The Sky Before Dawn

So I recently read The Demon and the City by Liz Williams which is the second “detective inspector Chen” novel. In spite of being in a series with the words “detective inspector” in its title the book didn’t really have a whole lot of mystery because it is told from multiple perspectives which reveal everything to the readers before the characters themselves know what’s going on. To be fair the character Chen is in fact a police inspector but his role in this particular book is minimized. For the most part the story focuses on and is told from the perspectives of the male demon Zhu Irzh and the human woman Robin Yuan. Other notable characters whose perspective is used to tell the story are a dowser and a woman of demon ancestry.

So the plot is that Chen is on vacation with his wife so Zhu Irzh is doing various pieces of police work to fill in and at the point the story starts he happens to be looking into a strange murder. Robin happens to be acquainted with the murder victim but she doesn’t know that person has been murdered and goes about her job of experimenting on a demon in a large pharmaceutical company. And as is the wont of stories with multiple perspectives it turns out that there are massive conspiracies afoot and crises abound and all the uninteresting characters who have some pretty tenuous connections end out being drawn together in the end. I’d say that on the whole the series is moderately interesting yet can get a little too chaotic at times for the same reason: the boundaries of the world are tenuous. On the one hand the story takes place in “Singapore 3” (more on that in a minute) in the relatively near enough future in a world similar to ours. However the difference is that heaven and hell take overt active roles in the workings of the world and so you know… what with the battle between good and evil constantly underway dramatic crises ensue. Considering the things that happen in this series perhaps we should all be glad that our world is not so otherwise every major city would be seasonally destroyed it seems. The problem with this setup is that it wants us to believe that not only the traditional chinese pantheons (Kuan Yin and all them) abound, but that others do too. So you’ve got all these things coming and going with the end result being that author has a nearly limitless supply of Deus Ex Machinas to use, which she does. After all, what better to pull your characters out of trouble or get them to where they need to go when they need to get there than a god? I kind of want to call the story preposterous or at least contrived but I suppose that if the world really was the way it is in the story things would probably play out in similar fashion.

All that said I wouldn’t particularly recommend the book/series although it wasn’t bad so if you like eastern mysticism and/or demonic main characters that don’t really act particularly demonic (think Angel from the Buffy multiverse) then feel free to give it a shot.

Now as to “singapore 3”, the first thing it makes me think of is “tokyo 3” from the Evangelion series. I’m not saying that there’s a connection but I do want to say that it’s idiotic to imagine that people would just tack a number onto a city. They might just tack a word on like with new amsterdam/new york but I don’t see there ever being a paris 2. Really, people have no shortage of names to give things. For example, every single street in boty New York and Paris are named. I have no idea just how many of them there are but there are plenty. Well whatever.

Reading this book made me think about multi-perspective narratives. I’m not actually sure that is a term but you know what I mean right? Basically you’ve got two types: those used in an epic story/series which do not necessarily connect all the characters, though usually do. And then you have those used in a story detailing a particular event and typically a single group/organization where the characters are always either connected from the start or at the end. Both typically end with all the characters coming together somehow, whether in allegiance or opposition. The main strength is being able to present a richer story since you’re essentially presenting however many different stories that simply have the same ending, the main weakness is predictability. Either the characters start apart and come together in the end, or start together and split up somehow (the lord of the isles series is pretty contrived about this) before reuniting for the climax. I’ve never read a book where something was presented that was strictly incidental, they don’t just feature a character who has nothing to do with the story. And so in that vein, for the stories with groups that split up they always get all back together again, you never have one character unaccounted for at the end.

You might be thinking “since you know that all stories are going to end and they all follow a basic formula of introduction, development, conflict, and climax there’s always some predictability anyway so what”. So what is that since all routes lead to the end writers end out making their stories redundant, and there’s little to no incentive to read every perspective if you don’t enjoy them. After all, it’s all the same in the end. I personally have a habit, though I didn’t exercise it with “the demon and the city”, of just reading the parts with the character(s) I’m most interested in and skipping the rest. Sometimes I’ll go back and read the other parts and sometimes not. To be fair, I think it’s harder to write stories with multiple perspectives than single perspectives. It works out a bit better in slightly less personal works like movies and video games (I particularly enjoy such games), and maybe even comics where you have all kinds of other things going on in addition to the writing of the story. But obviously in a book you’ve just got the writing.

So what can you do to write a story with multiple angles that people aren’t going to skip? Other than just not writing one in the first place (avoidance always being the best way to avoid something), I don’t think that you really need to do anything special, just write well in the first place. One thing to be aware of is balance. I was saying something about this the other day actually that if you create a great lead character then you need to focus on that character, if you find that character too hard to write and instead give all the time to an easier to write minor character then your story will have problems. This is pretty much what was going on in “the demon” as on one hand you have a deep character that you can do a lot with in Zhu Irzh and then you have Robin on the other hand. I didn’t count pages or anything but her sequences tended to be more drawn out or outright empty and I can’t help but suspect that for Williams it was easier to write a mortal human woman than a 200 year old male chinese demon. But even forgetting about that if one character’s exploits are extremely amusing and another’s simply aren’t…

Let me take a moment to preach about what I think is proper writing. Start from the beginning and then go in order until the end. Because of logistics issues this isn’t feasible for most multiple perspective stories (like the tv series Lost) which then have to rely on a lot of flashbacks and recaps. I think that “flash forwarding” (again see Lost) is a total fallacy to start with, but mixing the two without indication (Lost again) is just a cheap trick, like a twist ending. Speaking of which, things need to be feasible and that usually means ending the way that you’d expect things to end. It isn’t necessarily the case that if you take away extreme twists the work won’t be left with anything, but it often is. Yes consistency really is the main thing. People generally act very consistently, so to suddenly have a hapless pussy turn into a competent hero (see Yuji in the Shakugan no Shana II anime) requires a big leap of faith for the consumer. Similarly having a character be able to see through the secret behind the strength of an enemy that no one else has ever been able to notice before and then come up with a strategy to defeat them on one hand, and yet not be able to recognize how the female protagonist feels about them (Yuji in Shana again) on the other just doesn’t mesh. So start from the beginning, mesh, and end the way that you’ve indicated things will end. Now if you don’t give any indication as to how things will end then you have more freedom to end them wildly. By the way, don’t be afraid to let your characters either succeed or fail if they should be doing one or the other. Overwhelmingly more stories have things turning out well against all odds than turning out badly even though that’s how things usually go. Like my quest for a pain free life. The odds were against me and indeed I still have chronic pain which just keeps getting worse. In other words, even though I think it’s better to write positive stories than negative ones, don’t be afraid to let the world be destroyed if it means a better story.

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