landingtree

17/03/2023 cont'd

Wrote a section of my novel in omniscient third, with the audience referred to as 'we' as though all of them were crouched behind a camera, zooming around, desiring to look at particular places. Then read the start of Reservoir Thirteen and skimmed the first page of Bleak House and realised how much better it would be to cut the audience loose, 'we' is an awkward gaggle of picnic-goers on what's meant to be an empty mountain. Whenever I use 'we' in these few pages, it would be far better to invent a walker on the road, a bird, a schoolteacher, a cat running along a fence, and live briefly in their eyes.

18/03/2023

Reservoir Thirteen begins with a girl's vanishing, and the search for her, in the complex landscape around a small British town. But it begins to slide away smoothly out from under itself – weeks pass on a line-turn, then months. The first chapter sets up certain patterns – long paragraphs, the unsignaled movement from a human scene to news of birds mating in the hedgerows – and then, when the start of the second chapter comes with the new year, a satisfying pattern is established: each chapter will be a year. The vanished girl fades slowly in the village's memory, and she stops being what the village is mainly occupied by – though her memory haunts it.

As of chapter two I was already looking forward to seeing this format unfold, to see everything that's been mentioned return and be expanded upon. It makes me wary of my desire to go 'and then this thing - and then this other thing!' with structure. One thing promised and stuck to has such an effect. Reservoir Thirteen has an ensemble cast, and some years a person won't show up at all or will only get two lines. I've forgotten some recurring characters' names, but it doesn't seem like a problem, so much as, one does forget some of the people in a village. I never know when a scene is going to stick, which makes them precious: does the riverkeeper get three lines this year or thirty before we switch view to the fog on the hills or the crumbling of the reservoir bank? Paragraphing gives no warning, so the reading experience is full of tiny discontinuities.

As of halfway through: the book does pass the Bechdel test, but a great proportion of its developing stories are m/f romance – often halting and failing because few of the men here are very communicative. This book reminds me of Under Milk Wood: a whole town, its preoccupations, its surroundings, and most of all sex and romance between men and women. Notably, also, the working of the land and ageing/ill health.