A Magician's Sleight of Hand - Julie Myerson's The Quickening

I read this Hammer horror novella on holiday and found it a compelling page-turner. Picking it up again to review it, I read the entire book again and realised how very clever it is.

In this haunted honeymoon story, Myerson uses a magician’s masterly sleight of hand in order to distract us from what’s really going on. Newly pregnant, Rachel has been bulldozed into a quick wedding and a honeymoon in Antigua. On the way from the airport, the driver bizarrely says that her husband is on the island. ‘Not now. Always. He cannot leave.’

This echo from The Shining (You’ve always been the caretaker. I should know. I’ve always been here) sets the tone, and when they arrive at the resort, even the words, ‘Rachel held the towel to her wrists, her throat,’ made me see her stemming blood, rather than enjoying scented towels.

Myerson’s staccato style, without inverted commas, makes the writing feel tense and fast-moving. Rachel’s point of view is edgy from the start – the empty suitcases look ‘depressing’; she sees a figure on the beach and shivers. Every tiny observation is used to ramp up the tension.

The real horror of the piece, however, is Rachel and Dan’s marriage. We’ve all known a Dan – he’s the partner of a friend of yours and none of your women friends can stand him. He’s a foul-mouthed, irritable loser, a liar and a bully. When Rachel is first upset by a horrible ghostly encounter, he is drunk and bad-tempered. ‘What now?’ he says, and then drags her into his lap. His lack of sensitivity and sudden, selfish advances make us see him as a sexual predator rather than an amorous newly-wed. When she wants him to feel the baby moving, he can’t drag his eyes off the cricket. Most food nauseates Rachel and Myserson brilliantly uses descriptions of Dan gobbling with gusto to make us feel revolted on her account.

The depiction of the haunting and the way it overwhelms Rachel is skilfully observed, but what is truly masterful is the way Myerson uses our suspicion of the odious Dan to distract us from other possibilities in the story. Reading the book a second time, I realised that I had taken in details that screamed of someone else’s guilt, but brushed past them when Myerson, with expert timing, threw in another despicable facet of Dan’s character. And I’m not giving away the ending here, because Dan is also a guilty man.

I write psychological suspense stories myself, and I can only admire Myserson’s clever ruse. Rachel is pregnant and has been rushed into marriage. She is partially in denial about the nature of her relationship and later reveals that she suffers from anxiety. This all makes her vulnerable and unstable in our eyes. The ghostly events and real murders on the island destabilise her further so that we accept gaps and inconsistencies in her point of view, which only serve to make us more fearful for her and her unborn child.

The only downside to this is revealed in other reviews – many readers are irritated by Rachel as a  hapless victim, always spoiling the holiday fun with her fainting fits. It is true that this could detract from our identification with her, but it is part of the book’s masterplan, which certainly worked on me.

Read it twice – once to be taken in and a second time to admire how brilliantly Myerson achieved this.

Celebrating great writing 1: Breaking Bad’s bright sparks

Thanks to www.geekosystem.com

I love to celebrate good writing and so I can no longer hold back from having a word or two about Breaking Bad, the extraordinary Netflix sensation that everyone is telling you you have to watch. You may have noticed that lately, some of the very best writing is coming from US television rather than films, and this is a case in point. If you haven’t seen it, I will warn you that you have to get through the pain barrier of the first two episodes that, although brilliant, are incredibly gruesome; I have a strong stomach but wasn’t sure I could go on. However, do go on; this is one of the most compelling dramas you will see and before you know it, you will be nagging everyone you know to watch it too.

There are all kinds of things to applaud in the writing of Breaking Bad: the strong characters; the double-jointed, oft-twisting plot, and most strikingly of all, the uneasy moral position standpoint we as viewers find ourselves in as we watch a hero become an anti-hero and, as incredible events unfold, our allegiances don’t quite know who to cling to.

If I had to choose one thing that makes the writing stand out, though, it is the intelligence of many of the characters. Often in drama, the plot relies on some of the characters not understanding what is going on, and we as viewers get way ahead of them, guessing and second-guessing until the (fictional) truth finally dawns on them, or, in thrillers, more likely explodes in their faces. For a while, Breaking Bad too relies on protagonist Walt’s wife Skyler not knowing what is going on, and there is some delicious dramatic irony as this happy, conventional all-American family gets together: Walt playing the innocent cancer victim but in fact funding his treatment by manufacturing crystal meth, right under the nose of his drug enforcement cop brother-in-law.

Thanks to Intellygentsia.com

To start with, Skyler is so very straight, wide-eyed and innocent, that we underestimate her. However, Skyler has hidden depths. Skyler, it turns out, is fiercely intelligent, and at times she comes out as more than a match for the brilliant chemist and life-long under-achiever, Walt. Now things get really interesting. Skyler begins to make her own guesses about what Walt is up to. She begins to make her own strategies to cope. As the plot twists and turns, Walt uses his razor-sharp mind to stay on top in the terrifyingly perilous business of playing drug cartels at their own game, and all the time he seeks to keep Skyler in the dark. In a series packed full of delicious surprises, Skyler’s own machinations stand out as subverting the genre. This is not a story about one hyper-intelligent man and his nemesis, trading brilliant ploys while the others involved struggle to work out what is going on. Most unusually, as viewers, we can never assume that we are one step ahead of the characters, however much we guess and second-guess and speculate. In terms of intelligence, Walt surprises us, Skyler surprises us, Gus becomes a force we hadn’t reckoned with, Hank’s mind turns out to be sharper than we thought possible, and even the innocent-faced, often hapless Jesse at times exceeds our expectations.

This brilliant writing strategy is what keep us, as viewers, on our toes; it is what makes the series a cut above most thrillers. This is no lazy viewing experience; it puts us intellectually through hoops and more hoops, in fact, watching all five seasons (we are currently on season four) must be like putting your thriller-brain through the ultimate obstacle course. If you don’t watch it, do what you can to obtain it. If you have watched it all, no spoilers please – I don’t yet know the ending, and I think it’s highly unlikely that I’ll guess.

Join in, thriller fans – if you love Breaking Bad, what makes it stand out for you?
If not, what other thrillers in books, films or series have you on the edge of your seat, and what makes the writing stand out? I’d love to hear from you – use Facebook if you can’t make my comments widget work!

In Which I Have More Fun, read Gillian Flynn and Ponder Women Writers and the Dark Side of Life

Courtesy of rubiblogger.blogspot.com

A belated Happy New Year to anyone reading this! My resolution this year is one of my best ever and comprises only 3 words: 

Have More Fun! 

Last year was full of hard work, determination and effort as I dealt with:

1) My job being busy,

2) A new steely resolve to get my novel published

3) My husband’s depression and

4) Economising to cope with new financial constraints.

 It was all work and no play, and Sophie became a dull girl. This year is going to be different, with having fun a day-to-day priority. Because it’s me, the fun has to be diligently researched and sought out, with plenty of soul-searching to ascertain whether or not fun is being had at any given moment...

I began the year by booking tickets for a comedy cafe in a couple of weeks, and theatre tickets to see Warhorse in April (OK so that may involve tears rather than hilarity, but I do enjoy a good cry). We have rediscovered games we used to play but have stopped since our children grew up, and best of all, our dining room table now doubles as a table tennis table, with frequent games being played. Even the cat joins in when she can be bothered. I have made a point of having a chat and a laugh with colleagues over lunch whenever possible instead of slinking back to my desk, and have instigated trips out for coffee with people I love talking to but haven’t been making the time to see. On Friday Jon and I went to see a band a friend is in, and chatted and danced until late. Always diligent with my exercise, I have bought a dance exercise DVD to mix things up and add a bit of fun to that side of life (running in freezing, horizontal rain sometimes falls short of the ‘funometer’ minimum mark). I had a go yesterday and although I was hilariously unable to keep up with some of the quick-changing moves (I swear this is a brain reaction time issue rather than fitness!), it was - well, fun! It isn’t necessarily the activities chosen that matter, and not every outing is a success, but making fun a daily priority has changed my outlook for the better.

In the meantime, writing has been happening. I finished a short story over Christmas about an attractive, successful but insecure woman who meets a homeless girl. Both pregnant, they end up side by side in the maternity ward, but the homeless girl has a dream birth and a beautiful baby, whereas everything goes wrong for the heroine and her baby is not what she expected at all. I have sent it out to some magazines and competitions, so we’ll see. I am now reworking the beginning of my novel, Unspeakable Things, ready to send it out to more competitions and agents.

 I have also been reading Gillian Flynn – Gone Girl and then Dark Places. Both are incredibly compelling, with twists, turns and outcomes you just don’t see coming. This is clever thriller writing, playing with the reader’s tendency to try to second-guess the next step all along the way. Although we have to suspend our disbelief at times, particularly as the plot advances towards a conclusion in both stories, we forgive this as readers because the wondering, guessing and stunning revelations are so compelling and so enjoyable.

Flynn’s women characters are fascinating too, and I was interested to see her quoted in a Mslexia article by Celia Brayfield, Dark Matters, about expectations of women writers and the trend towards ‘sugar and spice’. Flynn wrote: ‘... the one thing that really frustrates me is that idea that women are innately good, innately nurturing. In literature, they can be dismissably bad – trampy, vampy, bitchy types – but there’s still a big pushback against the idea that women can be just pragmatically evil, bad and selfish.’

Celia Brayfield notes: ‘In modern popular fiction for women the all-things-nice injunction seems to be taken literally in many cases. Chocolate shops, cup-cake bakeries and shopping – preferably for shoes or in a vintage department store – are in vogue... They’re given covers decorated with bows and polka-dots in colours otherwise found on My Little Pony toys...’

As a writer fascinated by the dark side of life, I have often noticed people’s surprise when I tell them what I write about, but then I was never the sugar and spice type, even as a little girl, and felt for a long time that boys had more fun. I was relieved to discover, growing up, that life was a lot more complex and full of possibilities  than the ‘What are little girls made of?’ poem allowed. 

Do discover Mslexia for yourself if you are interested in women’s writing – it is a gold mine of information, encouragement and inspiration.