is watching the film of The Stepford Wives during a period of convalescence. But given the stature of the man, I decided I really ought to remedy this and read some of his books for myself.
He was a mere 23 years of age when, in 1953, his first book, A Kiss before Dying, was published. It was immediately acclaimed as a masterpiece in the crime-thriller genre, winning prizes and selling in eye-watering numbers. And it’s quite short – yeahhh! So that’s the one I decided to tackle first. Tackle? Says a lot about my overall approach, huh?
It was anything but. Accessible, gripping, masterfully plotted and written. And compulsive. Short chapters, and division into three parts, give added momentum. I easily finished it in a day in between wallpapering and weeding and cooking.
The story’s set in a small college campus. In Part 1 we see things from the perspective of the nameless murderer – blond, blue-eyed, handsome, street-wise, charming and a lady-killer in both senses. But also a gold-digger and a psychopath. We know he despises women and only wants them for what they can give him. In the first 84 pages we watch him manipulate and scheme to get rid of Dorothy Kingship aka Dorrie, a girl with a hefty inheritance and a baby on the way, who has dared – yes, dared in a most inconsiderate way – to thwart his plan to get rich quickly. We see him carefully and methodically get rid of her, completely confident the murder will be declared a suicide, and no one will ever know. And the effect is the more clever because we are in on the build up, the increasing threat of violence, but the actual moment of murder is left to our imaginations. So far, so fairly standard plotting.
But then comes the clever bit: a complete change of point of view. Part 2 sees Dorrie’s sister, Ellen Kingship, piecing together aspects of the circumstances that simply don’t add up. She’s convinced Dorrie didn’t take her own life. But how to prove it? She knows the man in question is a blond and handsome student in Dorrie’s cohort at college … but which one? Plenty of young men on the campus fit that description. And how can she trace him without endangering her own life? Approaching each potential blond suspect with a tissue of lies is fraught with peril. Was his the hand that pushed her sister so violently? Was his the smile that watched his ‘problem’ plummet from that 14th storey? As readers we grow increasingly tense as each betraying slip of Ellen’s tongue is detected through blue blue eyes, magnified by a suspicious brain. And who’d have thought torn paper snowflake crafting could be so spine chilling?
The body count increases. The murderer grows ever more audacious, intrepid, and bold. And now, we the readers know who he is.
Part 3 turns its focus on Marion, the third and last Kingship sister – our murderer’s last hope of inheriting a fortune. But there’s one blond handsome man who knew Ellen better, genuinely cared for her, and he is determined to bring this psychopath to justice, and save Marion from his clutches. Meticulously, incrementally, he obtains the evidence, by fair means or foul, and the net closes inch by agonising inch. Levin achieves a finale so tightly coiled and slowly released as to warrant the accolade from no less a personage than Stephen King: ‘the Swiss watchmaker of the suspense novel …. Every novel he has ever written has been a marvel of plotting … he makes what the rest of us do look like those five-dollar watches you can buy in the discount drug store’.
Oh, and even in his debut novel, a mere stripling, Levin had the confidence to describe Ellen running down 14 storeys and through deserted night streets in one long breathless 24-line sentence! Impressive stuff.
Treats in store …
Georgette Heyer
Georgette Heyer. The name brings a warm glow to my day. In my teens and twenties I was a huge fan of her Regency novels and snapped them up whenever I saw them second-hand.
Some for one shilling each, as you can see. Others the princely sum of two shillings and sixpence! I owned and read all except one of them, I think, and marvelled that a girl of 15 could write something as good as The Black Moth, initially to amuse her convalescent brother, but later published in 1921.
By the time she died in her seventies, she was the acclaimed author of over fifty books, but in spite of being a huge fan of hers, I confess that till this week, I’d never read one of her twelve murder mysteries. Time to remedy that and relax my mind at the same time, then. I’m in sore need of undemanding recreation right now. 
Think shades of Upstairs Downstairs meets Agatha Christie. The book is Why Shoot a Butler?
And indeed it’s a complete mystery why anyone would choose to murder Dawson, the trusted old butler of Norton Manor – a stately old fossil. Frightfully keen on the done thing, found with a bullet through his body on a remote road. Three murders and two burglaries keep the bumbling police totally confused while a scornful, enigmatic and imperious barrister, Frank Amberley, unravels a complicated and involved plot of much more significance then the murders themselves.
So why does Amberley keep quiet information about a female person found at the scene of the butler’s death? What is so important about a book borrowed from a dusty under-used library? What is the strange young woman at Ivy Cottage concealing, and why won’t she confide her secrets? Who is the sinister new butler who appears out of nowhere bearing unverified references? Who exactly is to be trusted?
This time around I’m much more aware of literary issues with Heyer’s writing, much as I thoroughly enjoyed the witty dialogue and element of suspense. But after all, this one was written in 1933 – language, publishing, social mores, well, pretty much everything really, was very different back then.
Nowadays most editors would pounce on a lot of nitpicky points, from frequently changing points of view within chapters, through to numerous typographical errors. Modern authors are taught to keep the choice of words pared down to avoid distraction: he ‘said’ – not he ‘expostulated’, ‘ejaculated’, ‘retorted’, ‘interposed’, ‘asseverated’. The prose should show emotion not spell it out – bin the adverbs – ‘tetchily’, ‘grumpily’, ‘maliciously’, ‘tranquilly’. It would take a brave or foolhardy man to call a fiancee ‘dear old soul’, ‘old thing’, today, I rather think. So, a product of its day, then, but a diverting read for all that, despite all the anomalies and anachronisms. And in the character of Frank Amberley I was forcibly reminded of all the rude, supercilious, entitled cads in Heyer’s romances who rode roughshod over other people’s finer feelings but nevertheless won the heart and hand of the fair lady.
Thank you again, Georgette Heyer, you lifted my spirits and took me away from twenty-first century problems. Exactly what I needed. And now, of course, I’m wanting to read the other eleven mysteries.
Points of View
My new novel is told through the eyes of three different narrators, and I’ve spent a lot of time and thought juggling with the options as to how best to present them. State the name at the beginning of each point of view? Designate chapters? Make the first paragraph by each person tell its own story? Leave the reader to fathom it out? Or what? In the end I went for the narrator’s name at the top of each chapter, as, for example, Jodi Picoult and Diane Chamberlain do. And as I did in Over my Dead Body.
After all, I don’t want my readers to be confused or struggling, do I?
Nor though, do I wish to underestimate their intelligence. Hmmm.
But then, this week I’ve been reading Penelope Lively‘s Moon Tiger and I’m gobsmacked. Not only does she not give any such readerly assistance, but she changes POVs within chapters without warning, inserts flashbacks, omits punctuation willy nilly, doesn’t even break up dialogue. Surely this is pushing the boundaries a bit too far? And yet … well, I’m keeping up. OK, I’m having to concentrate, but it soon becomes clear who’s speaking. Sometimes it’s the once beautiful and famous historian, Claudia Hampton, now elderly and dying, lying in bed waiting for the end but thinking of bygone days. Sometimes it’s her young self, travelling, falling in love, working in exotic places, reporting wars and other civilisations. Sometimes it’s her only brother and adored adversary, Gordon. Sometimes it’s her daughter’s father, Jasper, charming but untrustworthy. Sometimes her colourless and conventional daughter, Lisa. Sometimes her one true love, Tom, found and lost in war-torn Egypt. A mad confusing medley you might think, and not the place to flout all the usual literary conventions. It certainly wouldn’t suit a lot of people I know. Probably not most who read my books in fact.
But hey, let’s not get too sniffy. After all, Moon Tiger won the Booker Prize in 1987. And Lively herself has been made a Dame for her contribution to literature!
That’s literary fiction for you. Rules? What rules?