Thursday, June 12, 2014
Yeah, right: my reaction to the plot of Silence Once Begun
I hate to rag on a book but, damn, Jesse Ball's Silence Once Begun has the most ridiculous plot I've ever come across in a novel - I was exasperated to the point where the only thing I could "write" (electronically) in the margin was, "yeah, right." I will give away the ending here, so ease up if you're still reading the book and would like to be "surprised" - but, the catch is, that the "disappearances" of the 11 people for the small Japanese city was not a mass murder but was part of a plot to expose the unfairness of the court system. To review: young man loses a bet and as a consequence signs a confession admitting that he is responsible for the "disappearances." In prison, he refuses to talk, he endures a trial, is hanged. We later learn - and by the way there is no logical reason why the author/narrator has to delay this information till the end of the novel, just part of his manipulative narrative strategy - that the guy who got him to sign the confession had engineered a scheme to reveal the injustice of the system: he found an old misanthrope living out in the country who was willing to put a bunch of old folks up in secret on his farm for, oh, a couple of years; then he recruits 11 elderly people living in the city who will simply "disappear" and resettle on the farm for a year or two while the rest of the world assumes they're dead (yeah, right, that's easy to do!), then finds someone willing to sign this fake confession and die for it - and after the execution he marches into town with along with the 11 who had "disappeared." Is there any single part of this that you can believe? All along, I thought that we were dealing with some very disturbed people who maybe out of some obsession or self-abnegation would confess to a murder they didn't commit, etc. - but this ending? We're not dealing w/ people at all - we're dealing with authorial constructs. BTW, there was a movie, also not very good but slightly more credible - The Life of David Gale - on a similar theme: man fakes his own complicity in a murder, leaves behind exonerating evidence after his execution, in order to show the world the injustice of the death penalty - at least in that case it was one person and his bizarre obsession. If there were ancillary benefits in this novel, such as a sharp and mysterious style - he so clearly emulates Sebald and Murakami, his heart and ambitions are in the right place for sure - but I'm sorry to say the writing never rises close to that level, and I'll just leave it at that, except to note that I was a nay-sayer on Dragon Tattoo and that's gone on to earn about a billion dollars so who's to say?
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I can only say thank you for the candor. I wish more people would stand up and say so when they read a lousy story. The notion that every work is precious because every writer has a right to tell his story, makes me nuts. It's a matter of integrity to respond genuinely; we're not a team of six year-old soccer players who all get a ribbon for participating, whether we scored a goal or sat on the grass.
ReplyDeleteYes this is a tough one for me; I do not wish to add to the misery and unhappiness in the world, which is plentiful enough already. And writing a novel is not like playing a game of soccer: we invest so much of our hearts and souls in the process of writing. I know how it feels to face harsh, cruel reviews (and have decided that if I ever publish again I won't read any reviews). And yet: I do want to be honest and share with the few readers of these posts my feelings and thoughts as I'm reading - take it for what it's worth. Too often, BTW, the problems in novels are very "fixable" and part of the blame must lie with agents and editors who no longer work with authors in any serious or substantive way: they sell, or buy, and that's it.
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