posted
I'm also breaking out from the other thread because I don't want to discuss the politics of it at all.
It's Card's book, and one I want to read. I want to see how he writes the characters, the plot is an exciting and all-too-believable one, and I can't wait to see how he'll surprise me (as I know he will).
But the style, especially in the fourth and fifth chapters, bothers me and I'm afraid the book will suffer because of it.
One of OSC's greatest strengths, to me, is his skill with dialogue. He clearly loves language and enjoys revealing aspects of his characters through what they say and what they choose not to say. He also tends to write characters that are very intelligent, very perceptive, or both, and that's not very surprising at all.
The dialogue in these chapters, in stark contrast to what I've come to expect, is flat. Stilted. Too complete. Too thought out. I get very little sense of emotion or any kind of give and take. Granted, these men are trained to remain calm and measured in times of extreme stress, but as it is written I don't see even the hidden stress. When the plot is discovered, Malek is in charge immediately, but not angry. There is no indication that he's upset, that he's holding it in. They continue to speak in complete sentences, the same way they might discuss the plot of a movie they just saw. I had no feeling that they had both just realized they might be witnessing the assassination of the president.
They're calm during the firefight. They're calm when the missile is launched despite their efforts. The only indication of inner turmoil is this sole paragraph, after they see the damage at the White House:
"Not that Reuben didn't feel anything. He felt so much that he was almost gasping. But it wasn't grief. It was resolve. Gnawing at him. He would do something. There must be something he could do."
Nothing about Cole, who remains almost flippant. "Love those headlines." And a lot more discussion of how Malek was screwed, instead of how the head of the government was just wiped out. They're not just talking normally, they're chatting. There's no sense of urgency. I expect these men to be steely, but as this is a novel I also expect to understand them, understand why they're remaining calm, understand the effort this takes. I want to be in their heads, struggling to do my duty even though the worst thing in the world has just happened and a large part of my worldview has just reassembled. But I'm not, and so it must not be that bad, and so the impact of the assassination is lessened. Note that Chapter 4 doesn't end with the dramatic reveal that the president has been assassinated. It closes with the rather anti-climactic reveal that Malek is being played. Obviously that's what we're supposed to be really upset about.
The conversation with Phillips is equally bland, especially since it's mostly exposition and exposition we already know, at that. Complete sentences, no confused stuttering, and a lot of reiteration to a guy who should already know a lot of this stuff and who, moreover, should be devastated or in shock. All of this reads like first draft stuff, where the author has gotten in all the points he wanted covered but hasn't yet gone back to make it sound like people.
But the talk between Malek and Cole after the White House is, to me, the worst. This is not a conversation, it's two editorials talking to each other. Or two people in an informercial, talking about how great the product is. These should be two intelligent, perceptive men who share the same opinions and can probably finish each other's sentences, with maybe some inner thoughts to flesh out anything the reader might need explained. It shouldn't sound like two guests on a Sunday morning talk show fighting to get all of their bullet points out before the commercial.
Suddenly the author is talking directly to me with several mouths -- or so it seems -- and at that point I am no longer "in" the book.
Unless the targeted audience for this book consists solely of Special Ops forces, I don't think it works. I cannot empathize with these characters. There is nowhere for me to think, "This is what I would do if I were trained and heroic, this is how I would deal with the emotions and the terror and the dread. I might not talk about or show it, but that's because it's inside where it won't interfere with what must be done." The only interior monologue we get is Cole musing about oil dependency.
I have no experience being a 7-year-old military genius. I have never climbed into a fire to make a living plow. I've never awakened a sleeping princess or traveled through time to re-educate Columbus or held off a world war with some teenage friends. And yet in every one of those books OSC made me feel what they were feeling, made me understand the choices they made, made me yearn to be as strong or moral or unrelenting as those characters were, made me laugh out loud and cry real tears. I was there, in all those books. Part of me still is. That's his gift, and it's why I read his work.
I'm not in this one.
I realize this seems like I'm making a lot out of what is, admittedly, a personal opinion. And this may indeed be the style for political thrillers; I don't read them. But because of the way Empire is written I foresee a great deal of condemnation and vilification coming to an author I love. I foresee nothing but polarized reviews - love it or hate it, depending on what side of the line you're on. And I also fear that Mr. Card will dismiss all of the criticism of Empire as being solely from closed-minded liberals who cannot accept a moderate conservative hero.
It's not something I ever expected to say to an author I admire, whose complete works I own and reread regularly, whose columns have often made me seriously reconsider my own opinion, and nothing would please me more to be found totally wrong and off-base with this, but perhaps some of those readers may not accept a moderate conservative hero just because he wasn't written very accessibly. And that's a damn shame.
[ September 05, 2006, 07:54 PM: Message edited by: Chris Bridges ]
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posted
Good call, Chris -- I'd like to look at style, too, without getting lost in the political mess.
First -- Thanks, Mr. Card, for posting the work and welcoming comment!
I zipped through the five chapters a couple of days ago, and was both interested in the remaining story and puzzled/disturbed by some facet or t'other in the writing.
I just re-read chapters 1 and 2. Here are my reactions, as a reader , to the story as it is at this point. Beyond the reaction of wanting the rest of the story, of course, which in the long run is the telling point, no?
There's something about chapter 1 that just doesn't work for me -- perhaps it's merely the placement in the story. Perhaps it's the continual emphasis on "the Americans" . . . I dunno. I'll continue to ponder.
I think part of it does harken back to a sense of "flatness" in the first chapter. And a truly almost overwhelming sense of being preached at about "valiant soldiers, sacrifice, the great americans, etc."
I really think I'd prefer chapter 2 as the opening -- perhaps interspersed with one or two memory flshbacks.
I can see Malek being human enough to tune out during some professorial-student interchange and muse on how he wound up sitting in Princeton in the first place . . . and comparing the horrors of actual war to the horrors of seminars filled with yes-men . . .
posted
Maybe it's a deliberate choice? I agree that the death of the President was highly understated. Perhaps OSC wants us to focus on the conspiracy?
It's actually possible that the President survives; what Malek thinks about his whereabouts is not necessarily the truth. Consider : Perhaps the people playing Malek wanted an unsuccessful attack on the President as an excuse to impose greater control, or to manipulate the President into doing something ill-considered. If so, the attack is immediately less important, but maybe we only realise this in Chapter 6, and the artificial cutoff at 5 makes it look weird.
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quote:Originally posted by Shan: There's something about chapter 1 that just doesn't work for me -- perhaps it's merely the placement in the story. Perhaps it's the continual emphasis on "the Americans" . . . I dunno. I'll continue to ponder.
I noticed it when Malek was mourning the dead villager. For whatever reason, when he tore his shirt open and started hitting himself on the chest, it threw me right out of the narrative. I just didn't believe it.
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I have no experience being a 7-year-old military genius. I have never climbed into a fire to make a living plow. I've never awakened a sleeping princess or traveled through time to re-educate Columbus or held off a world war with some teenage friends.
Some hatrackers who have not read all of those works might get a mite mad at you Mr. Bridges
I sorta see what you are saying. But I still enjoyed quite a bit of the dialouge thus far. Like when Mrs. Malek is speaking with Cole, and when Cole is on the phone with Reuben.
These people speak to each other in ways that I just would not come up with on my own, and I enjoy Mr. Cards ability to help me experience other people's conversations. Though many didnt like Magic Street, I like it alot for that reason.
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quote:Originally posted by Shan: There's something about chapter 1 that just doesn't work for me -- perhaps it's merely the placement in the story. Perhaps it's the continual emphasis on "the Americans" . . . I dunno. I'll continue to ponder.
I noticed it when Malek was mourning the dead villager. For whatever reason, when he tore his shirt open and started hitting himself on the chest, it threw me right out of the narrative. I just didn't believe it.
Yep. And that's why I'm thinking about placement. Later in the book as one of those explanatory flashbacks or something . . . I imagine the whole scene will surface again -- along with whatever else added to the military's decision to send Malek to Princeton, cause it surely wasn't based on that single act . . . IMO.
*shrugs*
*looking forward to reading the rest of the story*
*laughing at self for even trying to parse out a book in five chapters*
*goes back to cleaning the garage*
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posted
Thrillers have a different level of characterization than the kind of novel I usually write. The characterization is there, but the dialogue is usually doing a different job. This is definitely a departure from what I normally do, but when I write a screenplay, I don't put in novel dialogue; when I write a medieval fantasy, I don't use dialogue from Battle School; and when I write a thriller, I create Romantic rather than Novelistic characters - they are what they do. So dialogue serves MOSTLY (but not entirely) the purpose of conveying states of mind, information and its analysis, purposes, anticipated consequences, and so forth - but NOT the kind of soul-searching that you'll find in most of my other books (ad nauseum, as some have kindly pointed out elsewhere <grin>).
I'm not saying I've necessarily created a GOOD thriller - though I hope I have. I am only saying that this book is a different kind of book from any of my others, and just as Lost Boys and Magic Street are radically different from Call of Earth and Hart's Hope, Empire is differenter than them all <grin>.
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posted
Thanks for the explanation. I have realized that the dialogue was a little different, just didn't think it was done with a specific goal in mind. Live and learn...
As for the first chapter, I didn't have a problem understanding the soldier's feelings. Yes, it may be a little theatrical, but the scene served its purpose.
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posted
Fair enough, and thank you for taking my post in the spirit I tried to deliver. It wasn't easy to write and I was worried I'd bugged someone I respect.
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As I read the aftermath of the President's killing, my thoughts are "Orson Scott Card has communicated the steel within these men, the focus and lack of emotion that comes with training and experience in war." I found the very lack of emotional oh-my-god-the-president-is-dead moments gave me a feel for how exceptional soldiers would react to such an event.
And can I just say that I haven't bought a book in a few years but I am eagerly awaiting Empire. When was the last time a thriller killed off the President?
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Still, the 5th chapter dialog really threw me out of the story. I know plenty of military, as well as police and firemen. I am familiar with the theory and practice of dealing with people who have been through traumatic experiences. And I can't see anyone I know or can conceive of acting, thinking, and speaking in the way that Cole and Malek did in the end of chapter five.
They were not only witnesses (direct ones at that) of an unprecedented and incredibly traumatic experience, but also found themselves pretty much in the middle of it. Remember how you felt during 9/11. Now imagine that not only where you actually there, watching, when the planes struck the building, but alo that you were pretty sure that both the peopel involved and the people investigating it were going to be gunning for you.
There are multiple possible reactions that people have to situations like this. Pretty much the whole spectrum of stress-related behavior is open from avoidance reactions to zany behavior (or mania). You're going to expect shock, especially when we're talking about very soon afterwards, which is going to generally going to lead to a flattened affect.
Which we see. However, the flattened affect that comes with shock isn't being calm. It's a result of a breakdown in a person's normal cognitive and emotional flow. If you see shock as severe as would lead to as diminshed an emotional response as these two characters are showing, you're going to see many of the other features of stress and shock, such as the important ones here: disjointed and/or ego-centric thinking.
Cole's our viewpoint character and his thinking is clearly not disjointed. If anything, it's more cohesive and structured than that of a person going about their normal day. Neither is it egocentric. There's a distinct lack of personal referents (I, me, mine, etc.) or relevance.
Of course, they are both heavily trained, which might account for it. Except, the training that people get to deal with stress involes focusing on specific relevant things. Often, it's a set of instructions or steps that have been drilled into you, but in the case of "think on your feet" Spec Ops types, it would be on the overall mission.
The problem I see with that is that Cole's musings and the subsequent conversation between fail this in much the same way that Cole's thought failed to egocentric test. The thoughts and conversation are pretty much irrelevant to the situation they find themselves in.
Nor could it be preparation and an expectation that this might happen that would lessen the shock because, while you could make a case for this in Malek's case, there's no possible way this would apply to Cole, who was, after all, our preternatually calm and collected narrator of this chapter.
---
The realism of the situation aside, I think this chapter represents a tremendous missed opportunity. A writer of OSC's talent could mix the shock, anger, and various other emotions people in this situation would be feeling with the training, drive, and resolve of these super soldier patriots into a scene full of tension, menace, and emotional resonance. We could have Cole, a reasonably young man who up until very recently didn't even have a clue what his job was kind of losing it when throw into the middle of this situation he was not at all prepared for and we could have the more experienced, prepared Malek who, while still shaken, is bringing him back to stable. Or any number of other powerful, compelling scenes. Instead we get something that sounds like an essay OSC wrote up beforehand and was looking for a place to drop into the narrative presented by two basically indistinguishable characters.
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posted
But Malich knew and feared this was going to happen and wasn't able to tell anyone. Actually, now I'm thinking it's unrealistic that he could have told Cole as much as he did out at the park, since the project would have been classified.
Which gets back to my whole objection about how really boring a realistic portrayal of high level classified doodah would have to be. I think I posted that on the Jeesh thread.
Not everyone on the New Orleans police force quit or shot themselves. Most of them stayed on the job.
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quote:Nor could it be preparation and an expectation that this might happen that would lessen the shock because, while you could make a case for this in Malek's case, there's no possible way this would apply to Cole, who was, after all, our preternatually calm and collected narrator of this chapter.
posted
Just ad hominem, that's one convoluted sentence dude. I don't like to rebut an argument with grammatical nitpicking, but I really don't understand what your point is.
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posted
Err...that's really not a particularly convoluted sentence. But, I'll explain.
quote:Nor could it be preparation and an expectation that this might happen that would lessen the shock
Saying that "they were prepared" is a bad explanation
quote:because
because
quote:, while you could make a case for this in Malek's case
Malek may have been prepared
quote:, there's no possible way this would apply to Cole
Cole was not
quote:, who was, after all, our preternatually calm and collected narrator of this chapter.
Cole was the person whose eyes we saw this chapter through and whose remarkably well-structured but basically irrelevant thoughts we were privy to.
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posted
I've re-read the chapter (which has changed in some ways I couldn't exactly enumerate) and I don't see that Cole's attitude is so puzzling, nor are his thoughts remarkably well-structured.
It can happen that one person freaking out (as Phillips or smithers or whatever his name is) sometimes mollifies the need of someone else to freak out.
I think it also depends on whether you see the killing of the president as the main problem, or the plunging of the United States into another civil war as the main problem. Malich knows the latter to be the case, and Cole is trying his best to understand Malich.
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quote: Cole thought wistfully of his air-conditioned car in the parking lot near the FDR Memorial -- but it was evidence, so even if traffic had been moving, he couldn't have taken it. And thinking of evidence reminded him of those two borrowed rifles with both their fingerprints all over them. Cole figured he could pretty much rule out denying that he was there.
There were a lot of other pedestrians streaming onto the Roosevelt Bridge. Usually pedestrians wore jogging clothes. Now they were in suits, or women walking miserably on high heels.
At times like these, people rethought their dependence on cars. Started wishing they could live in an apartment in the city and walk to work. Then, when the crisis passed, they'd see how far those apartments were from grocery stores and movie theaters, and how old and rundown they were, and even those who went to the trouble of looking at rentals were stunned at how little you got for the money, and pretty soon they were back behind the wheel again.
But these pedestrians staggering across a bridge devoid of automobile traffic except for the occasional military vehicle meant something else, too. They were a victory for the terrorists.
Weirdly, though, it was a defeat for them as well, Cole realized. All the oil money that funded them -- if we no longer burned oil for transportation, if we really became a pedestrian world, then what would the whole Middle East be but a waterless wasteland with way too many people to feed themselves?
But that's what these diehard Islamists wanted. For the whole world to be as poor and miserable as the Middle East. For us all to live the way the Muslims did in the good old days, when the Sultan ruled in Istanbul. Or earlier, when the Caliph ruled from Baghdad, fantastically wealthy while the common people sweated and starved and clung to their faith. And if it meant reducing the population of the world from six billion to half a billion, well, let eleven-twelfths of the human population die and Allah would sort them out in heaven.
What the terrorists aren't counting on, thought Cole, is that America isn't a completely decadent country yet. When you stab us, we don't roll over and ask what we did wrong and would you please forgive us. Instead we turn around and take the knife out of your hand. Even though the whole world, insanely, condemns us for it.
Cole could imagine the way this was getting covered by the media in the rest of the world. Oh, tragic that the President was dead. Official condolences. Somber faces. But they'd be dancing in the streets in Paris and Berlin, not to mention Moscow and Beijing. After all, those were the places where America was blamed for all the trouble in the world. What a laugh -- capitals that had once tried to conquer vast empires, damning America for behaving far better than they did when they were in the ascendancy.
This doesn't strike you as say a little bit too calm, structured, and ultimately irrelevant for a man who, while completely unprepared for these things, just witnessed people blowing up the White House, was involved in a firefight, and found out that both sides were now going to be gunning for him?
quote:I think it also depends on whether you see the killing of the president as the main problem, or the plunging of the United States into another civil war as the main problem. Malich knows the latter to be the case, and Cole is trying his best to understand Malich.
That doesn't make any sense. Neither of the characters knows anything about attempts to foment a civil war at this point.
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posted
I don't want to start a new thread for this very minor point, so I'll mention it here.
In Chapter 2, shouldn't "IPods" be "iPods"? Even though "iPod" is the first word of the (one-word) sentence, I think the proper name of the product is "iPod" (with a lowercase "i"). But a Google search shows that some other people are using "IPod" at the start of a sentence, so maybe "iPods" would look weird to others.
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quote: "The U.S. Army is absolutely dominated by red-state ideals. There are some blue-staters, yes, of course. But you don't join the military, as a general rule, unless you share much of the red-state ideology."
"So because the red-staters control the Army, you think there can't be a civil war."
"I think it's unlikely."
"Don't hedge on me."
Reuben shrugged. He wasn't hedging, he was specifying; but let Torrent think whatever he wanted.
"What if the White House were in the control of blue-staters?" asked Torrent. "What if the President ordered American troops to fire on American citizens who fought for red state ideals?"
"We obey the President, sir."
"Because you're thinking you'd be called to fire on neo-fascist militia nut groups from Montana," said Torrent. "What if you were told to fire on the Alabama National Guard?"
"If Alabama was in rebellion, then I'd do it at once."
(This was in chapter 2, and always has been.)
As for "Really", I don't see Cole's thoughts as being as interesting as we get from Bean or Ender or Ivan Smetski. They're maybe at a Petra level. I suspect these terrorists won't turn out to be Islamists anyway.
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posted
pooka, Errr...that was a blue-sky type of conversation he had at college. I can't see any reason for him to connect that conversation with what he just went through. If you're going to postulate that Malich is bascially omniscient, I think you and I have very different views of reality.
Speaking of which:
quote: As for "Really", I don't see Cole's thoughts as being as interesting as we get from Bean or Ender or Ivan Smetski. They're maybe at a Petra level. I suspect these terrorists won't turn out to be Islamists anyway.
I have no idea what you are talking about. It's not as interesting as we get from Bean or Ender? What the heck does that have to do what we're talking about?
You first said that it made sense that they would be calm because Malich was prepared. Then I established that Cole was not prepared, you said that he was freaking out. But, as I said, that doesn't sound like someone who is freaking out. So you respond with "It's not as interesting as what we hear from Ender?" I don't have any idea what you mean with that.
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posted
Where did I say he was freaking out? I said his thoughts are not "remarkably well-structured" (your phrase). It was just rambling thoughts that I'd rather read than a blow by blow description of walking across a bridge over the Potomac on foot. Whether my thoughts would ramble in that circumstance, I don't know. I'm pretty sure yours would not, because your capacity for perseveration nearly equals my own.
So you don't think Malich makes a connection between Army against President = Civil war and Army kills President = X? He's not just running to cover his own ass. He's running because whoever did this wasn't just trying to kill the president, they were trying to start a civil war.
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