It looks like I waited so long before posting my question that Albert more or less beat me to it, but with a different interpretation. I did not think Jackal had been set up by them: I understood her part of responsibility, but it puzzled me that Steel Breeze did not merit mention in the book’s conclusion, when everything else was tied up and resolved or explained to some degree. There was a tremendous shift of priorities in Jackal’s world in the last part of the book, and that made sense, yet the Steel Breeze thread was left hanging like a discarded plot device. In the greater scheme of things, with the world government coming about, and Jackal and her friends filling their roles in its chinks, suddenly the opposition fell silent, neither defeated nor continuing its terrorist campaign. I wondered where they’d gone.
I reiterate here what you knew from my journal, for the sake of your site’s visitors: I enjoyed Solitaire tremendously. Its part of trauma didn’t feel gratuitous or exploitative. You handled it well, leaving my imagination to do its job. 🙂
I look forward to your next novel.
Ide Cyan
I’m sorry this has taken so long, but getting your question right on top of Albert’s really put my brain in a twist. It would be easy to say, well, no book is perfect or yes, a world-building error or some equally shuffling first-novelist patter. And I tried
I think of the elevator incident as the white squall that appears from a clear sky and sinks Jackal’s life: a stew of small choices and random factors that bring a great storm into being, like the proverbial flap of the butterfly’s wing a half a world away. Steel Breeze is one of those factors. One can infer from casual references throughout the last section of the book that they are indeed still active, still fighting the bad fight, but they certainly aren’t high on Jackal’s radar screen. Although this has never bothered me, it’s clearly bothering some readers. Fair enough, but I would much rather be criticized for an active choice than for an error of ignorance or a failure of imagination, so let me be clear: it was a conscious decision to have Jackal’s interaction with Steel Breeze be almost literally a hit and run, and for Breeze to become no more important in Jackal’s re-created world than her parents or her loss of Hope, or any of the thousand other hits she took after her world fell away (which is to say, important but not differentiated. It’s all one big scar.)
So why don’t readers get this? Why does this need to be addressed in ways that other things don’t (meaning, for example, how come no one’s grumpy that she doesn’t ever think once about trying to reach out to her father? Or that we don’t find out until page 211 that there were 98 children on those elevators? Or maybe everyone is grumpy about it and no one’s told me yet.). Whenever I tried to think about how to a better job with this, I kept getting caught on why do I have to do it at all?
That reaction interested me intensely. It’s what made me rewrite this answer about a million times, trying to get to the core of it. I don’t mind being involved in a learning process –” I love to learn. I am willing to describe my own mistakes when I recognize them. But I wasn’t able to do that satisfactorily in this case. So I was doing laundry yesterday, still trying to parse my way through it, and my inner voice remarked to me, Well, if they didn’t like this accident, they’re really gonna hate the next book!
An epiphany, with wet bath towels. I finally understand that Solitaire is more about the white squall or the butterfly’s wing than I ever consciously realized. Everyone at Ko, including Jackal, tries so hard to keep it all under control, and look what happens –” the bottom falls out anyway. This may seem incredibly obvious to everyone else, but it never occurred to me that I was making my metaphors that literal. When I was writing it, it seemed important that Jackal’s tragedy happen when a piece of random violence collides with one of her own great fears, so that she could more easily make a fatal mistake; and I gave her the fear of falling from a great height because it’s one of mine. It seemed that simple at the time.
I love the writing brain: it does like to play.
So now I know that the elevator incident is not a simply plot device to get Jackal out of one life into another. It’s also a manifestation of accident, and accident wants my writing attention right now. The next book also involves the accidental, whose consequences propel people in unexpected directions and present them with unimagined choices. Which is, of course, where the real story is for me: not about the horrors or delights of randomness in the world, but in the ways we choose to respond when the chaos wagon rolls down our street. And so I will be thinking, as I approach the new book, of how the characters react not just to the specific accident, but to the existence of the accidental. And then I will have to find ways to integrate that into the story in better ways than I was able to in Solitaire.
I will have to pay particular attention to the ending of the new book. I am certainly not interested in the ‘complete package’ resolution. I have to admit I’ve been puzzled that many (most?) readers find Solitaire so neatly wrapped up. I think the world is rarely tidy, and I tried to shape the ending of Solitaire so that it would feel like the moment between exhaling and inhaling again, a literal breathing space while everyone gathers their energy for the next arc of the story, the next round of life. I wanted to end it in a space where hope could exist. To me that’s not an end, but a beginning. Clearly I haven’t done that in the way I envisioned. So another new question for me as a writer is, how to resolve the experience of the next book, create a resonant and compelling ending, without tidying away all that messiness that accident and choice create in our lives?
Which brings me to my current answer to your question, that I will have to be satisfied with for now: Steel Breeze went to the place where other accidents go, spinning off around a corner like a car hubcap come loose and never seen again. I didn’t forget about them: I sent them away unresolved because life is full of things that we never get to grips with. It’ll happen again: because of this conversation, I have discovered another layer that needs to be in the new book. Hopefully, it will be more skillfully done.
I’m extremely grateful for the chance to think about all this.
I’m grinning because all three posts on the Pint today are so related to one another. How does this tie in with the one about translation? Well, I think readers acceptance of plot devices varies culturally. In my fiction workshops, people keep bringing up the need for the characters to be the agents of their own doom or salvation. Where I come from, accidents are a big part of the everyday. Life sucks. That’s how Magic Realism was born because who wants to really stay in a country that live in perpetual and unofficial civil war?
Julio Cortázar’s stories are all about accidents and exceptions to the rule (Rule: if you can put on a sweater, you can take it off. Cortázar: the sweater becomes your skin. Rule: if you get into a fight and your hands swell, they’ll eventually heal and go back to their normal size. Cortázar: your hands keep on swelling.). In Baricco, characters connect for no justified reason, they don’t even have an age or interest in common. They fall apart just as easily as they fall into random traps within the story.
I’m still struggling with making my fiction more attuned with US and Canadian audiences who do believe that justice and order play a big role in an individual’s struggles and their outcome.
There’s also the question of medium. Some plot devices will work in one but not in the other. If you went from writing short stories, where the reader is entrusted with the task of filling in a lot of the information, it’s understandable that you placed a similar degree of trust in the audience of your novel.
I remember a documentary I watched where Jean-Claude Carrière, one of France’s foremost screenwriters talked about the process of adapting Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being. He said that he could make the war erupt right after Tereza leaves Tomáš only because film is immediate. You don’t have time in the middle of a movie to leave the theater, walk around and think about how artificial and convenient it seems that war would show up right then and there. It doesn’t happen like that in Kundera’s novel, there is a distance between one event and the other, because we do put books down to eat or sleep or go to work and then come back to them with our digested notions of where we were in the story and where the author is taking us next.
This is all interesting, thanks very much.
Wow, the notion of agency — it’s true, that is so ingrained into US culture that I hadn’t even really considered it before. I do think protagonists need agency — I don’t want to read about victims being victims with no change or resolution — but I also see now why some readers of Solitaire criticized Jackal as “passive.” Because, in fact, she’s not in control of much of what happens to her. But I always thought of her as active, very active, because she always chose how to respond, and that response was almost always to struggle, to put the pieces back together as best she could, to move on, to grow…
But that’s not very American of me, I guess (grin). I wonder where I got it from?
I don’t know if I agree with you about plot devices dissonance between short fiction and longer works. Between different media, sure (although the devices of film and prose fiction have really been cross-pollinating, I think, and MTV certainly has a lot to answer for…).
I think that people don’t necessarily expect to have everything explained in a novel, do you? I think it has more to do with what they expect to have explained and what they are willing to let go. Time jumps, no problem. Big Secrets that affect the characters all the way through, but are only revealed at the end — no problem.
But you’re right that readers in the mainstream of this culture are suspicious of anything that smacks of coincidence or accident. Huh. That’s a fundamental manifestation of privilege if I ever saw one — the idea that things only happen because we control or choose them (or because we make bad choices, or take our eyes off the ball for a moment). But on some level, it’s all about how we shape the world, and never about how it can just reach out sometimes and shape us.
More on the different cultural takes on accidents in plot. I attended and taught at a film school that used to agree with Alfred Hitchcock in that the movie should be finished at the desk and then it was simply a matter of showing up on the set to say where to put the camera. And with Peter Greenaway, who says things like, “I hate actors. […] They are the loose canon. They’re the one part of the process you can never completely control and I think all of you have read the criticism that [I am] anal retentive so I need to control absolutely everything and the actors are always a pain because they always escape my control.” There you have them, major control freaks, an American and a British guy. Then there’s Lars Von Trier, who is Danish and gets totally frustrated if the actors show up knowing their lines and perform according to the scrip. He’s looking for the accident, the uncontrollable element that breaks the characters to the point it also forces the actors on their knees.
Cross-pollination, love it. After most of the faculty at the film school for some reason began dating actors, our ideas about how to utilize people as puppets changed into efforts to create collaboratively and include actors in the process. Yes, I also think we are constantly assimilating plot devices from different media. This gives me hope. It forces people to re-think and re-tell our stories in ways that surprise us.
Do I expect to have everything explained in a novel? Oh, no, please don’t! I got the bit about Steel Breeze being a mischief agent who decided to capitalize on a chance encounter. But I’m not the best reader to ask. To me, even David Lynch movies make perfect sense. I’m very curious to see how audiences in other languages/cultures will read Solitaire.
Ah, David Lynch, there’s someone in the US who cherishes accidents. There is hope. 🙂
Oh dear, the actor in me is blinking hard and muttering I am not a puppet! in aggrieved tones. I can’t imagine working with a director who treated me like a… hmm, like an ingredient in a recipe or something. Theatre is collaborative, like movies, like music… and so is writing. It requires the active participation of readers, the opening of one’s mind to something new, the willingness to give it up to the text and let the mirror neurons take you there…