Alma Alexander

I recently did an interview for Book Talk (you can read the whole thing at http://booksbypickles.blogspot.com/2009/07/interview-with-alma-alexander.html – it was a good interview!) and their last question was whether I had any questions to ask of the readers. So I did – I asked,

“What makes you, the reader, call something a “good” or a “bad” book? What makes you call a book unforgettable? What makes you throw it across the room?”

Last month I wrote about what the commenters to that blog post did NOT want to see in the books they were reading. But there were some things that they DID want to see, and last week’s article got away from me, so I kept the good news for later.

So, what was the good stuff?

You can read the full comments to the original interview, from which all of this sprang, in last months’s post – but, in summary, the “good stuff” included: characters who are good enough to feel as though they might live if allowed out of their current novel milieu; well-thought-out settings and backgrounds; drama, intense emotion; a storyline that is meaningful, insightful, or that has something to teach; the kind of ending that makes you want to pick up the book and start reading it again from the beginning.

Eh. You guys don’t ask for much, do you?…We writers just have to write about real people in real places who feel real emotions and learn (and therefore teach) real life lessons, and then wrap it all up all pretty with a bow on top before we hand it over.

Uh.

Okay.

One of the books mentioned in the original comments was Guy Gavriel Kay’s “Tigana”, a book which I myself have called possibly the best book I’ve ever read, EVER, in or out of genre – why not use that to illustrate some of the points raised above. And yes, it will probably be a little spoilery – inevitably – so apologies, and if you want to scurry away and buy a copy and read it before you come back here, that’s just FINE, this post will wait, and that book will just get another fan…

Characters who are real enough to feel as though they could step out of the book and shake your hand…? This book has them, in spades. These are people who have lived their lives, every second of them, and who bear the scars of it, and the scars are there even when they try to hide them. Nobody here is Superman, with super powers world-without-end kind of caricature creature. Even the most powerful characters have their weaknesses, and those weaknesses are found and ruthlessly exploited – conversely, even the most harshly used and weakest characters have unexpected and soaring strengths which they can and do use to survive things which might otherwise have destroyed them. Even if nothing else at all worked in this book its characters are towering accomplishments – some of them, like Dianora, rise to true tragedy, the kind that squeezes your heart with sharp claws while you learn to get to know her, to understand the things that shaped her, and then broke her… and how, in spite of all of that, she somehow manages to remain whole and true to herself. Oh, that woman. She makes me weep and cheer at the same time. The writer who created her is a god.

The setting and milieu and background of “Tigana” are another extraodrinary accomplishment. There is nothing in this book that breaks the spell, nothing that makes you believe for an instant that this world has never existed, can never exist. It is all perfectly, sublimely, completely real. You have the strangest feeling that you could reach through the page and touch a brick wall, a trembling leaf, the quiet surface of the sea, a horse’s sweaty flank… and you could actually feel them there. They are that close. That real. That perfect. The history and the geography of these lands are ancient and deep, and bear its fractious present – the point in time at which we join the novel – with elegance and grace. This is not a world created lightly or shallowly. You enter here, and you will become a part of it all. There is nothing that is out of place; everything is thought out, set out, a puzzle piece in the correct setting and with perfect fit. If you’re a writer and you have trouble with worldbuilding, read this book – because this is how you do it. Precisely like this.

The story is so full of drama and of intense emotion, so packed with meaning and insight, so full of epiphany and of places where you (the reader) are taught things you never knew about yourself simply by empathising with the characters in the story, that it is entirely possible that you might find yourself overwhelmed by it at times. For myself, the thing that broke me was Alessan’s toast – “Tigana, may the memory of you be a blade in my heart.” I do not know how Guy Gavriel Kay knows what it means to lose your country and your soul – but I do, and this pride, this grief, this bottomless well of passion NOT TO FORGET WHERE YOU CAME FROM, where your bones were knit and the bones of your ancestors were buried, this is true. This is TRUE. If you read “Tigana” you will understand this pain. Of course, for different readers there might well be a different emotional trigger – but this was it for me, and this book and I are now bonded forever through this shared emotion. This… is pure magic.

For all the emotional storms, for all the wrench and drama and laughter and tragedy and triumph of this tour-de-force of a book, you bond to this story in ways you don’t even begin to understand. And this is a book of the kind that you turn the last page, scream and cry because it is over, and feel as though someone has just thrown you out of your own heart’s home – so you flip the book over, and you start again, because you don’t want to leave this world, you don’t want to leave these people, you don’t want to LEAVE.

Period.

There are few other writers, and precious few other books, which have hit all the high notes this well, and this consistently.

And yet… many readers simply expect this as a given, and still seem to think that achieving this – or at least some of this – is relatively easy.

As a reader myself, I am profoundly grateful when I come across books like this, because they become part of the building blocks of my life. As a writer… some day, when I grow up, I will write a novel like “Tigana”. Until then, I have to hope that I have climbed enough of the peaks for my readers to agree to ignore the deep shadows of the valleys where the monsters of my faults lurk in the twilight.

I’ll keep a list of these things – of the things that people have said that they are looking for in a book they would describe as “unforgettable” – next to my computer, so that I can see them while I write, so that I can be reminded of what I am reaching for. There are always new peaks to climb, and I hope I’ll have readers who will follow me up mine.

What about you? If you were to describe a book as “unforgettable”, what factors would be part of that accolade? If you could pick ONE book to exemplify your choice, what would it be?