The Twist in the Tale by Catherine Czerkawska

Wordsworth's Couch - not very comfortable.

This month, I'm in vacant or in pensive mood, reflecting on reviews and reviewing. This is because I was mildly (but only mildly) irritated by a doozy of a review on Amazon for one of my books. Somebody or other really didn’t like it. And in a general sense that’s fine. As business guru Seth Godin says, sometimes you just have to shrug and say ‘in that case it’s not for you,’ and let it pass. Mostly, that’s what I do. And I’d never leave a comment on a bad review. It’s impossible to have an optimum number of sales and NOT get a few horribly negative reviews. There’s one somewhere on The Curiosity Cabinet by a woman who at least likes my book a bit better than her one star iron – but not a lot!

If you don’t believe me, just look up any massively successful and much loved author, and scroll down to the one star reviews. Sometimes they can be quite informative. Sometimes there’s a writer who comes very well reviewed, not to say hyped, a writer whose books I simply can’t get on with. Some of those one and two star reviewers on Amazon have actually bothered to do a real critical analysis of why they don’t like the book and occasionally I’ll find myself in agreement. I never add my two pennorth though, for the simple reason that if I don’t like a book after the first fifty pages, I simply stop reading, and there’s no way I’m going to review a book I haven’t read. I don’t have the time, I don’t have the inclination and I’m not in the business of slagging off my fellow authors for what is in all likelihood purely a matter of personal taste.

A colleague recently found a one star review on one of her novels because it was an eBook and the reader had taken a vow only to read paperbacks. So she gave it a single star because she couldn’t read it. That sort of behaviour is deeply unfair to the author but it makes the reviewer look so stupid that it’s hard to get really angry. What does irritate me though is what I have come to think of as the Roald Dahl effect. Don’t get me wrong. I love Roald Dahl. After all, my son fell asleep to a cassette tape of Danny Champion of the World every night for about a year. What’s not to like about that?

No, it’s his grown-up short stories that are the culprits. You know? Those volumes of excellent stories that all have a twist in the tale. They were televised. It caught on, big time. The leg of lamb murder weapon. The murderous landlady. The body in the lift. Women’s magazines started to demand short stories with a twist in the tale. Soon, every short story competition in every magazine, every writing group submission, every read-around, was flooded with short stories where the whole (and sometimes the only) point of the story seemed to be to deceive the reader into thinking it was about one thing, only to surprise them right at the end by another twist in the tale.

Now that’s all very well – essential even – for crime fiction. Perhaps even for horror and supernatural fiction too. Unless you’re writing the kind of crime fiction where we know the identity of the killer from the off, and the whole point of the story is for the detective/police person/ protagonist to problem-solve their way to a conclusion. Like Monk. I love Monk and his problem-solving. And I’ve no quarrel with any of that.

But there are some readers who have extrapolated from their perfectly legitimate taste for twist in the tale stories and now seem to think that every novel or story ever published has to have a plot in which you have no idea what’s going on until the last few pages when all is revealed in a blaze of astounding volte face revelation.

I don’t write that kind of book. Or that kind of story. I don’t think it’s mandatory to write that kind of book. Some of my all-time favourite novels are not that kind of book either.

I’ve no quarrel at all with people who don’t like the books I do write. What does bug me a bit is the kind of review that says ‘the plot was obvious’ when I’ve spent two years knocking my pan in writing a loving exploration of character, writing about somebody coming to terms with dreadful events, writing about how events in our lives colour and change us – but without ever really intending to deceive the reader into thinking this is one kind of story and then revealing right at the end that it is another. It isn’t. It was never intended to be. It isn’t what I do. And what’s more, sometimes the whole point is the terrible innocence of the narrator, when the readers can and should be able to see what is coming a mile off. But the narrator couldn’t.

Incidentally, Big Publishing used to have a term for this and probably still does. Agents too. They used to say a book was 'beautifully written but too quiet.' I spent a few years back in the nineteen nineties racking my brains, trying to figure out what the hell they meant, until a fellow writer who had been the recipient of the same kind of rave rejection pointed out that what they were really saying was that the book didn't have a stonking great plot with a completely unforeseen twist at the end.

Actually, I have done the plot twist thing once or twice. Much to my surprise, not everyone guesses the plot of The Curiosity Cabinet, the historical tale anyway. I was sure they would and I didn’t much mind about it, but some people have told me that they only understood it at the same time as poor wee Henrietta. That was a bonus but it wasn’t the raison d’être of the whole book.

And there is a very definite twist in the tale at the end of Bird of Passage. There’s a part of the story that pretty much everyone guesses, as they are intended to. But there’s another part of the story that I think hardly anyone does. I wasn’t striving officiously to write a twist though. I was focusing almost wholly on the character of Finn, and trying to find out why he was so troubled, and what his blurred memories of a terrible past might really mean. We don’t know the full extent of what he has forgotten and neither does he. The revelation came to me as it came to Finn and as it probably comes to the reader. But even then, the twist wasn’t the point. The troubling revelation was.

Anyway, I suppose what my little rant amounts to is this. As a reviewer – and I’ve reviewed professionally in the past and as a young writer given one or two unnecessarily scathing reviews of which I am now heartily ashamed – I think you really have to avoid reviewing the book you wish the writer had written. It’s a huge temptation but one best avoided. You have to stand back a little and review a book on its own terms and with a certain generosity of spirit. You don’t have to be fulsome in your praise. And if you think a book doesn’t quite succeed on its own terms then you’re perfectly within your rights to say so, explaining why. One or two past reviews of my plays that were by no means positive have given me pause for thought and definitely helped to make me a better playwright. Because I could see (once I simmered down a bit) that they were right. But if you don’t think you can achieve a modicum of impartiality or generosity, it’s perhaps better to pause for thought before you hit the submit button. So what do you think?

I think there's a good case to be made for reviewing your ironing board instead.

Catherine Czerkawska

www.wordarts.co.uk