It’s a real art, writing a complicated plot with many characters in such a way that the reader keeps wanting to turn the page. When I get caught in a tangle, I sometimes reflect on two authors: Frederick Forsyth, a master of plot; and Dick Francis, who has a real gift for managing a large cast of characters by light touches that sketch in detail so that each one has a real physical presence that makes them memorable.
Even the masters are not infallible, but even their flaws offer helpful lessons to the developing novelist.
Take Forsyth’s The Devil’s Alternative. A huge cast of characters–from USA, Britain, Ireland, Japan, Germany, Israel, Russia, Netherlands, Ukraine, Norway. Sailors, politicians, shipping magnates, terrorists, spies. And for once he has not provided a list at the front of the book. Initially, I got bogged down in the complexities.
But when Forsyth finally got all the ducks in a row and started hurtling towards the climax, the very complexity was part of the building momentum. He cut, with masterly skill, from one point of view to another, generating an excitement similar to watching a ball passed from player to player down the field in a high-stakes soccer match. At his best, Forsyth knows exactly when to switch point of view from hero to villain; from ship’s captain to prime minister; from naval frogman to spy master; from prison governor to terrorist. The tension builds and the pages turn almost of themselves.
The Edge is not one of Dick Francis’s best, perhaps, but that only makes me reflect more deeply on what his difficulties have been in this particular novel. There’s much to like in the set up of a special race train travelling across Canada with a load of race-horses and owners and a couple of villains on board.
Many of the characters are drawn with Francis’s attention to physical detail, but there are just too many of them: the staff on the train, the officials of the Jockey Clubs off the train; the owners; the villains; and a whole cast of actors who are performing scenes from a murder mystery before lunch and dinner. The crowded canvas doesn’t give Francis the scope he needs to make the strong human connections between characters that can be found in his best work. And because the focus is on a train trip, we see little of the horses themselves. Instead of being characters in their own right––brave or ornery, athletic, determined, fluid or just sheer dogged.
It’s as if somehow, this time, Francis doesn’t quite get the ducks in a row.
(And yes, you birders, the ‘ducks’ in my photos are actually royal spoonbills. You can see them in the background of the first photo if you zoom.)