Unable to sleep, I wrote a story in my head somewhere around two a.m. this morning. It has no conflict and no plot. I plan to give it to some people who are high. They will read my story and tell me that it’s Totally deep, man or maybe they’ll say dude, but in any case, they will give me some of their cheese fingers and that’ll be kind of all right.
I’ve spent the last ten minutes staring at this post, wondering how to start, what to say. It’s like I spent the past four days reading The Night Stages in a dream, which is what the first three-hundred-and-fifty-odd pages of the book is like. It isn’t a dream, but it feels like a dream. Of course, what’s the one thing about other people’s dreams: they are boring. I think each page of The Night Stages I read at least twice because my mind kept wandering off, and not even to interesting thoughts. Rather, I would read a sentence and think “I should really buy a new mop.”
And no worries: I really did buy a new mop. My floors will be clean(-ish) soon.
We have Tamara, who was, like a character in Code Name: Verity, was in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force. We have Niall and Kieran, brothers who cycle, both in love with the same woman. We have Kenneth, who painted Flight and Its Allegories at the Gander Airport, where Tamara has a stop-over while fleeing Ireland and her doomed relationship with the married Niall. In other words, we have a ninth novel with the muddle-headedness of a first novel. Tamara flew planes in World War II, so what? Niall and Tamara have an affair, so what? Kieran opens a gate for a pair of ghosts, so what? Kenneth listens to a long story about another painter, so what? We could even say Kenneth, so what? Other than Tamara looking at his mural after-the-fact, there is no connection between him and the other characters. There is all this background instead of characterization, everything shot in a blurred focus and feels a short-story run out of control, crashed like a bicycle in the Rás, which is the last fifty pages. Those fifty pages and the detailing of the Rás are heart-pounding in their intensity, as if to try and make up for the lethargy of the three-hundred-and-fifty pages that come before it. Why couldn’t the whole novel be the Rás? Why couldn’t the excitement of the Rás be weaved in rather than dumped at the end? The payoff for persevering comes so late.
In terms of writing, this is a ninth novel, not a first. Normally I hate description, and there’s a lot of description here, but it’s done so deftly, so beautifully, that it wasn’t the description that bored me. The technique, if we just look at every sentence, at each page in isolation, is beautiful. This book is written, assembled, so exactly. It’s just, overall, I couldn’t get any fix on the characters or their necessity of being in the novel. It’s like a pure technique book, all writing, story lacking. Maybe I’ll feel something different after I’ve let it stew for awhile, but it definitely didn’t endear Jane Urquhart’s novels to me.
The Night Stages by Jane Urquhart went on sale April 7, 2015.
I received a copy free from Goodreads in exchange for an honest review.
No one has replied to my emails in days. I complain of feeling invisible.
Tesfa: But that makes no sense. If you were invisible you can still use the computer and send emails. The people you send the emails to don’t know you’re invisible.
We decide upon an internet monster is eating my emails.
I still think I can feel invisible though. If I want to.
I am doing Ukrainian on duolingo and reading The Night Stages and in bed last night trying to go to sleep I came up with this sentence, which I assume in the compounding of these two things:
Who can say how Ludmila Petrovna got her bicycle into the work camp.
Pleased with myself this morning waking up and remembering it, as well as getting the patronymic correct.
Now if only I knew something more about how this sentence fits into a story, I’d be set. I still haven’t got my last duolingo inspired sentence:
All the men have two red hats;
(which was one of the sentences duolingo kept making me translate to English from German: Alle Männer haben zwei rote Hüte) into a story either. Mélange peut-être (to add a third language in there)?
I don’t know anything anymore, if I ever did before.
Typing is boring.
I’m in my typical funk after stories (not that I’ve typed up the last chapter of Wolf Children or anything productive like that). I have no new story ideas. I don’t feel like writing. I feel like sleeping except there are children in my house and I should probably try to at least stay conscious until the one not sharing that much of my DNA goes home. Sunshine (my cat) is nuisancing me as I try to type this. I have nothing left to say.
Is this writer’s block? Maybe I should just buckle down and type.