Dancing Priest

Author and Novelist Glynn Young

Writing

Heart of Darkness: All This Stuff Happens in the Middle

By Leave a Comment

Someone forgot to tell Joseph Conrad. 

When you write fiction, you’re supposed follow the rule of thirds. The first third is the introduction of the characters and the development of the conflict. The second third is the development of the narrative, providing a deeper understanding of the characters and conflict. And the last third is the heightened pace of action leading to the climax and resolution of the conflict.

In Heart of Darkness,, after the first third of the short novel, Conrad threw the rule book out the window. All this stuff happens in the second third, offering no respite for the reader.

Marlow has located his boat and fixed it, and he’s now sailing upstream. On board are pilgrims. Also on board are some interesting members of the crew. They’re cannibals. He thinks they’re exercising great restraint or perhaps they’re just not hungry. 

At one stop, he finds a ruined reed hut. Inside is a book, An Inquiry into Some Points of Seamanship, written by a master in the British Navy. The book is filled with marginal notes. To Marlow, the notes look like code. He takes the book with him.

He continues to learn more about Mister Kurtz, the object of his journey.

There’s an attack on the boat from shore. A key crew member is killed. It’s looking grim for all concerned when the pilgrims (the pilgrims!) open fire on the jungle, scattering the attackers. Amid all the chaos, Marlow becomes seriously worried that, if the local population has started attacking, then Kurtz must be dead. 

He reads a report written by Kurtz for the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs, finding the writing to be eloquent. He sees a small note written by Kurtz at the end: “Exterminate all the brutes!” So much for eloquence.

He meets a Russian dressed like a harlequin. The book found earlier turns out to belong to the Russian, and the “code” on the margins is actually notes written in Russian. Like everything else around him, the book and the notes contribute to the sense of unreality (Marlow uses the word “absurdity”).

Expecting at least some calm, the reader, like Marlow himself, is instead whipsawed at every turn of the river. The action does not stop, especially for the rules of writing fiction. There’s no nice, slow development of the narrative here; this is more like Raymond Chandler’s advice for writing: “When in doubt, have two men come in the door with guns.”

As he ponders Kurtz and the man’s writing, Marlow makes one of the most profound statements in Chapter 2 and in the entire book. Learning about Kurtz’s diverse family background, Marlow says, “All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz.”

And there it is: Marlow’s statement about Kurtz, about Europe, and about Africa, all wrapped up in one concise sentence. He hasn’t even found or met Kurtz yet, but he already knows the meaning of Kurtz’s life.  Heart of Darkness isn’t a story about Africa; it is a story about European behavior in Africa.

Perhaps Chapter 3 will allow us to catch our breath.

This month at Literary Life on Facebook, we’re studying Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, in an edition that includes an extensive study guide by Karen Swallow Prior. 

Top photograph by Peter Oswald via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Dancing Prince: The Heart of a Child

By 2 Comments

The first four Dancing Priest novels were about Michael Kent-Hughes. In the fifth, Dancing Prince, the character who is stage center is Michael’s youngest child, Thomas, or Tommy, as he’s called by friends and family. He’s named for Michael childhood, college, and adult friend, Thomas MacFarland. 

As the novel begins, Tommy is four years old. His mother, Sarah Kent-Hughes, is painting in her studio when she discovers that the boy has slipped inside to watch. The unwritten rule of the family is that no one watches Sarah when she’s painting – not Michael, not the other children, not friends, no one. And yet there’s Tommy, quietly watching her and doing his own little drawings.

At first perturbed, Sarah looks at what Tommy’s been drawing, and she realizes that the boy might have artistic talent. She encourages him and continues to allow him in her studio while she paints. Until the day Michael comes home unexpectedly and finds them both painting in the studio. What happens next will frame the next two decades of Tommy’s life and the life of his father. It also frames the novel.

The novel shows Tommy at 4, 6, 13, 15, 19, and his early 20s. In his relationship with Michael, there is a recurring pattern, leading to the estrangement between the two. David Hughes, Sarah’s twin brother, becomes the significant male influence in Tommy’s life. Because Tommy so strongly resembles his uncle; people often think he looks more like David’s child than Michael’s. David also becomes the chief counsel to Michael on the subject of Tommy, for it is to David that Michael turns at times of crisis. 

What the story required was a boy and eventually a young man who somehow retain s the heart of a child. Tommy is known as the most devout of Michael and Sarah’s children. He’s also the most perceptive and intuitive. As his older brother Hank points out, from a young age Tommy always seems to know what is going to happen next, and he always seems to understand what is happening better than his older siblings.

Tommy was not the easiest character to develop. The section when he is 13 was actually the first part of the Tommy sections of the novel that was written. The scene of Michael accompanying Tommy and a friend to the Imperial War Museum is actually the oldest written part of the novel, having been originally drafted in 2006 and 2007 as part of a very different story about Michael and his family.

Tommy wasn’t supposed to be the main character of this novel. As the drafting got underway, Tommy kept poking his head into the story. It was almost as if I couldn’t keep him out or under control. It was a year ago that I finally threw up my hands and surrendered, completely revising the draft into something that is closer to what was finally published. Tommy turned out to be very content with being the center of attention.

Top photograph by Japheth Mast via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Heart of Darkness: “One of the Dark Places of the Earth”

By Leave a Comment

Five of you – friends, business colleagues, and the boss – are meandering your way down a river. It’s an early evening get-together, and you’re enjoying the company and the beverages. The sun has just set. It’s that early moment of dusk when the world becomes shades of gray. You’re feeling a bit mellow; it’s a bit of an escape from work and life in the city you just left behind.

Suddenly, you hear this: “And this also has been one the dark places of the earth.” No one responds, except perhaps for a raised eyebrow or a slight roll of the eyes. The one who said it is known for such things. He’s also known for telling long stories, and you suspect you’re in for one. 

You’re right; you are. It starts with a brief discussion of how the area you’re sailing through was first settled hundreds of years before, and what those first settlers – soldiers – experienced so far from home, right there on the edge of civilization. From that perspective, the area was a dark place. But from the perspective of the story you are about to hear, the real point of that sudden, startling, original comment, you will find yourself confronting the idea that it is still a dark place. This home you know so well, with its skyscrapers, museums, opera houses, art galleries, find neighborhoods, paved roads, medical facilities, and so much more is actually a dark place? 

And because you’re going to tell me a story about Africa? What?

I had the misfortune (or good fortune) of not reading Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad in high school or college. Instead, we read Lord Jim by the same author. The two books, originally published a year apart (1899 and 1900, respectively), have similar themes. But Lord Jim seems somewhat easier to read, and its narrative concerns the act of a disabled passenger ship by its crew. Heart of Darkness centers on the search for a man in the jungles of the Congo, Mister Kurtz, but it takes a while for the reader to figure that out, and a bit longer to learn that it’s about something else entirely. 

Joseph Conrad

Embedded in that first bit of dialogue, “one of the dark places of the earth,” is the theme of Heart of Darkness. As we read on, that statement seems to haunt the narrative. The narrator, a sea captain named Marlow, will describe how he had the desire to pursue such a career, how he gained the help of relatives, how he went to city that always reminded him of “whited sepulchers” (another kind of darkness), and how he gained a commission to captain a steamer on the Congo River, in that continent both stereotypically and forever known as “darkest Africa.” 

Arriving at his destination in the “dark continent,” Marlow discovers he will have to travel through the Congo to reach his boat. And he is struck of the sharp contrasts between the well-dressed Europeans and the Congolese people who are native to the region. Light, tailored clothes and rough, minimal clothes. Light skin and dark skin. Civilization and its seeming lack. 

The contrasts in Heart of Darkness are often so marked that the reader begins to understand something: Conrad might be suggesting that the contrasts may actually not exist. And if they don’t exist, the idea of darkness surely does, so where does it come from? And you go back to the first dialogue, “And this has also been one of the dark places of the earth.” Don’t forget the “has been” here; Marlow doesn’t say “was” but “has been,” implying that it still is. That the story of a jungle river journey is being told in the context of a leisurely sailing trip near London underscores that the darkness isn’t just in Africa.

And this is what Marlow is going to discover, as he begins his journey to find his boat and to find Mister Kurtz, the man whose name is on everyone’s lips, the European agent who seems to be the source of all wisdom and knowledge in this region of darkness. Marlow is going to learn that the darkness does not come from a place, a condition, or a situation, but that it resides in the human heart.

This month at Literary Life on Facebook, we’re studying Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, in an edition that includes an extensive study guide by Karen Swallow Prior. This post is a discussion of Part 1 of the short novel.

First Review for “Dancing Prince”

By Leave a Comment

Dancing Prince has its first review on Amazon, and it’s a five-star. Thank you, Carla!

“What does one say when you have lived so intimately with the Kent-Hughes family, suffering with them in their sorrows and rejoicing in their achievements and triumphs. Always and most importantly delighting in the way their every path in life revealed their Christian passion and commitment. I am sorry their fans don’t get to continue walking with them but pray their lives will impact many faithful and searching readers.

“As a side note, I was reluctant to read the epilogue for I expected to be disappointed with a story going in a totally different direction after so thoroughly enjoying the 5 books in the series. What a surprise awaited me. You will NOT be disappointed.”

You can see the review at the Amazon page.

The Story of the Novella ‘Island’

By Leave a Comment

“Did you write this?”

My publisher asked me that question after reading the manuscript for the novella Island. The reasons he asked was straightforward. It is completely unlike the writing style for the five novels that constitute the Dancing Priest series. 

The novella is closely connected to but not dependent upon Dancing Prince, the fifth and final novel in the series just published last week. The choices were to publish it as a separate work or include it as a bonus with the novel. Ultimately, we included it as a bonus with the novel. (The photograph above is the one that would have been used for the cover if we’d decided to make it a separate work.)

Early readers of Dancing Prince have discovered that the novel itself is about the same length as its four predecessors. But the novella adds another 20,000 words.

Island is story that a character in Dancing Prince, Erica Larsson, begins to write to explain – at least in fiction – how a tomb on the island of Broughby in the Orkneys might have come to be. The story doesn’t play a critical role in the main narrative, but it does stand as something of an extension of it.

The novella tells the story of Aoife and Ulf, two people living at the end of the 9th century. Aoife was born on the island, the daughter of a Celtic fisherman and the Dane woman he marries. Ulf is the third son of the king of Trondelag, a city and region in what is now Norway. Island is even given an introduction by Farley MacNeill, a character in the book who is the professor and academic mentor for Thomas Kent-Hughes. Thomas, or Tommy, is the fourth natural child and second son of Michal and Sarah Kent-Hughes and leads the archaeological dig that finds the tomb on the island of Broughby. 

MacNeill writes that he finds the story compelling historically, and he notes as almost an aside that he finds that the author has told something of her own story. 

The idea for the novella predates Dancing Prince itself. In 2014, I was fascinated by an article in Discover Britain magazine entitled “All roads lead Norse: Mysteries of the Orkney Islands.” It described the Neolithic and Norse relics and sites that are common in these islands off the northern coast of Scotland. The story is available online but is behind the magazine’s paywall. A similar story, “Discover the ancient island history of Orkney,” is available on the magazine’s web site and includes a photo of St. Magnus Cathedral in Kirkwall, which has a brief mention in Dancing Prince. 

In 2015, when my wife and I visited Britain, I made a point of visiting the Lewis Chessmen exhibition at the British Museum. These game pieces are among a hoard of similar pieces found buried on the Isle of Lewis in the Orkneys in the 19th century. I even picked up a few replicas, and this crowd sits on the shelf above my computer screen. They watched me write the manuscripts for Dancing King, Dancing Prophet, and Dancing Prince. The original chessmen are a couple of hundred years older than the period for Island, but they have been a good reminder of where the story came from.

The names and events of Island are based on a lot of online research into Viking / Norse and Celtic names and customs, as well as a lot of reading of Viking and Scottish history. I won’t claim that I got everything right; in fact, the story in the novella and the main novel turns on a Viking expedition about a century earlier than what history tells us. 

As the publisher discovered, the writing style is very different from the five novels. For one thing, it’s written entirely in the present tense; most novels, including mine, are usually written in the past tense. It’s also what’s called historical fiction; the five novels are closer to something I might call contemporary alternative history. Plain fiction works, too.

But that’s where the novella came from.

We All Know a Boo Radley

By Leave a Comment

I was all of 21, in my first job after college graduation. I’d been hired as a copy editor on the news desk of the Beaumont (Tex.) Enterprise. Production at the Enterprise was just becoming automated, at least in what we called the “backshop.” Reporters still used typewriters, typing up their copy, handing it to editors (including new ones like me) and hoping we didn’t slaughter their peerless prose when we edited.

Most reporters, like most writers, required editing. I quickly learned who the better reporters were – the ones whose copy didn’t need much editing. Some needed a lot. One rarely if ever needed any – and he was the newspaper’s staff mystery.

I’ll call him Joe. He was in his 50s, and he covered local government. When Joe turned in his stories, he would mumble, almost as if apologizing. I don’t think anyone understood the mumbles. The mystery was how he did his job – he was never seen at a city council or other government meeting, and yet his stories reported exactly what went on. No one knew how Joe did it. Even more mysteriously, no one knew where he lived. He received his mail at the newspaper, and that was his legal address. One staffer followed him in his car one night, and all Joe did was drive around Beaumont for more than an hour until his lost the tail. 

Joe was the stuff of legends at the newspaper. People had all kinds of stories about him, some of which might have been true. New staffers right out of college were especially gullible about the stories. Slightly feared and always a mystery, he was like the Boo Radley of the Beaumont Enterprise.

Bood Radley and Scout in the 1962 movie version of “To Kill a Mockingbird”

In Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, Boo Radley is the character that stays mostly in the background but on whom a good portion of the story centers. He’s the bogeyman for the children of the town of Maycomb. He’s never seen, but the children know he’s there, in the Radley home. He’s the stuff of Maycomb legends, and the children try to think of all kinds of ways to lure him outside. The Radley house is the one you run past, or the one you’re dared by your friends to knock on the door.

Jem and Scout Finch live three houses down from the Radley residence, and Boo occupies the children’s minds. They try to draw him out. They play games, enacting stories about the Radley family. Then they begin to notice small items left in a tree, almost like breadcrumbs. The items could be gifts, or clues, or even invitations. But slowly the children’s understanding of Boo begins to change. 

Discovering who Boo is will ultimately save the Finch children’s lives. While the adults are dealing with all of the implications of the Tom Robinson trial, itself rocking long-held racial prejudices, the children are finding out about the real Boo. When the two narrative streams converge, in the wooded way home on Halloween night, it is Boo who intervenes to save the children from a murderous Robert Ewell. 

I was a young teen when I first saw the movie, but I still vividly remember the scene of Jem in bed with his broken arm, Scout sitting nearby, and behind the bedroom door is Boo (played by a young Robert Duvall), saying nothing, still watching over the children. Scout has a moment of utter realization when she recognizes who the man must be. “Hey, Boo,” she says. Atticus Finch tells his children to “meet Arthur Radley.” And he tells Boo that he owes him the lives of his children. 

Boo Radley is a legend, a legend comprised of mostly fearful or fanciful stories. Those who might know the truth won’t trouble themselves to tell it. The children retell and exaggerate the stories. But even after Boo emerges from the shadows as a real character, there is still much the children (and the readers) don’t know. As Matt Rawle points out in The Faith of a Mockingbird, “Harper Lee never lets the readers in on Boo’s true story, so we are left to make our own conclusions and opinions about Boo’s reclusive behavior.” 

You can make up your own mind about what, or who, Boo might represent, but he can be a God-like figure, the God we all hear stories and legends about, some awfully scary. We can’t say that we see him much, but he leaves little breadcrumbs for us to find. And when times are bad, he’s the mysterious figure carrying us through the woods, like Boo carried the injured Jem. And when the scales on our eyes fall off, and we finally recognize him and see him, suddenly we, too, say “Hey, Boo.”

I left the Enterprise before ever finding out if anyone solved the mystery of Joe. Perhaps it was sufficient that I learned that he was a good reporter and a good writer, even if he was never seen at events he wrote about. I can still see him shuffling into the newsroom, nodding at us at the copy desk, and finding his way to his desk and typewriter, typing yet another completely accurate story about what happened at the city council meeting. 

We all know a Boo Radley. 

Top photograph by Mads Schmidt Rasmussen via Unsplash. Used with permission.