Writer’s Note 2: Thrilled by David Baldacci’s The Forgotten

Recovering from a virus after Christmas I had to resort to my audiobook file for restful reading. By accident I lighted on The Forgotten by David Baldacci. It had been a book chosen at random on a one line description.

To remind you. What follows is a highly personal excercise. It is not a review; it is my note  on elements that impress me as a writer and ways in which I - as a writer - can learn something  from this book. 

 I am ambivalent about  thrillers and sometimes think they are better on the silver screen than the pristine page. But this novel made me think again. I enjoyed it.

Writer’s Notes

Style

-Pacy writing. Crisp, effective prose. Every word a bullet. Very precise energy and balance of often short sentences. Careful and unfussy choice of words.

- Very tight plotting. Two main points of view. One dominant. Well woven together.

Place 

- Surprisingly excellent sense of place: The Emerald. Coast of Florida. The ocean. The power of a storm, The heat. The place called Paradise.

- Occasional change of pace to establish place with lyrical evocation, intense description. - Good use of senses.

Characters

- Characters are very clear to the eye and the ear.

- Recogniseable army disciplined hero.

-Feisty female one star general as collaborating heroine,

- Predictable villains with some good surprises.

- Very tight description ensures we know their body shape and style. We hear individual tones, dialects and accents They are clearly defined for us so we follow them through the twists and turns of the carefully woven plot.

Climax

- Several well staged shootouts at the end climax were more filmic but still well written, They do, after all go with this genre,

Themes

- Baldacci tackles various powerful  themes of modern life which emerge in the narrative  quite seamlessly,

• The lucrative modern Slavery trade People as commodities (the slimy villain calles the people he traffics product) 
• Identity.Army., Family, identity. Loyalty.
•  Courage and Survival.
• Physical strength.
• Gender.politics.

What have I learned  from David  Baldacci

- It is possible to write well and to tackle major themes within the thriller or any other genre

- The need to evoke a great sense of place to allow the reader to suspend her disbelief and stay with an occasionally fantastic narrative.

 - Tight, occasionally staccato prose enhances pace in a narrative.

Next: Bring up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel

Me and Stephen King and the Attraction of the Audiobook.

 Being - for the last fortnight - unable to read or write properly or do anything requiring energy I resorted to listening to audio-books. I don’t often resort to this as I like words on the page, be it paper or Kindle screen.

However the concentration for pure reading deserted me alongside my appetite and my energy. So, by means of the audio-books in the last week I have ‘read’ three books: The Forgotten by David Baldacci; Zoo Time by Howard  Jacobson; Standing in Another Man’s Grave by Ian Rankin. Waiting for me to enjoy are ring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel; Where There’s a Will by John Mortimer and Victorian London by Lisa Picard. I have also managed to read on the paper page The Examined Life: How We Lose and Find Ourself by Stephen Grosz.

(Should you be interested -  my next post here will be my personal notes on these individual books…)  

But I have to say that this experience has made me reflect on the audio-process. First, how wonderful that these texts were unabridged. When I think of the care that we writers put into every word, every paragraph of a novel it seems some kind of heresy to abridge it to make it fit into a required audio timescale. So the audio-time is anywhere upwards of ten or eleven hours.

Also, being read by accomplished readers, the rhythms and nuances of the prose enhance the meaning - perhaps more than the echoes in the head that emerge from reading on the page.

It certainly improved my line by line attention as I have to confess, as a lifetime reader, to a well entrenched and somewhat destructive habit of speed-reading and skipping. With audio books you can’t skip; you have to let the story unfold at the author’s designated pace.

It could be the euphoria of the illness but I would swear that I have enjoyed these books much more intensely than usual. As I come back to life and writing and work I’m certain I’ll use this form of reading into my book habit more   regularly in the future.

And then I suddenly remember I’m not alone. In his exceptionally good book On Writing author Stephen King urges all writers to read widely, wisely and well for their own self education. He lists the books he read in a single year. His list is enormous. Then he tells us that he had read a great proportion of this list by audio-book.

I suppose I could declare an interest here. All my books are now on Kindle - just got the stats – they’re trickling out very well there (except for Family Ties. Do give it a try. One of my best, I think) . But as well as thise= they are also out there in audio-book form. An Englishwoman in France looks very fine in its audio-book packaging. They’re available through libraries to order borrow and download. Or through companies like Audible.

And now I’ve had my own valuable and enlightening audio experience I treasure the thought of my own readers enjoying my novels in this steady appreciative pace, read by the brilliant actresses who give them their voice

NEXT: Tomorrow my appreciative notes on the audio books I have read this week. By David Baldacci, Howard Jacobson, Ian Rankin, Hilary Mantel, John Mortimer   Lisa Picard, Stephen Grosz.

Click: My novel set in North London