Hi Guys

I was wondering if there are any hard and fast rules about these. For instance does it work to write a novel with parallel narratives with an MC who takes up the bulk of the story? Also what makes this type of novel work?

I know that there are good examples around such as the Andrea Levy, Small Island, way which seems very neat and ordered - but probably quite hard to achieve. Then there is the Salman Rusdie, Midnight's children - which is not so much parallel narratives but parallel storylines that keep you on your toes. I would be really interested to hear from anyone who feels comfortable with this type of writing. S

Shika, TMOL is a parallel narrative in the most extreme sense: two separate stories with two different narrators, 150 years apart. The only physical things that link them are a house, and a set of letters. (Well, almost only, but I'm not going reveal what the other link is...)

The difficulty I found was making the links strong enough that readers didn't spend the whole thing waiting to discover why these two stories were in the same novel. The other difficulty is that most people like one strand more than the other, and you don't want them twiddling their thumbs in that other one, just waiting to get back to the first one, or worse still giving up altogether. A S Byatt admits that she much preferred the 19th Cent strand of Possession, to the modern one, which doesn't surprise me, since everyone else does too.

The necessity is to have a very strong sense of the structure, because how the two strands rub up against each other is crucial - why else would you be doing it like this? I planned TMOL out fairly thoroughly, but this one, which is also in a way a parallel narrative, I'm rather more making up the details as I go along. But I think I'm much more relaxed about these issues: after TMOL I feel much better equipped to spot what doesn't work and sort it out in revisions. Of all the post-first-draft work I did on TMOL it was the parallelness that I found hardest, that others were least convinced by at first, and that it took me longest to get right.

I'm not sure if I'd call it quite a parallel narrative if the two had a narrator in common - in old age, and youth, say - or if one was very subordinate to another. What's interesting about it as a technique as far as I'm concerned is that it's trying to see if you can link two stories that aren't linked in the way that conventional novel-writing demands, by plot and character. It means you can have two completely different takes on a subject - like a surveyor looking at a triangulation point from several places. And so by removing plot and character from the question, you can explore explicitly all the other components that make up a satisfying fiction: imagery, ideas, themes, places, atmospheres.

Emma

Emma

Thanks for this. I think my problem has been one of definition. By what you say, I guess I am thinking about a non-linear story with multiple perspectives and one omniscient story-teller. I guess in this sort of format it does not matter if some of the perspectives are less important than the MC's for example, whereas I can see from your post that two parallel narratives linked only by themes or imagery or both would be much more tricky to execute. Are the two narratives in TMOL told in the first person? S

I am thinking about a non-linear story with multiple perspectives and one omniscient story-teller

Sounds good to me. The only risk would be if you have so many perspectives in such short bites that it becomes difficult for the reader to get into each one when it comes along. And if it's very non-linear, you have to keep checking that it's clear what's happening where and when. But if Dickens can do it, so can the rest of us. The single omniscient narrator can be a unifying element, too.

Two very different takes on the same idea are Graham Swift's Last Orders which is technically very accomplished, but I've only just started, (and may yet find annoying, but at the moment seems remarkable and remarkably good) and Marge Piercy's Gone to Soldiers which has 10 MCs, at a chapter each at a time - a loosely-linked set of people going through the Second World War. I read it years ago and can still remember the power of her storytelling, and the virtuousity of how she could make you instantly involved with each one as their turn came round again.

Both strands of TMOL are in the first person, yes, and one of my first tasks was to work out how to differentiate their voices as much as possible. I love first person for the scope it gives you for exploring the gaps between what I can make the character say, what I can make them think, and what I want the reader to realise that they don't.
Emma

The difficulty I found was making the links strong enough that readers didn't spend the whole thing waiting to discover why these two stories were in the same novel. The other difficulty is that most people like one strand more than the other, and you don't want them twiddling their thumbs in that other one, just waiting to get back to the first one, or worse still giving up altogether. A S Byatt admits that she much preferred the 19th Cent strand of Possession, to the modern one, which doesn't surprise me, since everyone else does too.

I couldn't agree more on this. There's nothing more annoying than to be involved in one strand, and then get interrupted by another that isn't appealing at all -- the greater the disparity, the greater the annoyance, in my opinion. I think Possession is a good example of parallel narratives well handled, because even though the modern one is nowhere near as interesting as the 19th-century one, the former also advances the latter (and vice versa... in a way).

But what I really wanted to bring up here is the big mistake of coming up with a parallel narrative (or a subplot), or even forcing one, just to illuminate the overall theme of the novel from another angle, and treating the one as the other's subordinate from the very start. They very likely won't be equal in the finished work, but to start with this mentality is to end up with one narrative that has all the interesting aspects of the story, and another that's no more than a b-o-r-i-n-g dumping spot for obvious symbolism.

At least, that has been my experience.

But what I really wanted to bring up here is the big mistake of coming up with a parallel narrative (or a subplot), or even forcing one, just to illuminate the overall theme of the novel from another angle, and treating the one as the other's subordinate from the very start.

Yes, quite right. Each strand has to be a perfectly good story on its own, but the two together have to add up to more than twice as interesting, by virtue of the links between them.

Emma

Emma

You're going to kill me. I dumped Possesion, twice. Even though every one around me was raving I just could not read it. Are there any other good examples of parallel narratives? S

Michael Cunningham handles parallel storylines and multiple points of view exceptionally well. I'm a huge fan of his work and I think The Hours is a great example of how multiple narratives can be interesting in themselves, but are enhanced when placed side by side. A Home at the End of the World is written from a variety of points of view and Cunningham does an amazing job of weaving the different narratives together. Would recommend reading his work as an example of how it should be done!

Shika, no, I absolutely understand why anyone dumps Possession, in fact I'm amazed it's been as staggeringly successful as it has. I actually didn't like it all that much when I first read it, it was just that it was perfect for my MPhil dissertation. As I dissected it, I got to like it more and more, but I still think that I might not have persisted with the modern story, if I hadn't been so desperate to find out what happened to the 19th century lovers.

I think full-blown parallel narratives as I define them are rare. The French Lieutenant's Woman is the other well-known one, but I couldn't get on with it at all. Apparently William Boyd's next one is like that - 1976 and 2nd World War. Cymro's right, The Hours is wonderful - I'm thrilled to know he's written more, BTW Cymro, and I'm off to the bookshop tomorrow. Penelope Lively's Moon Tiger is an old-woman-looking-back sort of parallel narrative, just make sure you've got a very large box of tissues to hand because it's terribly sad.

And there's always TMOL, not that I'd dream of mentioning it, of course.

Jane Rogers - Her Living Image

That's a parallel narrative where both characters are the same person.

It's what inspired me to write my current WIP, although I'm writing in the YA Chick Lit genre so I can't really compare at all. It's loosely inspired by that book. I'd recommend the book, though.

Luisa

Re: Byatt -- you know, I think she's brilliant when she writes something with an historical setting, and rather less so when she writes something contemporary. I love her fairy-tales, too. I remember reading (or trying to read) Babel Tower a few years ago; I loved the disturbing historical parable, but the main narrative was such a slog I eventually gave up on it. (Admittedly I was an impatient teenager then, so perhaps I should try again...) I wish she wrote a full-scale historical novel with several intervowen strands, some touches of realism mixed with a splash of the fantastic, Gothic, and whimsical -- I think that kind of thing would do justice to her true abilities. Contemporary realism seems to hold her back, somehow.

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I almost forgot what I was meaning to post in the first place! In my opinion, 19th-century novelists perfected the technique of parallel narratives -- I think the different strands in, say, Middlemarch, Anna Karenina, Bleak House, and The Way We Live Now complement each other perfectly and the end result is an organic whole. I think it's because of the didactic roots of the realist novel. The further you get from the didactic novel, the more problematic it gets to connect narratives in a meaningful way.

But would you call them 'parallel narratives' or just 'interconnected narratives'? And is there a difference?

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Oh, and if we're talking about The Hours, we mustn't forget Mrs Dalloway either!

Re: Fredegonde's comment on AS Byatt -"Contemporary realism seems to hold her back, somehow."

Diffr'nt strokes for diffr'nt folks I guess. I loved The Virgin in the Garden, and Still Life, but Possession I couldn't get on with ... For some weird reason I can't quite fathom, the ending reminds me of The Shining, probably a shared Gothic virus. Not that I've anything against Gothic infection 'per se', as Hyacinth Bucket might say. (And I love The Shining, but the Kubrick movie even more).

Jim

Yes, the ending of

Possession

is just plain silly, though up until then I quite enjoy the sort of campus-satire of all the academics chasing each other - very over-determined, but rather fun.

I would only call something a parallel narrative if the two strands could more-or-less be untwined from each other and stand as stories on their own (can't be bothered to disentangle that mixed metaphor). Anything where characters can move from one to the other, or plots interdepend, I wouldn't call parallel narrative. The difficulty - and therefore the game (or technical challenge) - is to see if you can prevent readers from wondering why these two stories are in the same novel.

Emma

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yeah, well, I meant italics, didn't I

Emma,

Would theme and imagery be enough? Or would there be at least some moral hint to tie the two together? Obviously, all will become clear once I read TMOL - sorry can't do a smiley - but seriously why would this be the best structure for a particular story? Sorry it's very early too and I am having a child's birthday party hangover. S

I am having a child's birthday party hangover

Infinitely worse than the alcohol kind - though I usually end up with both, owing to the amount of alcohol needed to recover from said party.

In TMOL I wanted to explore all sorts of questions: about war and art and the ethics of combining the two, ideal romantic love versus the messy scruffy real kind, what war does to people, why people live in communities (regiments, schools, convents), and above all, transgressive relationships of all kinds. The way I always start thinking about such things myself is by wondering about how these things were at different periods: what's different and what's the same, what's culturally conditioned and what's the human condition. So of course I couldn't help setting up the novel to be wondering about it all in the same way. As well as ideas, everything's all netted together with a web of images, mostly from early and modern photography, about light/dark, positive/negative, portraits and pictures, mirrors and windows and reflections (which is why it was called Shadows in the Glass for a long time).

I'd like to think that would all be enough to link two stories, but no one else thinks so. TMOL was like that for the whole of the first draft, mostly because I couldn't see how to link them, beyond putting them in the same house, without it being impossibly creaky. But so many people said, 'I like each of the stories but I got annoyed because couldn't see why they were both in the same novel', including editors and agents, that I gave in and linked them with a set of letters too, and once I'd done that all sorts of other things developed. Realistically for almost all readers I think there does have to be some sort of plot-connection. After all, plot is still the sine-qua-non of fiction, however elliptically it's set out at the more experimental end of the business.

Emma