Books
3 December 2007
Because Sepulchre is out now, I am beginning to get an idea of what readers think of it - especially in comparison to my other works.
That said, comparisons are not always useful. There are so many books ... And, perhaps, there are only so many ideas.
A friend of ours wrote a clever film script a few years ago about a man who goes back to try and make amends for all the terrible - or mundanely unkind - things he did as a child and young man. Our friend had - rightly - high hopes, then there was a TV show in the US called My Name is Earl which riffed the same concept ... and that was that.
Or is it? How similar do two ideas have to be before the first precludes the second?
Having moved house in the summer, we boxed up all our books and only have about a third of them out on our shelves so far. There were a lot of boxes. I say we have 10,000 books. Greg maintains it is about 8,000. Whichever figure is closest, that's a lot of ideas expressed in words following one another in little camel trains across the page.
Or is it, once more? Perhaps, as has been said, there are only a few stories, maybe just seven: The Quest, Voyage and Return, Rags to Riches, Overcoming the Monster, Rebirth, Comedy and Tragedy.
And, as everyone knows, Tragedy is just a Comedy in which the misunderstandings turn out badly instead of well ...
And Voyage and Return is just a story in which the hero of the Quest comes home transformed by their adventure ...
And seldom does the hero Overcome the Monster without a journey of some kind, perhaps with a special weapon to arm themselves against the beast ...
Sepulchre is, I suppose, a Tragedy, because - in its fictional world - misunderstandings lead to good people suffering unnecessarily. As Auden put it: 'What needn't have happened, did.'
But it is also a story of a Monster overcome.
There is triumph and disaster in the Sepulchre.
