Hogmanay. The moment to be highly resolved is back. I’ve tried to avoid making a bucket list for 2024. I suspect it would contain the same content as that drawn up on Hogmanay 2022. I really must learn the Ring Cycle. I really must read Remembrance of Things Past. I really must understand Maxwell’s equations. The longer the list gets, the more absurd it becomes. Some people say that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different outcome. There is a languid character in an Aldous Huxley novel – Antic Hay I think – whose father chastises him for a lack of focus. Being interested in everything is the same as being interested in nothing. We flit from one pursuit to another and give each one our briefest attention span. We dabble in freemasonries, like Pierre Bezukhov in War and Peace. But if you really want to turn your life upside down, you need to focus on that one thing. What is it?
Fortunately I’ve been too busy this week to navel-gaze. The proofs of my latest tome were couriered to me just before Christmas, and I have spent the twilit zone between Christmas and New Year going through them. The typesetter has wielded a particularly fine-toothed comb, and given the closest attention to minutiae. That comma (,) should be italicised (,). Who would spot that? Typesetters have their own language, or at least, orthography, somewhat of a cross between Kanji, ancient runes, and hieroglyphics. I haven’t attempted it. I’ve accepted pretty much all the alterations, and added a few suggestions of my own. I’m not too exercised about the length of a hyphen as opposed to the dashes round a parenthesis, and nobody at this stage has asked me radically to rework my theme. So the tome, Part III in the life of the troubled doc, is on the cusp of delivery. It has been a long and winding road.
But is it any good? Don’t ask me! I’m up too close and lack perspective. I guess I would claim that it is, like the curate’s egg, good in parts. I’d be terrible at a book launch. Don’t read chapter X! Cliché-ridden, sags in the middle, mawkish and sentimental. At the book fair, Jim Naughtie would ask me, “Why should we read this book?” And I would reply, “I can’t think of a reason in the world.”
It’s quite long, over 100,000 words. It’s in three parts. There are 29 chapters bookended by a prelude and a postlude. I take consolation in the notion that a perfect novel has never been written. Novels, by their very nature, tend to ramble. Some chapters are bound to be stronger than others. If there’s a chapter in there that doesn’t work, I’m not going to say where it is. Besides, the reader might well take a different view. But I will stick my neck out and say I’m fond of chapters I, IX, and XXII. I like to think chapter XXII is original; but maybe that just means it’s weird.
But does the book work as a whole? Does it “come off”? I cannot say. Structurally it’s okay, but a novel needs to be more than 29 chapters that happen more or less to make some kind of chronological sense. There has to be a synergy. The whole needs to be greater than the sum of the parts. And this is where I find myself up too close.
At any rate I’ve de-italicised the last italic, and composed a letter in response to the typesetter’s specific queries. Time to let it go. When the Post Office opens again in the New Year, I will send the manuscript back to the publisher, and then I can return to Wagner, Proust, and Maxwell.
I don’t think so. Time to live a little, in the big wide world, scarier than ever though it is. The Minister of Dunblane Cathedral said on Christmas Eve, that in life, the biggest risk of all is not to take a risk. So that is my resolution for 2024.
Take a risk.
Guten Rutsch!
jamescalumcampbell 