All the Way Around the Half-Continent

At last I have a matched set! Kind of.

Some readers were bowled over by D. M. Cornish’s Monster Blood Tattoo and its sequels. I wasn’t one of them. I thought the first novel devoted too many pages to world-building, started too late, and ended too early. There was a lot of interesting stuff going on, and a lot more.

I remain impressed, however, with Putnam’s perseverance in seeking an audience for this series in the US. As you can see, the company revamped the cover design and even the series title with each new volume. But now the American editor has left the firm, and I’m not sure the books will get the same sort of attention.

Another series I’ve seen undergo that sort of ongoing reinvention is Linda Buckley-Archer’s time-travel series which began with Gideon the Cutpurse before it veered off into retitling. See the complete rundown of covers and titles so far at Damsels in Regress.

Finding Where Foundling Really Starts and Ends

Foundling, the first book in D. M. Cornish’s Monster Blood Tattoo series, tracks young Rossamünd as he leaves the orphanage for his first job. This being Fantasyland, he gets lured and knocked off course, enticed into dangerous deeds, presented with rival mentors, and so on. And a good thing, too, since ordinary job orientations aren’t that exciting. Foundling is thus a novel about Rossamünd trying to figure out his place in the world.

A few years ago, I heard Newbery-winning Richard Peck intone (he didn’t seem to simply say anything) at an SCBWI conference that after completing a novel he always goes back to rewrite the first chapter. Later he told Publishers Weekly the same:

I'll take this first chapter, and without rereading it, I'll throw it away and write the chapter that goes at the beginning. Because the first chapter is the last chapter in disguise.

I’m not sure a total rewrite is necessary, but the first chapter of a novel definitely needs to set out the threads and themes of the story that follows. It should also be where life changes for the protagonist, and thus where the story really begins.

So what’s the first chapter of Foundling? “It Began with a Fight” shows Rossamünd and another boy at the orphanage sparring with sticks. Is that the last chapter in disguise? Does it lead into the rest of the book? In retrospect, can we glimpse the threads of the wafting through the air back there? I don’t think so.

Rossamünd never has to call on his stick-fighting capability during his journey, nor other combat skills. His nasty rival never reappears in the book (though I’m sure he’ll resurface later in the series). There’s no causal link between this scene and the plot that follows; despite the chapter’s title, it’s not where “It Began” at all. And this scene has no tie to the novel’s main theme of defining one’s place in the wide world.

Furthermore, by focusing so many pages on the fight scene, Cornish seems to have left himself less space to start his story. When Rossamünd does get his job offer, in chapter 3, it’s followed by several very hurried paragraphs describing action instead of dramatizing it (no dialogue at all on on pages 40-41). Yet those actions turn out to be most important for Rossamünd’s future, more than the fight.

I think the same elements could have been combined this way for a more successful launch:

1) Rossamünd learns that he’s been selected for a new job.
2) His jealous rival pummels him unfairly in the sparring match.
3) Rossamünd’s friends on the orphanage staff (introduced largely in chapter 2) cluster round to ensure that he can take the job.
4) He departs, still a little dazed, which leads into his first adventure.

A similar problem of story structure appears at the end, though of course I don’t want to give everything away. In vague terms, Rossamünd has ended up working for a monster fighter named Europe. (A lot of Cornish’s characters share names with things or places in our world.) On page 284 Rossamünd does something that annoys Europe--he knows it would annoy her, perhaps anger her dreadfully, yet he feels he has to do it. This is thus an important step in defining himself. But now he has to accept the consequences.

And what are those consequences? On page 290 Cornish shows us that Europe still wants Rossamünd to be her helper. Score one for standing up for your values! Unfortunately, the novel doesn’t end for 22 more pages, which show Rossamünd traveling to his original job assignment. That final chapter thus becomes an anticlimax, hanging around like a last bit of pie when you’re already reasonably full and the pie wasn’t stellar to begin with.

Again, with a little tweaking Cornish could have kept up the suspense he’d created to the end. Rossamünd could have left for his assignment still worrying about how Europe felt about him, fearing that he’d cut himself off from her respect forever. At the end of his journey, he receives a note from her [page 296]. Move that to the end of the novel, make that the first way she tells him that she still respects him, and the anticlimax would disappear. Then the whole novel, from very start to very end, would be about Rossamünd finding his place in the Half-Continent world.

The Primary Objective in Monster Blood Tattoo

At Inside a Dog, the current writer in residence is D. M. Cornish, author of the nascent Monster Blood Tattoo series. (He also maintains this blog.) Cornish writes of the value of good editing:

I have to say that editors are a boon, no matter how hard their input can be to hear at first. Of course, I knew this already. The process of Book 1 was well worth the reworking and the bruised ego; and though there is a whole lot to be done on Book 2 this too will be worth it... though ask me again how I’m feeling in a couple of weeks.

At the small risk of disrupting that important work with antipodean commentary, I found the first book in the series, Foundling, to be well written on the level of sentences, dialogue, and paragraphs. Even more impressive is how Cornish has imagined his “Half-Continent” world of monsters and monster-slayers from top to bottom. Indeed, as he’s described in interviews, “My primary objective has been to create place as thoroughly as possible and know it well before venturing out into stories.” Only after an editor saw his voluminous notebooks and insisted he write a book did Cornish apparently focus on creating a narrative to take place on that landscape.

Alas, I think Foundling’s storytelling is still full of bumps and jars, of the sort that good editing (external and internal) could smooth down. The prose is fine, the world lively--but the story structure often ungainly. It’s largely a matter of what to emphasize when, what to leave out till later, how to make everything tie together. When an author’s “primary objective” is creating a place, that naturally makes him reluctant to subordinate setting details to story--but that’s what a novel needs.

As I noted back in January, Foundling has more maps and appendices than most historians writing about real countries can hope for: over 120 pages, over a quarter of the book. That volume of information helps create verisimilitude, and would certainly have appealed to the fanboy I was in my early teens. But some of those back pages state information not relevant to this story or repeat facts from the story itself (occasionally giving away plot points). In the end it’s more data than is good for the narrative.

And those appendices may not be necessary. The book’s young hero, Rossamünd, has a sort of World Almanac that he consults during his adventures. So we could see many of the crucial maps, pictures, definitions, etc. at the same time Rossamünd reviews them. Or short extracts from the reference book could appear between chapters. Connecting the background information directly to the story would have forced Cornish to focus on what readers really need.

When such background info does appear in the text, it sometimes comes with the unwelcome urgency of a voice in your ear while you're trying to watch a movie. To take one small example from Foundling, chapter 10 brings on a healer this way:

Closely behind her shuffled a stranger: a short, meek-looking young woman--a girl really, younger than Verline--wearing a variation of clothing Rossamünd had seen many times before. A skold!

Then come two long, detailed paragraphs about the healer, filling more than a page and a half. That description interrupts a dramatic confrontation and shoves two domineering characters into the background. A silent, “meek-looking,” and “very nervous” newcomer shouldn’t dominate the scene like that.

I think the long passage about the skold would have worked better three pages later, after the start of the next chapter. At that point the loud characters have played out their conflict and separated. Rossamünd gives his eager attention to the healer. That would be the best time for Cornish to draw our attention to her as well--for the sake of the story.

TOMORROW: The same pattern writ large.

Disclosure: I read Monster Blood Tattoo: Foundling after receiving a free review copy from its US editor.

Maps, Footnotes, and Other Historians' Fantasies

There are books on my reading table that together add up to 1,516 pages. Of those pages, over 141 are reference material, including:

• 12 maps
• multiple glossaries
• multiple tables of names
• footnotes

Are these the Revolutionary War history books that I study? No, of course not! Academic historians must beg for a budget that covers maps. And as for footnotes on the same page instead of endnotes stuck at the back of the book (if they're stuck in at all)--well, only Bartimaeus has the power to make that possible.

Yes, the books I've dissected are all fantasy novels for young readers:

• Monster Blood Tattoo, Book One: Foundling, by D. M. Cornish
• Beka Cooper: Terrier, by Tamora Pierce
• Ptolemy's Gate, by Jonathan Stroud, the third book of the Bartimaeus Trilogy

And yes, each of these thick-enough-to-stand-in-a-high-wind books is also merely one installment in a series. There are thousands of more pages about these worlds on the shelves or in the works, quite possibly with hundreds of more pages of reference material. In fact, Monster Blood Tattoo started as notebooks of non-narrative reference material and only later turned novelistic (a journey I don't think it's completed with full success, but that's a topic for another day).

Creating a verisimilitudinous world is one of the joyous responsibilities of fantasy writers who set their stories in other universes. A map can ease that task and excite readers with the possibilities of life in that world beyond the borders of the book. But dictionary entries just aren't that much fun to read, especially when one must read them to understand a story, when they duplicate information in a story, or when they give away bits of the story--which some of these reference materials threaten to do. At the very least, they make the historian in me jealous.

One dissection of fantasy literature that reads exactly like a collection of dictionary entries--because it is--is Diana Wynne Jones's Tough Guide to Fantasyland, republished last fall in trade paperback form. Originally that book was a mass-market paperback in the US, so it had to be reset and redesigned for this edition. It looks like that task was handled by a designer with the geographically evocative name of Tony Sahara.

Unfortunately, a major casualty of the shift to larger pages was the old-fashioned map in the first edition. It's been replaced with a mere thick-lined representation of a map, like something one would found on the back of a cereal box. No, no, no! Fantasy novel maps are crowded, antique affairs full of stippled mountains and far too little farmland. If this genre of fiction must include reference material, those pages should look right.

Barging Through Fantasyland

The orphan has taken a river barge to the big city, only to discover that its crew are smuggling illicit goods. Escaping from that danger, the orphan sets out along the river road on foot, soon meeting a horse-drawn vehicle carrying an enticing upper-class woman--who turns out to be even more dangerous.

Frances Hardinge's Fly By Night? No, it's D. M. Cornish's Monster Blood Tattoo: Foundling. But a lot of MBT1 is seeming familiar, like a case study for Diane Wynne Jones's Tough Guide to Fantasyland.