Errata

Novel: Labyrinth
Author: Kate Mosse

I was wrong about Authie. He DOES have a personality. Here are his main personality traits:

1. He likes to "shoot the cuffs" on his shirt. He does this at least three times in the last half of the book. Example: Authie shot the cuffs on his crisp white shirt. He even takes the time to shoot his cuffs just before his death.
2. That's it, really.

This personality trait makes him different than Audric, who never shoots the cuffs on his shirt. Also, Audric is really really and I mean really old. Older than Authie, I am almost positive.

I was so wrong about these characters. They couldn't BE more different. Sorry, Kate Mosse!

One Rule to Rule Them All

Novel: Labyrinth
Author: Kate Mosse

Writing fiction can seem daunting, especially if you're a rule follower. A Google search will turn up hundreds of long lists of "rules" for writers. Some of these lists are sturdy advice while others are nitpicky, and it's hard to tell the difference when you're still learning how to write. However, the one guideline that turns up on every list, and the one you should always, always, always follow is:

SHOW, DON'T TELL.

That means you don't TELL the story through a series of dry speeches in dialog or narrative form, but rather you SHOW the story by having the characters experience it.

This is the same principle behind labs in science class. For most people, it's not interesting enough to simply learn the dry facts with no context; to truly become engaged in a concept you must experience it by participating in it. This personal interaction provides a richer understanding and (hopefully) an affinity for the subject.

In a work of fiction, the plot is the science and the characters are our lab partners. We become engaged and reach a rich understanding by viewing the story through the characters' eyes. The author should write in such a way that we feel an affinity for the characters and through them the plot. The plot should not be a dry recitation of facts.

We should not feel like we are memorizing this:

CH3COOH + NaHCO3 ---> CH3COONa + H2CO3
H2CO3 ---> H2O + CO2

We should feel like we're doing/watching this:



Simple enough, right? Even the Brady Bunch can do it.

I regret to inform you that Kate Mosse has never heard of "Show, Don't Tell."

Whenever possible, she has her characters break into long speeches or else reverts to narrative to give us infodumps on such topics as:

* The Occitan language
* The history of medieval France
* The Crusades
* Egyptian Hieroglyphs
* Herbs and shrubbery
* The geographical layout of Southern France
* The types of wares available at a market in medieval France
* The relationships between medieval French nobles

...and on and on.

The culmination of this comes around page 400 when after hundreds of pages of running around that goes nowhere, one of the two main characters meets up with a heretofore extremely minor character, who then proceeds to give a twenty page lecture on the history of the Holy Grail. Said lecture reads like this:

"The origins of European Catharism lie in Bogomilism, a dualist faith that flourished in Bulgaria, Macedonia and Dalmatia from the tenth century onward. It was linked with older religious beliefs--such as Zoroastrianism in Persia or Manicheism. They believed in reincarnation. [...] In the Palais des Arts in Lyon," he continued, "there is a manuscript copy of a Cathar text of St. John's Gospel, one of very few documents to escape destruction by the Inquisition. It is written in the langue d'Oc, possession of which in those days was considered a heretical, punishable act. Of all the texts sacred to the Bon Homes, the Gospel of John was the most important. It is the one which lays most stress on personal, individual enlightenment through knowledge--gnosis. Bon Homes refused to worship idols, crosses or altars--carved from the rocks and trees of the Devil's base creation--they held the word of God in the very highest esteem."

Twenty pages of this, folks.

Do I exaggerate? A little. Some of those twenty pages are spent as the same character lectures us about what happened to the characters in the parallel plot of the book, which takes place in medieval times. So not only do we get a huuuuuuuuuge twenty page infodump, we also never get to see the other main character (Alais) again until the moment of her death!

The irony is, the events this guy describes sound like they'd be about 10,000 times more exciting than the feeble, yawn-inducing storyline we saw poor Alais through. Why couldn't Kate Mosse have started the story at a part that mattered? So basically we watched Alais run around for 400 pages collecting herbs and sneaking about the castle and the village for nothing? The "real" plot is delivered to us as a lecture by some minor character old dude we only saw for about four pages towards the beginning of the book and barely even know?

ARE YOU FREAKING KIDDING ME, KATE MOSSE?!

(Note: Can you tell I'm angry? And can you tell I'm angry even though I didn't say, "Gosh, I'm angry"? That right there is an example of Show-Don't-Tell.)

I don't want to finish this book. I'm going to do it, because I only have like fifty pages left, and I'm sure in those fifty pages there will be something even better/worse to write about on here. Plus I have a whole nother list of really horrible similes saved up to post. Can't stop now. Kate is not yet done SHOWING me how bad her writing is.

My Two Cents

I left the book at my mom's last week and hence have been unable to comment on any specific passages from Labyrinth this week. D'oh. To make up for the lack of blogging, here's my review I wrote a few days ago for Amazon.

Fails as literature June 14, 2010

WARNING: Labyrinth by Kate Mosse blatantly ignores the following standards of fiction:

1. That the human characters resemble human beings in their thoughts, speech, and actions and thus allow the reader to identify with them in some way. The human characters in Labyrinth: a) rarely carry through a thought to its logical conclusion; b) habitually abandon conversations halfway through, and; c) unless they decide to do something supremely stupid such as ride alone at night through a war-torn countryside populated with armed thieves, never take action of any sort unless forced to do so by a cackling villain.

1a. That each character has a distinct personality. Upon reading a piece of dialog or a reaction, the reader should reasonably be able to guess at who said or did that thing based on the personalities presented. The reader shouldn't have to struggle to the realization that Authie and Audric are different characters, nor be forced to puzzle out that Raymond-Roger and Trencavel are in fact one and the same man (who is called by both his first and last name seemingly at some random whim of the author). The main personality traits of a Mosse character are blandness and forgetfulness, in that order. We can add to that apathy and stupidity, if the character is good, and a fondness for sex and/or torture, if the character is bad.

1b. That the characters, once established, act in a manner consistent with the author's description. For instance, a girl described as "brave" and who is volunteering at an archaeological dig should not be tremendously upset upon discovering some skeletons. Nor should a medieval, married girl described as "fearless" and "independent" quake in fear at the sight of a distant corpse and then go running to her daddy.

2. That the story progress at a healthy enough pace that if the reader turns 100 pages ahead, he does not see the characters doing the same things they were doing 100 pages ago. Let's say that on page 119 a man hands you a phone number, then is immediately run down by the bad guys in front of your eyes. What do you do? Call the number to find out what's going on, or wander France for 200 more pages before thinking of the number again, and then only after it is told to you a second time? I bet you can guess what Kate Mosse's heroine does.

3. That the historical references and the researched facts be a natural part of the story and presented only as necessary to the plot. The reader should not have to maneuver around them like orange barrels at a roadwork site. Kate Mosse continually violates this simple rule.

4. That the author should regard the reader as a thinking human being with a memory. It's enough to mention once or twice that Pelletier has gone to Montpellier. After five mentions even the most forgetful reader will have acquired this information; by the ninth or tenth mention the reader will become annoyed, and by the twelfth mention the reader may want to throw your novel across the room.

5. That the phrases "suddenly" and "straight away" should be used sparingly, not well over 100 times in 500 pages. It's not necessary, for example, to describe Alice ordering her meal "straight away"--would it not suffice to say she ordered food? Kate Mosse tends to use "straight away" to begin sentences, which makes this even more distracting. Straight away, I noticed that Mosse has an obsession with the term "straight away."

6. That an English language book be mainly in English; that foreign words be used appropriately--such as when the English word will not do--or occasionally for flavor. We don't need entire strings of conversation in French, especially not when the conversation consists of someone telling their secretary to make a phone call. And we don't need to be patronized by having words like "allo" followed immediately by the English "hello" by way of translation. Kate Mosse believes she's the only person in the English-speaking world to ever learn French, and she is darn well going to teach it to us.

7. Finally, and most importantly, that the story and/or characters entertain the reader. Judging by other comments here, Kate Mosse has a rival in Dan Brown. Dan Brown's novels suffer from some of the same mistakes as Mosse's do--infodumps, wafer-thin characterization, repeated words, excruciating dialog, etc. However, Dan Brown, for all his human failings, knows how to create a story and move it along, and thus ENTERTAINS the reader. I'll take an over the top, ridiculously implausible Holy Grail story over a meticulously researched, deadly dull Holy Grail story any day of the week. Et toi, Kate Mosse?

Foolish Inconsistency...

Novel: Labyrinth
Author: Kate Mosse

In today's reading, our new acquaintance Authie is searching someone's apartment. I say acquaintance rather than friend, because like almost every other character in the book, Authie has no personality and we thus can't know whether we're supposed to like him or not. Anyhow, Authie is searching, and...

There was a bureau in the corner on which sat an old electric typewriter.

We could note that since this part of the story takes place in 2005, all electric typewriters would be considered old. Then again, a page later Authie runs into an ink well, quill, and blotting paper (!) on the desk and shows no surprise at this setup. Perhaps modern day France lacks the communication niceties enjoyed by the rest of the Western world? After all, I hear they're still eating moldy cheese over there. Ha-ha!

But wait! Authie is so impressed by the typewriter that he is momentarily distracted from his mission of searching the apartment.

He pressed the on/off button and it buzzed into life. He slipped a piece of paper in and struck a couple of keys. The letters appeared in a sharp black row on the page.

We won't go into whether two letters constitute a "row on the page." After this effort, Authie moves on to search the rest of the bureau, presumably leaving the typewriter turned on and the piece of paper in it, as there's no mention of him turning it off and removing the paper.

Surely there will be some significance to this later in the book, you think. Maybe they pull Authie's prints from the paper, or maybe he's left some sort of cryptic message in the typed letters. But nope, a search of the book's text on Amazon reveals no other mentions of the typewriter after this. Authie, the Worst Thief in the Whole World, was simply bored and decided to play with someone's old skool typing toy while rifling through the victim's belongings, and no one ever notices.


Here are some of my suggestions to fix this predicament:

1. Remove this paragraph from the book, since it's useless to the story and to Authie's character.
2. That's it, really. Remove the paragraph.

In conclusion, I have a few letters of my own for Kate Mosse:

WTF?

I Never Metaphor I Didn't Like

Novel: Labyrinth
Author: Kate Mosse

A sampling of similes from pages 90-97:

Nausea sloshed in her stomach, like bilge water at the bottom of a rotting boat.

Everything seemed to be shifting backward and forward, in and out, like a film out of focus.

The sound was distorted, like a record player at the wrong speed.

The strong white light cut through the inky blackness of the chamber like a searchlight. [Note: Actually, since it's a flashlight and they're searching for something, it IS a searchlight.]

...the shadow of the altar was silhouetted on the rock wall behind, like the Greek letter pi superimposed on the carved labyrinth.

The sun seemed to explode in Alice's face like a firework in a black November sky.

Alice felt that if she touched anything it would fall down, like scenery on a film set...

Her head was suddenly filled with whispering, disjointed sounds, like echoes in time. [In point of fact, they ARE echoes in time, not merely "like" them.]

They went round and round in her head, like a half-remembered nursery rhyme.

But the words were rooted in her mind, repeating loud and clear, like a mantra.

Reading this book is like getting hit in the face over and over again with the word redundant.

Sucker punch

Novel: Labyrinth
Author: Kate Mosse



Let's leave aside the questionable use of passive voice here and concentrate on this bit:

...Pelletier's fist slammed into his stomach. It was not a hard punch...

So Pelletier "slammed" his fist into poor Guilhem's stomach, but it wasn't a hard punch. Certainly not hard enough to knock him off his feet or anything like that. Oh, wait:

...it was forceful enough to catch him off balance... Guilhem stumbled back against the wall.

So the punch is hard--or should I say not hard--enough to knock Guilhem back several feet into the wall. Guilhem, a man who two pages before was described as so large that his wife could only "fasten a brooch" on his shoulder after standing on tiptoe, even after he leaned down to make it easier for her. I'm five feet tall, yet I can reach the shoulder of a six foot man without much trouble. Hence, I think it's safe to assume that Guilhem stands well over six feet tall, and that Pelletier must be approaching Wilt Chamberlain territory, considering he can knock the lights out of Guilhem with a soft punch and then strangle him half to death with his "massive hand."

Wow, people in medieval France sure were big.