Terry Knows About Karate
I was thinking about the The Da Vinci Code earlier. I have neither read it, nor, to the best of my recollection, watched the film. Dan Brown’s writing is frequently mocked and was memorably lampooned By Michael Deacon in the Daily Telegraph in 2013 ( Don’t Make Fun of Renowned Dan Brown). So why was I thinking about renowned author Dan Brown’s most famous best-selling novel? Precisely because it was the renowned author’s best-selling novel.
Some years ago I was in Waterstones at Ocean Terminal Edinburgh. Two women were in the shop. They’d just been to the royal yacht Britannia and were flying home the next morning. One of them asked the other, her daughter I think, if she had any recommendations for a book to read on the flight, and the daughter unhesitatingly recommended The Da Vinci Code and explained why, referring to character, story, mystery, tension and the satisfaction she got from reading it. I think every writer, however famous and/or literary, would kill for that level of reader engagement (and sales).
There’s a lesson there, and one that’s in my mind as I try to revise and edit a novel I thought I’d finished last year. When I looked at it again yesterday I realised it’s a structural mess and requires surgery. in the excellent Prog Rock Britannia, (watch it on a YouTube playlist here) the ever-entertaining Bill Bruford quips: the only people we didn’t concern ourselves with at all was the audience. I won’t be adding Tom Hanks or a foxy cryptographer, or, indeed, an all-electronic drum array to the story, but I will be bearing the reader in mind as I wield the scalpel and bone saw.
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Once again, the news is a distant ship passing in the deep ocean on a dark night, its running lights below the horizon. I dare say things have happened in the world, but I have no idea what they are. Even I noticed, though, that the head of England’s Track and Trace, Dido Harding, suggested today that no one could have foreseen the virus mutating. And she’s correct, if you exclude every single virologist, epidemiologist, historian of medicine, doctor or anyone else who might reasonably be thought to know what they’re talking about, a category that excludes Ms. Harding.
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Music: an impossibly young Kirsty MacColl from 1983, when I got my first job.
You thought you were such a smartie
But Terry knows about karate
There’s other things he’s good at too
Terry’s not a bit like you
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