Critique #89 Brian Dolton
Katharine Kerr October 8th, 2006
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Winter had come to the Great North Road. The ruts were half-frozen, the ground an unpleasant mixture of mud and ice. A gibbous moon shone down, through shreds of high cloud. Henry St. Saviour wished that his black highwayman’s coat was both shorter, that it might not drag in the rime and grime, and thicker, that it might better serve to keep out the keen November wind.
“Faith, Billy, and it’s on just such a night as this the coach would be delayed,” he said, blowing on his hands.
“It’ll be here, Captain,” Billy answered.
St. Saviour didn’t bother reminding Billy that he hadn’t been a captain for eleven years, now. He’d long since given up expecting the boy to call him anything else. Even in church, Billy Bowman always called him Captain, not Reverend. No matter that Billy had only been five years old when St. Saviour had bought himself out of his commission in the army, and taken the far less colourful uniform of a man of God.
Hi Brian.
I’ve gotta be honest - I wasn’t blown away by this opening. Yes it sets the scene, introduces characters etc etc, and no there’s not really a huge amount wrong with it in the grammar dept., but there’s just something missing.
I’ll get a couple of little things out of the way first:
‘A gibbous moon shone down, through shreds…’ - I think the comma is unneeded. Also, it could just be me being dense (because I had to look it up :p), but I did wonder how many bog-standard readers would know what a ‘gibbous moon’ is. Is it a necessary detail? It’s quite an odd word in itself, and sticks out oddly (even moreso if you don’t know what it means), so if it’s not needed, I’d consider getting rid.
‘Henry St. Saviour wished that his black highwayman’s… November wind’ - it gets a bit long and convoluted. If you can’t shorten the sentence down a bit, I’d at least use some brackets or hyphens to break it up (instead of the commas). Also, ‘rime and grime’ didn’t work for me - there’s nothing specifically wrong with it, it just sounded a little… deliberate, for my liking. You’ve already established that the ground is icy and muddy - it doesn’t need reiterating so soon after the initial description (and on a more personal note, the rhyming makes it sound a little sing-songy to me, and hence detracts from the feel of ‘cold uncomfortable’. Just personal preference on that, though).
As I say, there aren’t a great many knits to pick in this - it’s the overall effect that’s the problem.
Take your opening line, for example: ‘Winter had come to the Great North Road’ - it sounds very ‘once upon a time’ to me. You might as well say ‘The sun rose over the peaks of the Blue Mountains’ or ‘The Mystic Forest awoke to the warm light of spring’. All of these openings are essentially the same - there’s nothing to set yours apart from the rest.
All you’ve really got here is long-winded description (i.e. the coat - is it really so important that it should take up nearly a quarter of your opening?) and backstory. I’ll admit that I am slightly interested by the Captain-to-Reverend conversion, and on the strength of that alone I’d read on, but not for very much further unless things improved. Nothing has to ‘happen’, necessarily (plenty of good books start with gentle descriptions of settings, etc), but in this case I think more characterisation and less history would help; I don’t really want to know the life story of a character who has, thus far, said one thing (and it was essentially complaining about the weather).
I know I’m being quite hard on the opening, so I hope I haven’t put you off - the only real problem I had with this is that I found it slightly boring.
Anyway, I hope this helped :).
I like historical adventures, so I liked this opening, though I agree about the gibbous: unless we need to know that, why not ‘moon shone down’.
the one nit that blipped me out of the story was the name ‘St. Saviour.’ That seems like ‘Saint Jesus’–which doesn’t ring true as far as I am aware of Catholic theology: the Saviour would be jesus, who is surely above the Saints in the heavenly hierarchy, yes?
Thanks for the comments. I was indeed concerned that it was a touch on the pedestrian side.
Regarding the name: there are a significant number of churches in the UK dedicated to St. Saviour, although I have been unable to find out why - I’ve never found any reference to an actual saint of that name.
OKay, then it’s legit—but odd.
I like this opening.
I don’t know why, but this sentence works well for me. Rime and grime didn’t pop out at me, but maybe the rhyming is a problem.
I don’t think this sentence is as clear as it could be. “Faith” makes me think something along the lines of “have faith or patience” which is at odds with what follows. “…and it’s on just such a night as this…” I can’t help but think this is a strange way to talk. Could be just me.
If you really want to get nit-picky, I’d say the last paragraph could flow more easily. “Even in Church” Starting the sentence with this introduces a new topic before I’m quite ready for it–maybe start the sentence with what we know—the Captain and Billy—then lead into the church and Reverend. “…and taken the far less colourful uniform of a man of God.” I think this part doesn’t help clarify the main subject of this sentence, that Billy hadn’t been old enough to know St. Saviour as a Captain.
I read this, I fear, as a pardody of an old-style historical novel–perhaps because the name St. Saviour, while legit, is kind of over-the-top. St. Saviour is ex-military, currently a clergyman, and is also a highwayman? Shades of Dr. Syn. And the diction of the narration is also, for reasons I can’t quite put my finger on, sort of Georgette-Heyer-doing-Georgian; there’s nothing wrong with that, but since her work was inflected by her own time, seeing a similar voice coming from someone at the beginning of the 21st century seemed odd.
While you get a lot of information crammed into this brief excerpt, it may be a little too much: that last paragraph, which has already been mentioned, is so dense with data that it’s slow to parse–not hard to understand, exactly, but I had to slow my reading to get what you were saying.
I would certainly read more, I would very soon want to know whether my initial reading was correct–that this was parody of the Dr. Syn/Scarlet Pimpernel sort of fiction–or not.