Just Any Pair of Eyes Won't do

2

Perspective is destiny.  If you choose to tell the story in the first person, you have given up a rare chance to soar with the gods.   As a matter of fact, you have simply exchanged skins with someone else, and must suffer their anxieties and complexities in addition to your own.  That has obvious drawbacks, but it is also a solution of sorts.  By this I mean you will have again dodged the bullet of having to deal with certainty about what is The Truth.  Since there isn’t an omnipotent narrator, the whole scene unfolds from a single, personal perspective.  There is no truth but that processed through the eyes, the ears, and the brain of one character.   Since that is how we live our lives anyway, it grants the author a certain dispensation from knowing more than he actually does. 

There is a second tier to the perspective problem I found to be more difficult, especially because it wasn’t immediately apparent.  Where to place the center of gravity?  The stories could be inside looking out, that is, from the perspective of a North Korean looking out at the world.  Although that is actually the guise the Inspector O stories take, I decided not to use it as any more than a comfortable cloak, because, obviously, James Church isn’t North Korean.  That decision, in fact, has led to some criticism by readers who think the books—and certainly Inspector O—should be more “Korean,” although some Koreans who have read the books are perfectly content with O as he is. 

Another possible perch for the story was outside looking in.  That is a common approach for thrillers with an espionage angle, especially those that find North Korea a useful foil.  These days, if you need an evil character or a bad place, you can always throw North Korea into the pot.  Some good stories have emerged from that approach, but using that angle would, I decided, be boring for me and might be numbing for readers already up to here * with stereotypical North Korean villains.

Was there a third option?  After marching into a few chapters, I decided there was.  The perspective that I could write from best was the one where I had operated for many years—i.e., somewhere along that margin where the internal reality of North Korea meets the “reality” of the outside world.  This infinitely thin edge has been for me a domain of constant, revealing clashes.  Like a particle accelerator, it has created new, short-lived flashes (note to copy editor: if you have rhyming words in neighboring sentences, do you change one of them?) of insight.  There were moments when slivers of common ground appeared out of nowhere, then disappeared again.  Each of the Inspector O books plays on this phenomenon, using a character or a setting in which O’s reality collides with—or sometimes rubs raw—the parallel reality of our own self satisfied universe.  

The influence of perspective goes a long way, all the way to plot line.  Theoretically, it probably shouldn’t. A plot is a plot, and if you’re a mystery writer, you’d better draw a pretty clear plot line through the story, and figure out a way to wrap things up at the end.   A very good investigative reporter once said to me, “You have the plot figured out before you start writing, of course” and seemed horrified when I said no, I did not. 

For better or for worse (and many readers are very uneasy with plots that do not resolve themselves and leave threads--some might say “hawsers”--that dangle when the last page is turned), I am convinced that a story about North Korea shouldn’t be neatly tied up, especially one written from the viewpoint of a character treading water at Inspector O’s place in the piranha pond.

A good friend and long-time colleague observed that the O stories read like the process of discovery in intelligence work on North Korea—and that’s exactly right.  People like to think that intelligence analysis is the same as working with a jigsaw puzzle, and that it is largely a matter of having the patience to put the pieces together. 

Yes, certainly that’s true, with a few qualifications:  You are working with four and a half 1,000 piece puzzles jumbled in a barrel.  And you have been told by a source you really don’t trust that three of these puzzles depict that night sky in the southern hemisphere during, oh, say, 1067, 1649, and 1926.  And another source has said that the other one and a half puzzles depict various types of clouds during an eclipse of the sun. Meanwhile, you have no clear instructions about which puzzle you really have to complete in order to find the solution to a problem you are not absolutely sure exists.   And oh, by the way, the barrel was dropped from 5,000 meters into the South Pacific and unfortunately broke on impact (sorry, but these things happen), meaning sharks have swallowed most of the edge pieces because they looked like baby tuna seen from below.   Tea, anyone? 

My editor wanted the plot for one of the Inspector O books—never mind which-- laid out in advance.  I obliged, but when I began to write, it was with the feeling of a dog on a leash.  Every character knew where things were headed.  Twists in the road were deliberate, false trails were contrived; characters shut their eyes and followed along glumly, saying “Ooo,” or “Ahhh,” at the proper points of discovery.  Some authors do not have this problem, and are much the better for it.   Well in advance, they can lay out in their own minds, and even on little pieces of paper, the entire storyline.  But that isn’t how James Church or Inspector O have experienced reality, or at least that part of reality concerned with creating these particular novels.  As a result, we find ourselves with certain types of endings—and we’ll do our best to take up endings in another blog later in the week.