Back with Another Book Rant

It irks me that I can't finish a novel (that I'm writing) because I really seem to know what I'm doing when it comes to picking apart stylistic problems with novels I'm reading.

Today's exhibit:
The Last Kingdom by Bernard Cornwell

I read an article the author wrote concerning his research on the Battle of Agincourt, thought he was engaging and well-researched and went to find his books. Lo, Mr. Cornwell had written this book about King Alfred (the Great), champion of literacy and bane of the Danish invasion...founder of England as we know it in a great many ways. I've read lots of historical fiction set in England, but most of it is 13th-16th century, and I was all about reading Danish conflict. Some of my favorite days in England were spent learning about the places the Danes had set up shop. (Yay York!) I was also really interested in how one goes about telling the story of this great English king from the POV of an English boy, taken as a slave by the Danes, who is then trained as a Danish warrior to go a-Viking. Really? What fascinating angle, so I gravitated towards this early history, rather than the book about the Battle of Agincourt, or Cornwell's retelling of the Arthur story.

And aaaaagh....Cornwell, while well-researched, has fallen into the biggest fricken' pit trap of first-person story telling there is. His narrator relays events like a person might relay their day. "Well, I got up and dressed in my [historically accurate and detailed] battle garb. We all boarded the long ship. It was [historically accurate description of the way a ship is built and how fierce all the Vikings looked]. While afloat, the old, blind scald told Odin's battle stories. They were quite inspiring. The battle was grim and bloody and people's guts were everywhere, but the battle rage came upon me and no one could stand. My leader rewarded me by giving me another arm band. I was growing quite wealthy. [Description of the use of metal jewelry as currency.]..., & c."

He even runs aground on my biggest pet peeve: "It was then I first saw [the man who would be King Alfred, the first woman I would love, this guy who I think is suspicious and weaselly, but with whom no one else takes issue until he tries to kill me..."] Oh for fuck's sake! Give us some build up.

And it's not like this guy can't create character and dialogue. I read too quickly through the places where he pauses to actually flesh out an interaction. He wrote a really brilliant scene of the young narrator, while still a slave boy, saving the war leader's daughter from a pack of other young boys. (This was a game of war and plunder that went a little too far.) There was suspense and character, and the punishments and rewards that followed did well to illustrate the way Cornwell researched systems of justice and allegiance that may have been in use at the time.
It advanced the plot of the narrator's move up the social ladder among his adopted people. It gave some character development, AND it fleshed out the cultural setting.

There is lamentably little of this, and I'm finding it really difficult to get through this book. I still am very curious about how this is going to become Alfred's story, and the way it is narrated indicates that it will make the shift sometime. However, it might be a miracle if I get there.

So let it be said, even if you are writing a first person narrative, you must still make it detailed. You cannot get away with info-dumping your way through a novel. We will appreciate your researching efforts so much more if try a little harder to show us the action. I want to feel squicked and nervous while reading a battle scene. I want to feel elated when the main characters make it through. I want to be amused by the budding relationship between the saucy new slave girl and the narrator. I want to slowly become suspicious of the man sent to kill the main character, and be either triumphant that I figured it out before the rest of the characters or startled by the treachery right along with them.

...and in a minor, unrelated complaint, I kind of want Danes that don't read like Beowulf caricatures. I understand that most of the Danes I'm reading about are the advance fighting/colonizing force, and that the Dane Next Door has yet to arrive in England, but come on! I bet they weren't all ready to feast on the flesh of their enemies and laugh in the face of danger at the drop of a hat. Facing farmers and unfortunate conscripts or not, you could still die with a pitchfork or an eel spear through your gut all slow and rotty...ew.

On that positive note, I think I'm done.

Staging Macbeth

I went to see the Guthrie Theater's production of Macbeth last night. Thanks to DB's Big Brothers, Big Sisters connection, we had free tickets in row H, dead center. Awesome. The performances were all quite good.
MacDuff's son in particular blew me away. It's not easy to be a kid with multiple lines of Shakespeare. (Alas, I can't remember which boy played him last night, as there are two that share the roll in alternating performances.) Michelle O'Neill as Lady Macbeth was fantastic as well. She played a very turned-on-by-power vampy Lady which made her descent into sleep-walking madness really incredible.

After the play, we had an interesting conversation about the decision to set it in alternate 1940s. We both agreed that what was fresh in the mid-90s--that taking Shakespeare out of it's literal time period and putting it somewhere else thing--is actually getting kind of old. We found ourselves wishing that maybe everybody had been running around in 11th century Scottish gear, rather than crisp military uniforms and pretty swing-dresses.
DB thought there is just too much jar between the setting and the language, that it takes even longer for your brain to start "speaking Shakespearean" than it does when you're faced with people in time-period correct costumes. To a certain extent, I agree. I think it's more that you have one more thing to try and figure out. Where are we? When are we? What did he say?

That said, we did roam down a "what non-11th century settings would work better" sort of path. Neither of these solves the head knot brought on by adjusting to setting and language at the same time, but roll with me on this one. I like it.

Macbeth, we decided, could be quite easily set in a sort of post-apocalyptic time. Thus, it makes sense for there to again be a king of Scotland as an entirely separate entity from the UK. The amount of knife fighting suddenly makes sense again if firearms have grown scarce post some sort of WW III. The presence of the Weird Sisters as a sort of we've returned to a more superstitious time makes sense again, and if the time period is already stressful, resource-low, etc., the madness is more believable again.

My favorite, however, was sort of a high-punk, super underground early 80s thing. Similar to what Luhrman did with his now-iconic Romeo and Juliet, the factions involved could be very much rival gangs. We're not talking kings and queens at all, we're just talking leaders with delusions of grandeur and inflated titles.
I also think the Weird Sisters as drugged out nutjobs is a rather fun image. Madness works well in this environment too...if everyone is a little strung out on stuff all the time.
It would have to be done carefully because the Macbeths' guilt-raddled visions are one of the most powerful things in this play, and if it gets played off too much as the result of his drug-delusions, it could lose something. (But I just keep thinking of the baby crawling on the ceiling in Trainspotting...it would work quite well with the ghost of Banquo.)

There's certainly still a language-jar, but somehow it feels more right in my mind than alternate 1940s. I can't explain precisely what didn't work, but something kept pulling me out of the moment. I didn't have this problem with a Napoleonic Hamlet and Twelfth Night. Victorian Midsummer Night's Dream also works well for me, but I just felt like Macbeth could have been staged better. ...so we fixed it, and now I have great desire to be a director.