I’ve been raving to my colleagues, friends, and anyone that follows me on Twitter about one book in particular that we’re publishing next month: Tinkers by Paul Harding. It’s beautifully written, touching, true to life and death, and the end…well, I won’t spoil it for you. It’s a great book, an epic of only 192 pages, one of those books that comes around every now and then and reaffirms your love of reading.
One of many interesting things about Tinkers is trying, with my marketing hat on, to sum it up in a few sentences, into a pitch that booksellers will remember out of all the other titles they are presented that month. I (or, more likely, the person in the sales department doing the presentation) could do what I did in the above paragraph, but then the bookseller would (quite rightly) be able to say ‘Well, you would say it’s brilliant, you’re trying to sell it to me!’ The difficulty is that Tinkers is a book where if you try and sum up the plot in a line it sounds positively mundane: a man lies in his deathbed, and as he is hallucinating, remembers his time with his father when he was a young boy. That’s about it.*
None of that accounts for how gripping this book is. There are no great clashes between heroes and villains, love affairs, or dramatic deaths (there is death, but it is quiet, sombre), yet it held me, absolutely rapt, right to the last sentence. That’s no mean feat either. I’m pretty easily distrac - oo look, a cat playing the keyboard!
Ahem, anyway, back to my point. I like a book with big plots, wham-bam action and sweeping storylines where lots of stuff happens. The same goes for films and TV for that matter. But watching something like Lord of the Rings (tons of plot, characters with Big Dramatic Speeches, swords held aloft, millions of orcs) is an entirely different emotional experience to watching The Man Who Wasn’t There (very little plot, a main character mumbles most of his lines, a fearsome letter opener, and absolutely no orcs). The screenwriters have to work hard to gain the trust of the viewer, to get them to relax into a film where nothing much happens, to make them feel that the journey will be worth the work in the end.
When I saw The Man Who Wasn’t There in the cinema, two young guys in front of us got up and walked out after around 30 minutes. I remember being annoyed at the time, wanting to say to them, ‘Where are you going? You’ll miss the best bit!’ Now I think that the Coen Brothers just hadn’t got the trust of those two people. Boredom, I think, is not a passive thing: it’s active, fighting against something that’s too slow or predictable. If a book or film is boring me, I’m impatient to get to the end - I start to skim read, or I’ll get distracted agai - oo look, a funny comic!
Trust is hard won and easily lost with readers. The success of Tinkers for me boils down to the fact that we know with every sentence that we’re in the presence of someone who can really write. Harding earns the right to tell a story that, for the most part, is going on in the main character’s head with the precise, lyrical way that he tells it. He makes you want to sit back, and accept the story for what it is, on its own terms.
What do you think? How do apparently plot-light books and films hold your attention, and which ones have done it best?
*As it happens with Tinkers our sales pitch was made much easier for the fact we can say that it’s the first debut novel to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in a decade.
