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?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Ooookay...please don't read my book.
ReplyDeleteTony, you have to keep in mind that this is a symptom of a much larger problem in this particular book--the problem being excessive detail unrelated to characterization or plot. I like detail and I love long books, but I like the detail to at least have some significance. This novel is FULL of moments like these that go nowhere--at one point she spends an entire page describing a character and he is never seen again after that page. Why??? It's almost like she put all this stuff in intending for it to have some meaning and then never went over the first draft to remove it.
ReplyDeleteAlso, I take serious issue with this guy not at least wondering why someone is using an ink well and quill in the year 2005 considering he's supposed to be a super duper police detective dude (illegally) searching for clues.
ReplyDelete