Amphibrach?
I wrote back on 5 December 2021 that I enjoyed Ken MacLeod’s most recent novel, Beyond the Hallowed Sky, and I was interested to read Adam Roberts’s generally positive review of it on his blog Sibilant Fricative. What caught my attention, though, was Roberts’s discussion on structure, and how to treat different points of view. Macleod, as Roberts notes, pleats three strands together, and GRR Martin, in the Song of Ice and Fire (Game of Thrones) sequence, weaves together multiple points of view. Roberts refers to his own most recent novel Purgatory Mount, though not by name, in which he opens with pov ‘A’, has a long middle section based on pov ‘B’, then returns to pov A to close the novel. Roberts calls this approach Amphibrach which is a term in poetry for a long syllable bookended by two short, unstressed, syllables. It’s an interesting way of doing it, but it faltered, in my view, in Purgatory Mount, because the middle sequence was more engaging for me than the two end sequences.
A novel I’m revising, working title The Magpie Rhyme, adopts the interweaving approach. A much delayed work in progress is causing me porblems with two distinct points of view, and I’m toying with options. My draft of this work in progress started with some interweaving but I found it clumsy and have archived off one of the strands to come back to. What I’m wondering is what to do when I come to seriously revise what I’ve written. If interweaving doesn’t work in this case, then I could simply put the two povs as two stories in one book, perhaps with another short story in the same ‘universe.’ Alternatively, I could adopt the Purgatory Mount approach, but if I wasn’t entirely convinced by it in that book, then I’m not sure as I want to experiment with it in my own.
An interesting remark in the comments section of the Roberts blog post refers to the writing of John Dos Passos. I last read Dos Passos 40 years ago and remember being a bit bamboozled by him at the time – I certainly read the USA trilogy (1930-36), in the combined Penguin edition, and also, I think, Manhattan Transfer (1925). I remember nothing about the latter, but do remember that the USA trilogy uses multiple short sections in a non-linear form. Cool, but more experimental than I have in mind for the work in progress (and probably beyond my capabilities to pull off convincingly.)
A conundrum.
Meantime, the short story muse has stirred and I’ve written two in the last week and a half – Immortalis, which is a 1400 word love story set largely in a graveyard, and The Devil and Barnaby Smew (ca 2000 words) which is not a love story and needs more work before I’ll be happy with it.
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