Plotting

Pleased to report that I seem to have got my reading back on track. Now happily being depressed by Henning Mankell's melancholic Wallander in The Fifth Woman and shivering away in windswept Skane. Excellent opening with the murder of a guy who was a bit of a poet with an obsessional interest in birds. There are those, of course, who'd say he got what he deserved for that alone.

Also back on course with Merwin's narrative poem The Folding Cliffs, this being my third attempt to make headway on what is obviously an impressive, but rather forbidding piece. Well, forbidding for me at least. Mind you I finally cracked Browning's The Ring and the Book after several failed attempts. Oh, and I'm including Kate Bernheimer's collection My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me on the list of current reading which cannot be abandoned. Not that I've ever really abandoned it. It's just that almost every story has the intensity of opening a new world to the reader and I can't take in too much at once. Also these are not stories that necessarily grip of themselves - they're all a bit too post-modern for that.

This is quite unlike A Place of Execution - duly finished early on Sunday morning - which I'd highly recommend to anyone who wants to read a powerful story beautifully told. I thought I might have figured out what the plot twist was going to be but I was, as usual, wide of the mark. The twist was excellent, being integral to the nature of the story told and, in that sense, a natural one. But, having said that, I'm not sure it was one hundred percent convincing. (There's a spoiler coming up, so don't read on if you intend to read the book.)

The problem is that the essential premise of the novel is that the little community that the 'victim' comes from conspires to ensure the execution of her 'murderer', hiding the fact that she is not dead at all. He has been systematically abusing the children of the community and this is their way of dealing with him. Since the 'murderer' is the sort of squire of the village, his feudal grip over them is such that they don't feel they will be believed by those in authority if he is reported. All well and good, except for the fact that the key evidence they have against him comes in the form of photographs of the abuse and it is abundantly clear that the police are only too ready to take whatever action against him that they can as a result of the few photographs to which they are initially exposed. So why not simply spill the beans on the nasty sod?

The writer makes it work as long as you are prepared to suspend your disbelief, which is what all fiction is about, of course. But it reminds me of just how impossible I find it to plot almost anything. I'm always looking for a kind of impossible perfection in these matters.