Rod Raglin
This blog will touch on the experiences I have as a writer (not to be mistaken for my experience as a writer, i.e. how many books I've written, etc); the pleasure and the pain, the joy and the grief, the satisfaction and the frustration, the magic and the reality - have I left anything out, oh yeah, the rejection, rejection and more rejection, the humiliation and the embarrassment, the jealousy and the resentment - that pretty much covers it, except for why I do it which perhaps I'll realize along the way. Are you totally confused? Good, let's begin.
"Literary" fiction at its worst
This novel begins with a piano falling on a man and killing him. The piano is being hoisted into the window of a third-storey apartment, being too large to fit in an elevator or negotiate the stairwells.
In hindsight this should have tipped me off. Why would someone be standing under a piano? Wouldn’t the sidewalk be cordoned off? I mean most people won’t walk under a ladder, but this character stood under a piano being hoisted up three storeys?
I kept on reading because the plot sounded fascinating – an astrophysicist has evidence of extraterrestrial life, an anthropologist has discovered ancient writings that cast in doubt the Book of Genesis. Evidence of both these revelations comes into the possession of one woman who is pursued by fundamentalist of three faiths who don’t want this information revealed to the public.
It sounds like an action thriller along the lines of the Da Vinci Code. It’s not.
Long descriptive passages bog down the narrative, conversations lead to nothing, and when the plot (finally) advances it’s with contrived scenes that push the suspension of belief, well, beyond belief.
Add to that an ending that leaves so many situations unresolved I had to look back to see if I’d missed a chapter and what you’ve got is a “literary fiction” at its worst.
