Source of book: Audiobook from the library
Back in February, my wife and I took a long weekend out at the coast together, and, as we often do, we listened to an audiobook. Okay, most of an audiobook - we didn’t quite finish this one. I went ahead and got the physical book to read the ending.
I almost wish I hadn’t bothered. I LOATHE the ending. And indeed, this book was a disappointment.
Not all books are winners, of course. We have had a few clunkers. The Maid, for example, is a book that I believe only made it through the editing process because the author edited it herself. I’m still salty about the plot holes, pointless twists, inconsistent characterization, and the mutilation of legal procedure.
This book suffers from many of the same flaws. I find that these flaws are all too common these days in genre fiction, particularly fiction marketed toward women.
[Fair disclosure: I whine a lot more about chick lit on this blog than bro lit, mostly because I avoid bro lit like the plague, whereas chick lit sometimes slips through my filters. I assume that the only reason that bro lit wouldn’t have the same flaws is because it doesn’t bother with characterization.]
Perhaps I can give a general overview of the flaws that I see in books like this one:
1. Plot twists for the sake of plot twists.
2. Characters who, at the end of books, behave completely inconsistently with their natures as established earlier in the book.
3. Romance and sex that doesn’t do anything related to plot or characterization elsewhere.
4. Painfully obvious errors about important facts: legal procedure, science, history, etc.
5. Drama and trauma for their own sake.
I will probably think of some more, but those are the five that come to mind off the top of my head.
Let me look at each in a little more depth.
First, plot twists can be great, when done well. A true surprise, particularly in a genre that demands them, can be a thrill for the reader.
However, twist after twist after twist just results in whiplash. It makes the plot more confusing, of course; but even more than that, it serves to cover for bad planning and writing. Compare, say, Agatha Christie, where one or two big twists are carefully set up, and presented in a way that the reader can look back and see the path in retrospect.
For lesser writers, it feels like they mistake a bunch of twists and drama (see below) for an actual message - or even a coherent story. Just make a bunch of shit happen at the end, leaving the reader feeling…something.
I see this very much like the big fight scene or explosion in an action movie (and presumably bro lit): It creates an effect, but doesn’t tell you much of anything.
Far better is to carefully plan and plot your story - remember, this is a story and it needs a narrative arc in most cases to fulfill its purpose - and not rely on cheap tricks at the end.
Don't just get your twists from the bargain bin at Hackney's Novel Shop.
Second, I read fiction mostly for the characters, and how they grow and change, or at least how they react to the worlds they inhabit. If I preferred plot, I could just read genre fiction all the time.
So it matters a LOT to me that characters be interesting, dynamic, and most of all consistent.
The Maid is a perfectly awful example of how not to write a protagonist - she completely changes personality in the last part of the book.
Don’t do that!
Your characters should come first, not your plot devices. I can’t remember who all has said it (I think a few good writers have used the line) but an author follows their characters around to see what they will do.
This doesn’t mean characters can’t grow and change, but they shouldn’t change completely because the plot needs them to.
Third, I have no objection to sex in books or movies. I can think of a number of really excellent sex scenes that I have read - almost entirely written by women, and many by queer authors, which I do not think is a coincidence. But in each case, the sex serves the plot and the characterization. It isn’t just fan service.
I want to learn something about the characters from a sex scene. And I want any romance element to feel organic to the plot and characters, not something added on because it is what the writer thinks the reader demands.
Also, I am pretty sure that most people - including the more interesting characters - don’t just get horny for an attractive person and go straight to bonking in short order. See above: character consistency.
Number four: oh GOD! Can people be bothered to fact check anymore? I’ll mention a few things specific to this book later, but this is a real pet peeve of mine.
I’m sure it doesn’t help that I am (as this blog attests) broadly read and educated, and know at least something about a great many things. (See: Range by David Epstein) So, I am probably more likely than the average reader to notice elementary errors.
But still: check your facts! Particularly if they are important to your plot. (Again, The Maid is an abomination.)
If you have a courtroom scene, have a lawyer check your facts. If you have a medical issue, check with someone who would know if you get it right.
And, in the case of this book, for fuck’s sake, don’t just watch The Day After Tomorrow and assume that you know all about climate change.
Finally, sure, there is plenty of room for drama and trauma in a book. Just to give an effective example of each, there is so much drama in I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter. But, it is YA, and the drama of that age is real. The drama serves the needs of the plot, even if I found it a bit exhausting.
For trauma, just recently I read We Do Not Part, which is full of serious personal and national trauma for sure. But the trauma is what drives everything, so it serves the needs of the story.
If you are just putting trauma in for effect, if it doesn’t really serve the story, then it won’t work. Don’t traumatize your characters just to get an emotional response. It should mean something.
So, with that long preface, here is what the book is about:
Shearwater Island (based on Macquarie Island, south of New Zealand) is a remote island with a research base - and a seed vault.
The book opens with a mysterious woman washing up on shore, barely alive. She is discovered by the family of four who lives in the lighthouse - dad and three kids. Everyone else connected with the base has disappeared.
It turns out that the woman, Rowen, has come looking for her husband, who worked at the base and stopped communicating months ago.
So, what happened to him? And everyone else? I guess that is the mystery, which is eventually unveiled.
And also, global warming, people isolated from each other, mental illness, sexual assault, and animals. None of which ever feel like fully developed ideas.
The book is written from multiple points of view - short sections narrated by each of the five characters. This is hardly the only book written like this, and it can in fact work.
But this actually is problematic in this particular kind of book. Not because there is a mystery, but because each of the characters knows the answer to some of the questions, but they don’t let the reader know what they know.
Contrast this to the classic, The Moonstone, which likewise shifts points of view. But the reason it works is that we do get to go inside the heads of the characters, and know what they know. It is because the perspectives we get are from people who also do not know most of the facts that we get to see the mystery unfold just as they do.
In this book, instead, every character is hiding their knowledge not just from each other, but from the reader. This to me was super frustrating. And unfair. If you want to write from the first person perspective, fine. But don’t have your narrator withhold key facts.
And if you want multiple perspectives, fine. But don’t force the characters to not think about important things that they know that are relevant to the story they are telling.
Now, about the five problematic writing issues, as applied to this book. I probably will give spoilers, and I don’t care, because I disliked the ending enough that I want to ruin it.
First, stupid plot twists.
This book would have been far better with one-quarter of the plot twists. They weren’t necessary, and seemed thrown in at the end to give a nail-biting episode of terror at the end. Oh, and also in the middle - there are several scenes seemingly calculated to be a set piece in the inevitable movie.
And, like most situations in books or movies like this, they only happen because people do stupid things. Which, if it is a book about stupid people, might make sense. But when you have people who are supposedly highly competent making elementary errors and taking pointless risks (problem #2), it is clear that you are manufacturing plot twists for their own sake.
I will also add that some of the twists are also there for the trauma and drama (problem #5), and result from bad errors about science (problem #4), and sometimes even for the sake of romantic frisson (problem #3).
In this book, that means that you have people who somehow got selected for a remote research base - and are thus presumably sensible and competent - risking their own survival not once, but over and over and over. Inconsistent characterization.
Also on that point is the way that as each revelation takes place, the characters seem to change their opinion of other characters. And not in the “now that I know that about you” way, but things like deciding one’s husband is a narcissist after spending the entire book talking about him in completely different terms.
Related to that is the fact that the central romance seems implausible for either of the parties, given what we are shown of their personalities and situations. Maybe one could see Dominic wanting to bonk, but not Rowen.
And then there is the bad science. And it starts off right away. In the cold waters we are talking about, there is zero chance someone would make it all the way to shore without freezing. Particularly since she allegedly came off a boat that sank soon afterward that nobody seems to have seen, despite seeing Rowen in the water.
And it gets worse from there. Including the obligatory “people are going to drown” scene that I still can’t figure out the physics of.
I mean, last I checked, water seeks its own level. So if there is a vent tube on the top of a hill, and the water is rising to the top of it (because global warming or something), that water should be rising outside of the tube too, right? If sea levels fill the vent, then the end of the vent where the would-be rescuers are standing should be flooded too, right? And where would they go after they get the people out of the tube?
The whole scene makes zero sense. Sorry.
And that’s even before you get to the problem of sea level rise. Yes, global warming will - and indeed already is - making sea levels rise. But not like several feet per hour! Or, as in the book, seemingly a hundred feet in a few short minutes. That’s not how it works. (I don’t care if you saw it in the movies.)
Those are the big ones, but there are others. The seemingly sudden disintegration of infrastructure. The idea that an entire research station could go off line completely and suddenly, and nobody seems to notice or send a search party. The seeming lack of any organization or protocols for a research base.
Or, even, children living there in the first place. I mean, there are places that do this, but they aren’t just one freaking family - there are schools and provisions for socialization, careful monitoring, and a whole bunch of other stuff. It would have been so easy to look this up. And, of course, with kids involved, you BET if a station went dark, there would have been a search sent out yesterday.
We haven’t even gotten to the ending, which I already mentioned I hated.
Shall we list a few reasons?
Scientifically ludicrous. Out of character with the characters. Plot twists just to create drama and tension at the end. The old “woman sacrifices her life to save a child” trope that my wife loathed. Re-traumatized everyone who survived.
And none of this was necessary at all. Any number of endings would have been better - and would also have potentially given some form of character development, catharsis, or something. Instead we got the Deux ex Tramica. (To butcher some innocent Latin…)
I am undoubtedly missing other things that annoyed me about the book. But I can’t bring myself to care enough to try to think of them.
Perhaps what annoyed me the most, though, was just the lost opportunity. The setting was great, and some of the descriptions were evocative. One could have set a book here that took advantage of that.
One could also have explored the themes of isolation through actual nuanced writing, rather than plot twists and drama.
One could have done some research and spent more time thinking through a less sensationalist plot, and written a novel that would have had something to actually say.
This is not that book, however, and that is disappointing.
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