In French translation the opening scene in Denise Mina’s The Field of Blood is slightly less than four pages long – approximately eleven hundred words.
I read them several times last night. Moved on with my reading; came back to them again. Then put them aside and read on. This is the first book in which we encounter the two Paddy Meehans, apparently. Interesting to see how the older Paddy re-appears in the later novel. Clearly, a defining figure in the author’s landscape.
What impresses me in the opening scene is everything Mina has compressed into it. I couldn’t help comparing with the few pages I’d read earlier by Stephen King. Mina’s opening sequence involves the killing of a child by other children. King’s, the beating of a wife by her husband, causing a miscarriage. In Mina’s four pages, I had Conrad’s Heart of Darkness compressed to radioactivity. In King’s I had trigger words used as emotional vehicles. The kind of treatment that leads to: “oh, how awful, oh, how sad, oh how… could you pass the chips, please, I’m reading right now.” After reading Mina’s, you shut up and deal with the resonances and implications.
I dreamt of Mina’s four pages. Which may sound like a nightmare but it was no such thing. Quite the contrary: I felt secure in the knowledge it could be done. You can bring the reader down to face the beast. And you can bring the reader back up and out again. What you can’t do is stick a plastic dinosaur behind crinkled paper and say: “Lo, ’tis the beast”. Whether it takes fifty, eleven hundred or three thousand, each word must work.
Lastly, reading it recast my own exercise into a form of personal writerly challenge. I like challenges. Why? Because, when I feel challenged, I forget about cringing and whimpering. The Snark is a Boojum, you say? Hurray, hurray, hurray!
Visitors: All breakables are now out of reach of little ones. We’ve borrowed high chairs, car seats, a crib. Stocked up on diapers, cereals, chocolate (…) powder for milk, as requested by the mummy. DVDs from the médiathèque, pile of books from the neighbor. Writing it down feels as if I’m reporting all the prelim measures taken after a hurricane warning: windows boarded up, all garden tools and furniture safely stowed away, gas turned off…
The part I’m most looking forward to is taking the two children to the médiathèque – how’s that for a surprise?
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10:00 Assuming readers of this blog are as book-minded as I am, please note the additional link I picked up at DeeDee’s literary hang-out, Le bâtiment de la lumière et des ténèbres (the blog itself is in English): Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind looks at book marketing (crime fiction, but not only).
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19:20 I don’t know about anybody else, but I crack up every time I hear Mary Astor saying: “I’ve been bad. Worse than you could know.”(At 1:26 on the trailer.) Go ahead, Mary. Convince us.
Best to one, best to all.
A writer's notebook 