Hero or villain? It's all relative

How do you turn bad guys into good guys in fiction? By creating even worse guys.

Donald E. Westlake used this device time after time in his books, especially when writing Parker novels under the name of Richard Stark. Butcher's Moon (1974) is a classic Parker novel, longer than most and with a higher body count. The 2011 reprint has a foreword by Lawrence Block, another novelist known for converting bad guys (a burglar and a hit man) into good guys, comparatively speaking.

Parker, a professional thief with barely a soft spot in his character, decides to return to the midwestern city of Tyler to find $73,000 he left hidden there after a heist went bad years before. (Why he left the money behind or why he waited so long to try to retrieve it is never explained.)  He enlists the aid of another professional, Alan Grofield (a recurring character), in case finding the money isn't as easy as he hopes. It isn't.

Not only isn't the cash where he left it, but he suspects it was found by someone in the organized crime syndicate that runs Tyler. Adding another complication, the Tyler gang is in the midst of a power struggle, a younger man trying to gain control from an older man. Parker and Grofield quickly bring things to a boil. When Grofield is seriously wounded, Parker recruits former associates from around the country to help him get his money and save Grofield, proving he does have a soft spot after all.

The action, like the twists and turns in the plot, is nonstop. Parker may really be a bad guy, but this is a good book.

Piling on metaphors

Steven Pinker

We don't just mix metaphors; we pile them on top of each other. There, that is an example.

Steven Pinker argues in The Stuff of Thought that we cannot think, let alone speak or write, without metaphors. They help us give shape to our thoughts, then help others understand what we are thinking. Pinker compiles many of the common phrases used by those in romantic relationships, all suggesting that love is a journey. Among them:

Our relationship has hit a dead-end street.

We're at a crossroads.

We may have to go our separate ways.

This relationship isn't going anywhere.

We're spinning our wheels.

Our marriage is on the rocks.

I'm thinking of bailing out.

He compiles a similar list suggesting that argument is war:

Your claims are indefensible.

His criticisms were right on target.

He attacked every weak point in my argument.

She shot down all my arguments.

We use, hear and read metaphors so frequently that we are usually unaware that they even are metaphors.

I thought of Pinker when I read the following sentence in Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens. Notice the metaphors, one after another:

The course which these adventures shape out for themselves and imperatively call upon the historian to observe, now demands that they should revert to the point they attained previous to the commencement of the last chapter, when Ralph Nickleby and Arthur Gride were left together in the house where death had so suddenly reared his dark and heavy banner.

Dickens tells us, metaphorically, that adventures both shape out a course and call upon historians. Then they demand that we return to a previous chapter where two characters were left together and where death had reared "his dark and heavy banner." That's a lot of metaphor packed into one long sentence.

Try explaining anything — how you spent your day, what's wrong with your car, what you think about President Trump — without using at least one metaphor. You may be able to do it, but it would be a challenge. It also may not be as clearly expressed or nearly as interesting as it would have been with a few metaphors piled into it.

Sentences worth returning to

Charles Dickens

Some sentences we must read a second time, or even a third time, because we didn't understand them the first time. This may be our fault, perhaps because our mind wasn't focused on the sentence, or it may be because of bad writing. More often it is because of long, complex sentences, difficult words or unfamiliar ideas.

And then there are those sentences we reread simply because they are so good, so beautifully written, so wonderfully expressed.

One encounters both kinds of sentences in Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens, the novel I commented upon a few days ago. My edition of the novel has 777 pages, but I must have read the equivalent of well over 800 pages simply because I read so many sentences more than once. Dickens didn't write many simple sentences. He liked to throw everything into them, so some need to be reread to fully grasp them. Others beckon us to read them again because they are so good. Here are a few I found that fall into that latter category.

"She was neatly, but quietly attired; so much so, indeed, that it seemed as though her dress, if it had been worn by one who imparted fewer graces of her own to it, might have looked poor and shabby."

This line reminded me somehow of the atrocious hairdo Bo Derek had in the movie 10. At least it would have looked atrocious on almost any other woman. But this was Bo Derek.

"It may be further remarked that Miss Knag still aimed at youth, though she had shot beyond it years ago ..."

This sentence goes on and on, but this is the part worth rereading.

"It is a pleasant thing to reflect upon, and furnishes a complete answer to those who contend for the gradual degeneration of the human species, that every baby born into the world is a finer one that the last."

At least every new mother believes so.

"Pride is one of the seven deadly sins; but it cannot be the pride of a mother in her children, for that is a compound of two cardinal virtues -- faith and hope."

I mentioned this to a group around a dinner table recently, and a woman commented that this was no less true of a grandmother's pride.

Before Scrooge

Before there was Scrooge, there was Ralph Nickleby. In my comments last month about The Man Who Invented Christmas, I noted that the film shows Charles Dickens getting the idea for Scrooge from an encounter with a miserly man before he started writing A Christmas Carol. Yet years before this Dickens had already created a character in Nicholas Nickleby who could have given Scrooge lessons in miserliness.

The novel, published in 1838, opens with the death of Ralph's brother, making him responsible for his brother's widow and her two grown but not yet independent children, Nicholas and Kate. First he moves them into much more humble accommodations, then finds Nicholas a position as a tutor in a boy's school far from London. With the brother out of the way, he uses pretty Kate to entice two playboy noblemen into some business dealings, unmindful of what might happen to Kate afterward.

Nicholas soon discovers the headmaster at the school to be abusive toward the boys in his care. He flees with one of those boys and finds himself for a time with a wandering theater group before learning of his sister's situation. When he returns to rescue her, a long struggle between uncle and nephew begins, with many complications and adventures.

Nicholas Nickleby was not a successful novel in its day, at least in comparison with Oliver Twist, but it is hard to understand why. While it may not be one of the best novels Dickens wrote, it provides nonstop entertainment (except for one chapter that is obviously just padding and could be skipped without missing any of the story). It would make an excellent entry-level Dickens novel for those intimidated by that author's reputation for meandering plots and multitudes of characters. Here the plot rarely strays far from the Nicklebys, and the characters, while plentiful, are easy to keep straight. If the reader becomes confused about who a character is, Dickens soon enough makes it clear.

This was one of the early Dickens novels. He was still learning the game he would soon master, but we can already find evidence of some of the writer's greatest personal interests and concerns, among them the plight of boys in schools operated for profit, young women coerced into careers in the sex trade and the theater, his greatest love, perhaps even including writing.

There's humor here (Mrs. Nickleby ranks among his greatest comic characters), an abundance of romance (the clergy will have all the weddings they can handle by the end of the novel) and all the plot twists a reader could want. It's a massive novel, of course, but this is Dickens in an age when writers were paid for bulk. When a novel is this much fun, however, size is more blessing than curse.

Movie moments

When we remember movies seen in years past, what we mostly remember are certain moments from those movies. These moments stick with us even after most other details have faded away. That is the point film critic David Thomson makes in Moments That Made the Movies (2013), and I think he has it right.

We don't, of course, necessarily remember the same moments, or even moments from the same movies. And so Thomson's choices are very personal: his movies, his moments. We can choose are own.

His book is generously illustrated with stills from the chosen films, which go from a movement study of two nude women by Eadward Muybridge in 1887 to Burn After Reading, a Coen brothers film from 2008. Actually his last "film" is a still photograph taken during a violent Stanley Cup victory celebration in Vancouver in 2011, chosen because to him it seems like a moment from a movie.

Readers are likely to most appreciate Thomson's commentary on familiar scenes from familiar movies, whether or not they represent the moments we most remember. These might include Michael Corleone's (Al Pacino) restaurant shooting of a police captain and the man responsible for the attempt on his father's life in The Godfather; the meal Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) shares with Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) in Psycho before she is slaughtered in the shower (the moment other viewers might remember best); David Huxley (Cary Grant) ripping Susan Vance's (Katherine Hepburn) dress in Bringing Up Baby; and the fake sexual bliss demonstrated by Sally (Meg Ryan) to Harry (Billy Crystal) in When Harry Met Sally.

 Most of Thomson's choices are more obscure. He has a fondness for Japanese films of the 1950s and French films of the 1960s that few readers of his book are likely to have seen (although sometimes his commentary may make us want to see these films). Even his English-language choices tend to be rarely viewed films. Regarding Mickey One, a Warren Beatty movie from 1965, he says, "This a real film -- you can look it up." One film is unavailable on DVD in the United States. The moment he chooses from Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid does not appear on most DVDs.

So there's a lot of showing off in Moments That Made the Movies. "I've seen this, and you haven't," he seems to suggest. Still, we are free to write our own accounts of the movie moments we most remember. Chances are they would not be as readable as his.

George Orwell's Burma

George Orwell's best-known novels, Animal Farm and 1984, are political at their core, and the same is true of Burmese Days, even though this 1934 novel is a tragic love story on its face.

Based on his experiences as a member of the Imperial Police in Burma in the 1920s, the novel shows the British Empire cracking under the pressure of native resentment of the racism practiced quite openly by the small, tightly-bound British community that regards the Burmese people as dirty inferiors fit only for service to them.

One exception to this attitude is John Flory, a lonely man in his mid-30s whose best friend, and perhaps only friend, is a capable Burmese doctor. In their conversations, Flory criticizes his countrymen, while Dr. Veraswami defends them. Flory has a disfiguring birthmark on one side of his face, but even without that he would have difficulty finding a wife way out in Burma, for there are no single British women. He settles for a troublesome Burmese mistress.

Then Elizabeth comes to live with her aunt and uncle after being orphaned. Her uncle thinks only of raping her, while her aunt thinks only of getting her married and out of the way. Flory may be her only option. Flory loves her from the start, never mind that her attitudes are totally opposite of his own. She is as racist as anyone in Burma and hates mixing with the natives. She also frowns on art and culture, while Flory longs for intelligent conversation. Yet twice Flory comes within an eyelash of winning a marriage commitment from Elizabeth, only to be thwarted at the last minute.

So controversial was Orwell's novel in England that it was published first in the United States. Even now it packs a wallop in its portrayal of blatant racism. But if the breaking of the British Empire moves us, it is nothing compared to the breaking of Flory's heart.

Language was play

Harper Lee

Harper Lee's idea of a good time, as told by Marja Mills in The Mockingbird Next Door, was to read aloud the social news in her hometown newspaper, laughing heartily all the while. It wasn't that she was making light of the people of Monroeville, Ala., whom she loved, or their calls on friends and neighbors, which she did herself, but rather the fact that somewhere in the 21st century this was still considered news and, more importantly, the language used to describe these events. More than anything, the author of To Kill a Mockingbird loved to play with language.

Lee, for example, delighted in talking about Alabama place names, some of them towns too small to appear on any map. The state has places called Burnt Corn, Smut Eye, Reform, Bug Tussle, Needmore, Murder Creek, Massacre Island and Penitentiary Mountain, among many others.

Even more pleasurable to her were certain expressions heard in rural Alabama and perhaps nowhere else. Here are some of them:

"I had a brother under me." This refers to a younger brother.

"Pounding the preacher." When one lacks money to put in the offering plate on Sunday, a pound of chicken or vegetables from the garden for the preacher will do.

"Journey proud." When you are anxious the night before starting on a trip, you are journey proud.

"Mashing buttons." Pushing buttons.

"Shopping buggy." Grocery cart.

She also enjoyed church signs. Her favorite was "HOW DO YOU PLAN TO SPEND ETERNITY? SMOKING OR NON?

Harper Lee spent about half of each year in Monroeville and the other half in New York City. She was comfortable in both environments, yet perhaps at the same time out of place in both. She was too intelligent, too sophisticated for Alabama, yet at the same time too much a simple country girl for New York. Thus it was necessary for her to go back and forth, feeding on the culture of both places. And wherever she might be, she played with language.