Reading as a Writer: “Child 44″

Back in the late 1990′s, a cable movie entitled Citizen X came out on DVD.  Based on Robert Cullen’s The Killer Department,  it told the story of a Soviet investigator on the trail of a serial killer in a society that maintained it had little crime and serial killers were only in decadent capitalist societies.  That serial killer, Andrei Chikatilo, traveled around the western USSR, killing children in a horrific, ritualistic manner.  The investigator never gave up, caught Chikatilo, but in the process suffered his own psychological trauma from the experience of conducting the investigation in a society ruled by fear and paranoia, and that discourages individual initiative.

Tom Rob Smith has utilized elements of this true serial killer story to form a skeleton on which to hang the flesh of his serial killer novel, Child 44. Suspenseful and a fast read, this novel captures exquisitely well what it feels like to live in a totalitarian police state, the way a person must think in order to survive.  Smith clearly delineates the detective’s line of thought, as well as other characters’ thoughts, to show that way of thinking which then determines actions.  Lev Demidov, the protagonist/detective, is an MGB agent who has enjoyed great success even though he’s dogged by a rival agent, Vassili.  He loves his country and his wife, Raisa, but that love and his past successes aren’t enough to protect him from Vassili’s scheming.  He ends up in exile, working for the militia in a small town near the Urals.

Before he left Moscow, before his fall, Demidov had reviewed the case of Arkady, a young boy found murdered gruesomely on train tracks.  Since the USSR has no crime, Arkady’s death is ruled an accident — he was hit by a train.  But Arkady haunts Demidov, and when he comes across identical child murders in other towns all over western USSR, he decides to find the killer and stop him.  This would be supported in a Western country, but not in the USSR where the MGB does everything it can to stop Demidov and his investigation.

This is a riveting story, set in winter to begin and ending in the height of summer’s heat.  Smith switches point of view in alternating paragraphs at times which he handles like a pro, making clear  whose POV he’s in in each instance.  It could have been terribly confusing.  What was confusing at times was what time of day it was — Smith does not make this very clear, especially at the beginning of scenes.  There were times I wondered how Demidov could be doing what he was doing in the dead of night when it was, it turned out, midday.  I also missed a more richly described setting.  Smith sketches only what he absolutely needs for the action, sacrificing an important dimension to enrich his story.  Russia has its own landscape of beauty, the forests magnificent and almost spiritual, and this could have added to Demidov’s love for his country, deepening his character.  Oh, and Smith began his writing career as a screenwriter and this shows in the absence of all five senses in his writing (but strong dialogue).

Smith carefully shows the psychology of people who live in a totalitarian police state, but missed the mark with the psychology of the serial killer.  His Andrei is far too self-aware, too rational, and without any motivating inner fantasy to be a convincing serial killer.  The murders are more about sending a message than the powerlessness Andrei feels — indeed most characters in this story feel powerless in the face of the State — and a serial killer’s need for power, domination, and control.  Serial killings are also sex crimes even if they do not involve rape, and there was very little indication of this when we’re reading Andrei’s POV.

For a first novel, Child 44, is an interesting, fun read.  Smith clearly can write well and I look forward to reading more of his work.

Words

In another venue, I write about the power of words.  For this blog, words perform heavy lifting.  They work to create images, explain ideas, describe a future world I’ve created and populated with characters from my usually over-active imagination.  Writers use words to do what painters do: lose themselves in the painting.  And to create the conditions for the reader to do the same.

Reading as a writer means to take particular note of the way another writer uses words to create a fictional world, describe characters and tell a story.  Cormac McCarthy’s The Road sticks in my mind because of the muscular Anglo-Saxon vocabulary he used to describe the experiences of a father and son trying to survive in a primitive environment.  Was that intentional?  I haven’t read any of McCarthy’s other novels, so I don’t know.  But the vocabulary gave the novel another layer of depth and richness, reflected the earthy and primal conditions of the characters’ story.

My poet friend commented yesterday to me that literary novels are too close to reality to read during these holidays.  Only a genre novel could offer the needed escape.  The writers of literary novels tend to focus primarily on language and style, while genre writers’ primary focus is on story.  They unite in their work on character development, although plot-driven novels focus much less on character and they tend to fall into a genre such as thriller.  They all use words.

A literary genre novel (something I strive to create) combines the literary with a popular genre, such as mystery or science fiction.  In these novels, language or words become not only tools to build sentences to build paragraphs and tell a story, but they reflect the action, the sensibility of the fictional world, and give the story a richness and color similar to how the different timbres of the musical instruments in an orchestra give music color and richness.  The most recent example of this that I’ve read is the science fiction novel Grass by Sheri S. Tepper.  While I read the first two pages, my mouth slowly dropped open at the sheer beauty of the language and of the landscape she described with it.

Writers can have favorite words, those they use most often, or words so unusual that to use them would be like a millenial celebration.  Here are some of my favorites:

• susurrous: full of whispering sounds (I’ve actually used this word in a story)
• deracinate: pull up by the roots (“She deracinated her life.”)
• puissant: powerful or influential (looks like the opposite)
• quidnunc: an inquisitive and gossipy person (from the Latin meaning “what now?”)
• hebetude: sluggishness (not the same as the heebie-geebies)
• adamant: unshakable or immovable, unyielding (the sound of the word is heavy, unyielding)
• frisson: shudder, thrill
• fribble: to trifle or fool away
• coelacanth: fish or fossil of a family of mostly extinct fishes

There are others, but I have not made a list (before this).  They pop into my mind at odd moments, or in response to something someone has said.  Or while looking up a word, I’ve become engrossed in reading the dictionary and found other verbal gems I hadn’t known existed.

Words.  We use them to convey thoughts, emotions, and to connect with other humans, whether face to face or through the written word in novels…..

Discovering the Zeitgeist

While following up with an internet search on a comment someone made to me, I discovered the Zeitgeist Movement. In German, die Zeit means the time,  and der Geist means the spirit, mind, intellect or wit.  By putting the two words together, like German has a wonderful way of doing, we get “time spirit” or “spirit of the times” as the English translation.  Zeitgeist refers to social trends that occur during a specific time period.  It sounds like they are somewhere in the air we breathe or in the spiritual ether that affects souls.  Like during the 1960′s, for example, which was a time of social upheaval and change. 

The Zeitgeist Movement (TZM), according to Wikipedia, is a grassroots movement that focuses on increasing society’s awareness of the need for global social change for the good of the entire world.  They are peaceful, nonviolent and dedicated to spreading their message and mobilizing activists through technology.  Well, that’s all well and good, but what kind of change exactly?

The first concept TZM advocates is “no money.”  This really caught my attention, because it’s something I’ve been thinking about for years, and I play with it in the Perceval novels.  They approach this idea from a positive position about humanity, i.e. we can overcome how we’ve been programmed since childhood to need incentives to do anything so that we will want to work, earn money to spend it, work more, earn more money, etc.  They propose that this programming can be stopped or just not done in childhood.  Children, after all, before they know about money, are curious, active beings who do things simply for the pleasure and experience of it.  They follow their interests and talents naturally. 

So far, I’m with them.  This process could take quite a long time, which is what I’d been thinking myself.  We need to change our minds, our thinking, in order to abolish money.  But I was coming at it from the angle of needing to replace money, and maybe that’s an intermediate step.  They also advocate abolishing property, which I understand to mean as “ownership.”  Everything belongs to everyone.  This reminded me of Native American beliefs about land. 

Other things they advocate:

• Automation — to free mankind from repetitive and tedious tasks.  This does not mean, I guess, that they advocate laziness but that they want people to do the things they love, i.e. create.  Creativity is a human characteristic that needs to be nurtured and promoted (speaking as a worker in the creative arts!).
• Artificial intelligence — to make decisions objectively and to store and retrieve information.  This one makes me nervous — not the information part, but decision-making.  We have machines already making decisions for us, programmed by people, and they are far from infallible.
• Technological unification of the globe — isn’t this already happening with the internet?
• Scientific methodology — governing decisions made through the scientific method and not beliefs.  This excludes politics, religion and competition.  They make a point of excluding utopia and communism.  It also takes the notions of money and power out of the picture.  Their mission statement, which is fascinating, goes into more detail, but I wonder if this actually robs humankind of its essential humanity.  We are emotional beings with a psyche and intellect, and our behavior can be quite nuanced and subtle.  And the Zeitgeist Movement itself is a belief system.   
• Sustainable city systems — creating cities using a unified systems approach for self-sustaining culture as a model for global unification.  I’m not certain what this means, and I wonder what they plan to do with existing cities and cultures.  Does this imply that nation-states with sovereignty will no longer exist?

This movement now has my attention, and I plan to learn more about it because of my own thoughts about the future for Perceval.  Their website looks comprehensive with numerous links to other information and suggested reading.  With humans, I think anything is possible, but when it comes to change, especially major change, humans tend to dig in their heels and lean back hard…..

The Blizzard

Image thanks to Chris at icanhascheezeburger.com

What’s it with blizzards anyway?  The wind whips the snow into whiteout sounding like sand against my windows and my imagination ramps up into overdrive.  Not that I’m complaining.  But with a blizzard?  Why not with sunshine and clear skies?

So what does it mean to me, the writer, that we’re socked in by a blizzard today.  SNOW DAY!!!!  Time to play!  The imagination loves to play, to create, to have fun.  Early today, she had already come up with a tantalizing character for a children’s book, the title, and the very first scene, along with a timeline for writing it next year.

A little later, I decided to work on fiction today, specifically a short story that needs a rewrite.  It had a problem that I couldn’t figure out.  But today was the perfect day to drag it out and ask myself what the problem was and how to fix it.  The answer came fast, whizzing through my brain’s circuits from the imagination to the intellect.  It’s so simple, I’m astonished I didn’t think of it sooner.  I spent the rest of the morning working out the details and began the rewrite.   Most of the original story will remain, too.

This blizzard has triggered also a lot of memories of past snow days, both in childhood and as an adult.  Precious gifts – memories – when they come as specific gems, fully formed in the mind, and they’re things not remembered in a long time.  Memories feed the imagination with emotion and visual images, sounds and smells.  Memory fuels the writing process, mostly subconsciously but sometimes consciously.  Seeing the snow this morning triggered the snow day memories which took me straight to a childhood place and enabled my imagination to play with thoughts of being a kid, of kids I know, of stories I’ve written for kids in the past, and that led to one specific kid who invites me to his birthday party every year — my Scientist friend’s oldest son.  Another element popped in: I reread Madeleine L’Engle’s classic novel A Wrinkle in Time a couple weeks ago, which had also triggered a lot of childhood memories.

So it all came together because of the blizzard and having a snow day: the snow, children’s science fiction, and the protagonist of the story.  I added a character that popped into my mind as I was thinking about the “tesseract” concept from L’Engle’s book.  Now I have two characters, a situation and a scene, but not a story.  Why?  No conflict yet.

The next step was to write down everything I’d thought of, which triggered more ideas that I wrote down also.  This could be the beginning of a fun children’s science fiction/fantasy story, or it could end up being a dead-end. My imagination will let me know eventually.

In the meantime, I have that short story rewrite to finish….