Character, in any sense in which we can get it, is action, and action is plot. Henry James.

I have written about this question before in various posts (use the search tool at the top of the page to find them).

But I thought the story of how George Eliot came across and developed the story of Adam Bede, might be instructive.

The story was suggested by an event in the life of Eliot’s aunt, Mrs Evans, a Methodist preacher. Mrs Evens had spent a night in prison with a convicted child-murderer, a mere girl. Evans had sought to make the girl recognize her guilt, and had then accompanied her to the hangman.

George Lewes, with whom Eliot lived in an open-marriage, suggested that the night in prison would make a good scene in a novel – and Adam Bede was conceived with that scene as its centerpiece.

Eliot created a seducer – obviously necessary to the plot – who was a young officer, heir to the local squire. But as well as her seducer, the girl, Hetty, is blessed with a true lover of her own class; Adam Bede.

George Lewes suggested that the novel should end with Adam’s marriage to the woman preacher, and that there should be a clash of some kind between Adam Bede and the young officer.

Leslie Stephen tells how, while she was listening to Wilhelm Tell at the Munich opera, George Eliot was inspired to make the two rivals fight.

The aunt’s story is softened considerably, in that Hetty is not guilty of murder, but only of temporary desertion of her baby. And neither is Hetty hanged, but instead transported to Botany Bay.

I find it both amusing and instructive to have the ability to follow the mind of a great novelist and to glimpse how different people and influences impinge on the development of her story.

1. The criminal must be someone mentioned in the early part of the story, but must not be anyone whose thoughts the reader has been allowed to follow.

2. All supernatural or preternatural agencies are ruled out as a matter of course.

3. Not more than one secret room or passage is allowable.

4. No hitherto undiscovered poisons may be used, nor any appliance which will need a long scientific explanation at the end.

5. No Chinaman must figure in the story.

6. No accident must ever help the detective, nor must he ever have an unaccountable intuition which proves to be right.

7. The detective must not himself commit the crime.

8. The detective must not light on any clues which are not instantly produced for the inspection of the reader.

9. The stupid friend of the detective, the Watson, must not conceal any thoughts which pass through his mind; his intelligence must be slightly, but very slightly, below that of the average reader.

10. Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them.

If you are a writer in the 21st century your main task is to break all these rules on a regular basis. Though you may find that someone got there before you.

While he was negotiating with the cook, we got this beautiful Polish girl who had started work at the wagon this morning, all white teeth and blonde hair and not a whole lot of English. ‘We’d like two breakfasts,’ I told her and she flashed a smile and asked, ‘You want sauerkraut with that.’

Took me a minute, it wasn’t a question I’d been asked before. ‘No sauerkraut,’ I said. Then I said, a little louder and that way you talk to foreigners when you forget everything you ever learned about them, ‘Two breakfasts. English.’ I gave her the whole five syllables and I could see in her face that she didn’t like me, but also, in the same face was total recognition of what we were there for, and it obviously didn’t involve, even in a remote way, sauerkraut.

She was conflicted about Tom because he has the body of a young god and he hadn’t said anything to upset her but was obviously with me.

‘They want two breakfasts,’ she said to the cook, a crooked little man with the ability to smile on just one side of his face.

‘About ten minutes,’ he said. ‘I’m up to my ears here.’

‘The Pole turned back to us. ‘Ten minutes?’

‘That’s fine,’ I said, beginning the process of worming my way back into her affections.

‘You want coffee?’

‘Two, please.’

‘Sugar?’

‘No thank you, and no milk. Black coffee.’

She hesitated and I realized I’d got close to giving her more information overload, but while I was still wondering she’d already got over it, put it down to cultural differences, and was slapping the coffee machine around.

Tom claimed a table behind the kids of the old guy’s two daughters and I brought our coffee over to him. ‘Two hamburgers, one hotdog,’ the cook shouted and the old guy got to his feet and collected the food and sorted out which of the kids it belonged to. He had his camera in one hand the whole time, not ready to shoot or anything, but well protected in a fancy case. I thought he probably had a bad experience with a previous camera, put it down one time, maybe even on a trip to York, and someone had it away. With this one he wasn’t taking any chances.

‘I didn’t want onions,’ the eldest kid said.

‘Why didn’t you say?’

‘I said a hotdog. I didn’t say onions.’

‘Hotdogs come with onions. If you don’t want onions, you have to say you don’t want onions.’
‘I can’t eat it with onions.’

‘Jesus.’ The old guy took the hotdog and brought it to the bin behind our table and emptied the onions out of it. Then he took it back to the kid. The kid opened it up again and inspected it for onion remains, found some and scattered them on the pavement under the table. At the same time the second youngest kid was emptying the ketchup bottle onto his hamburger. ‘Stop that,’ the old guy said, snatching the ketchup bottle away and putting it on the other table where the two daughters were stolidly ignoring anything that went on with their offspring. The little girl who must’ve been the youngest of them all was crying because she was the only one who didn’t have any ketchup and that was the main reason she’d wanted a hamburger in the first place, that and some chips, but they didn’t have any chips.

‘The chips’ll come in a minute,’ her grandfather said. ‘They’re not ready yet.’

‘I don’t want ‘em now,’ she told him. ‘You’ve took the ketchup.’

Another customer arrived wearing badly designed camouflage clothes, a vest and long shorts in some kind of synthetic material. In the field it would have made him look more visible rather than less. His enemy would have been able to pick him out at almost any range. In addition to the camouflage gear he wore a moustache and white ankle socks with open-toed sandals. ‘I’ve got a girlfriend now,’ he told the cook, over the counter. ‘Living with me in the same house and everything.’

‘Jeez,’ Tom told me. ‘I’m beginning to remember why I moved away from this town.’

‘Two chicken burgers,’ the cook shouted, and the old guy started up out of his chair again, his camera swinging on its strap. ‘Chicken burgers,’ he said, ‘Who ordered chicken burgers?’

‘They’re ours, dad,’ one of the daughters said. ‘Ask him for mustard.’

While he went to the counter two women shoppers parked themselves at the table on the other side of the kids.

The old guy came back with the chicken burgers and mustard and one lot of chips. He gave the burgers and the mustard to the women and the chips to the small girl. But the other kids at the table all dived for the chips. ‘Stop that,’ he shouted. ‘These chips are for Melany. Yours’ll be ready in a minute.

The eldest lad took another chip and the old guy took it off him and put it back in Melany’s polystyrene bowl. The lad didn’t think about it. He reached forward and got the same chip again, long one. ‘Put it back,’ the old guy said menacingly.

The boy threw it in the air and it sailed up and away and came down in the bag of one of the lady shoppers at the next table. She retrieved it and dropped it back in Melany’s bowl. ‘Can you please control your children,’ she said to everyone at large, the old guy, the two daughters, Tom and I and the cook and the Polish girl and even the man in the camouflage gear who had moved over to an adjacent stall and was explaining his love life to the traders there.

‘More chips,’ the cook shouted philosophically, as the two women shoppers marched off to find an easier source of coffee.

The old man was flexing his fists by this time, and there was a little vein in his forehead which had gone into constant twitch mode. He said to the children, his voice controlled, even hushed. ‘This is my holiday as well, you know. Not just yours.’

He went for the rest of the chips and shared them out between the children. ‘Try and eat in a civilized manner,’ he said.

He sat with his daughters and composed himself. When one of the lads dropped his chips and hamburger on the floor under the table he didn’t even move. Eventually, when the two eldest lads began to fight and one of the metal chairs got overturned he collected all the remaining pieces of food and marched with them to the bin. ‘I’m terribly sorry about this,’ he explained to me and Tom. ‘They’re savages.’

‘Come on, we’re leaving.’ The whole extended family were on their feet and we watched them drift away into the crowds of shoppers in the market.

‘Two breakfasts,’ the cook said, and Tom got to his feet and brought our food to the table. As he sat down the old man returned, his face red. He pulled the chairs away from the tables they’d occupied. ‘Has anyone seen a camera?’ he asked, hysterically. ‘I must’ve put it down.’

We shook our heads.

He went to the counter and asked the cook and the Polish girl, and they shook their heads.

‘Day trippers,’ the cook said when the old guy went looking for his family.

‘He wasn’t having a good day,’ Tom said. ‘You could see it was gonna end bad.’

Robin – everyone else called her Rob because her second name was Berry and they liked how it sounded, especially when she took up with a guy called Nick King – looked me in the eye and with no sense of irony, said, ‘Be careful, I’m just emerging from my second-longest relationship.’

There’d been a time before when I’d said something she didn’t like and she’d clattered me round the head with an ashtray, so I’d got into the habit of not reacting when she said something, even if the something she said was bizarre or outrageous.

Keeping a straight face, I said, ‘That’d be the second longest after Nick?’

‘Right.’

‘How long?’

‘Fourteen months. I was with Nick for three and a half years. This guy, though, towards the end he was staying out all night long. It was humiliating.’

‘What did you do?’

‘I was gonna stick his mobile down his throat. Got it into his mouth, but he was too strong for me. Smashed one of his teeth and cut his gum, though. And even after he broke my nose I still bit him in the thigh, hung on in there until I tasted blood. I would’ve killed him if I could.’

I held the eye contact, pursed my lips and shook my head. Anyone could see where my sympathies were. ‘He broke your nose?’

‘Cartilage, not the bone. I was in A&I but it was worth it. All for some scrubber he met in the gym. Fucking drum-stick legs, no arse to speak of, and I’m sitting home smoking all night while he’s spooning it out to her.’

I’ve known Robin for fifteen, maybe twenty years, though ‘known’ is probably exaggeration. We’ve been acquainted for a long time. We were on opposite edges of the same scene shortly after I arrived in York, part of the fallout that followed the Thatcher revolution and the disintegration of the trade-union movement. For a brief moment of time it looked as though we were on the same side, and neither of us have taken the time to formally dissolve the relationship in the intervening years.

When I think over the times we have met up, Robin has been either drunk or in love. Once she was on the verge of a nervous breakdown and another time she was sitting on a kerb weeping, never said a word.

She had a daughter, Ellie, who is around fifteen, sixteen years old now. A hollow-eyed child, Ellie has grown into a teenager with a loud voice and hair in different coloured braids. She lives in a squat, a house that belongs to the church and believes that Jesus wants a legal transfer of ownership to take place.

Robin never asks me anything about myself. Our relationship consists of me asking concerned questions about her and she giving me sketchy information. The story is one of Robin, the vulnerable individual, battling the overwhelming power of destiny and the world and losing, but only marginally, always finding enough second wind to come back for one last try. My role, that of story-teller and sympathetic liberal onlooker, is only marginal.

‘I’ve gotta go,’ she said. She walked out to the street and I watched her walk out of the frame of the window.

A second later she walked back, opened the door and stuck her head into the café. ‘You know what?’ she said. ‘You’re fucking weird.’

His smile was the same and I watched him over the table as the girl served up our breakfast. When she had finished she looked down at the spread, and from my face to T’s and he reached to pat her hand. She let it happen, though something in her recoiled. For a moment she didn’t know how to handle the situation, but recognized there was no harm in him. T didn’t recognize that a situation had occurred, and now passed.

‘I want you to do something for me,’ he said, when she’d returned to the kitchen. He split the yoke of his egg, guiding it with his knife as it smeared one side of the toast and bacon. ‘If it’s too much to ask, that’s OK. But if you can do it I’ll be grateful.’

‘You know me,’ I said. ‘I’ll help if I can.’

‘I need to see Louisa. It’s been too long.’

‘Louisa.’ A name I hadn’t heard for some time. A wraith-like picture of her formed in my head. Louisa in her red dress, a painter and a dancer, seemingly always by his side. But a woman who inhabited a battle-ground; ostensibly offering hope and nurture while concealing a psychology that led her adrift, where no one could follow.

‘I need you to ring her for me, just tell her I want to meet up.’

‘Why me?’

‘I promised not to contact her. Her parents, her mother, they’re so against it. If I ring there’ll be an almighty row, and they wouldn’t let her speak to me, anyway. She’s trapped there, in that house.’
I ate slowly, taking a sip of my coffee, waiting to see where he would go next.

‘You tell them, whoever answers, you just tell them you’d like to speak to Louisa. They’ll probably put her on the phone. If they ask who you are, you tell them your name, you’re John, and you used to work with Louisa at her school, you were teachers together, and you’ve been away and come back and you’d like to see her again. Then when Louisa comes on the phone you tell her you’re ringing for me and I want to meet her, but you’ll have to speak quietly because her mother’ll be somewhere close, trying to listen in.’

He’d stopped eating by this time, though he still clutched both knife and fork. He’d thought long and hard about this, tried to foresee and cover anything that may get in the way of his plan. His Louisa had been stolen away from him or he had somehow agreed to give her up and the stark realisation of that was eating him away.

‘Once we’ve met it’ll be all right,’ he said. ‘We’ll be back where we were. OK, we’ll have to be careful, but we can do that, we managed before.’ He laughed, relaxed for a moment, looked down at his plate and cut off a sizeable portion of toast and bacon, carried it to his mouth on the fork. ‘It was ridiculous, thinking we would manage apart. Louisa’ll be the same, just like me, pining away.’

The serving girl came back to the table, tall like a young maple. ‘Everything all right?’ she asked.

‘Yeah,’ T told her. ‘I’m good. We’re good.’

We parted outside, T going to collect his car while I headed towards Fossgate and the walk home. My last glimpse of his back before his disappeared into the morning was of a portly man, somewhat unsure of his footing. A poet still, in his depths.

It must be fifteen years since Louisa slipped away from us, shortly after her parents died. I remember being surprised at the time, not that she had taken her own life, but because T himself was surprised. Everyone else who had known her had expected it for some time.

But none of us knew her as well as he.

And none of us, apart from T, had managed to keep part of her alive. We were too busy maintaining our own illusions.

They have wide wooden shelves against the windows and walls, and high steel-framed stools. Seems like most of their business is take-away sandwiches and drinks for the local office and shop workers, but there were several customers sitting with drinks or food when I arrived. A few more standing, waiting for a baguette or some kind of wrap.

I took a stool on the back wall next to a tall woman with a beard eating baked potato piled with shrimps and pink mayo. She caught a dribble of the sauce on her chin with her little finger and spooned it back over her bottom lip. She glanced at me and made her eyes bigger.

Swinegate Court is a covered passage. People use it as a short-cut from Swinegate to Grape Lane and there are often cars and vans parked head to tail. Maybe the owners leave them to unload stock into their shops.

There’s another restaurant in the passage and a Parisian style boutique called Giselle, which sells posh frocks. There were several on display in the window, on models without heads, lined up ready for a girls night out. Frothy creations reminiscent of a landscape anticipating the approach of spring.

One of the standing customers had been to see Celine Dion. ‘What’s she like now she’s had twins?’ her friend asked.

‘Like a stick. But she didn’t have twins. Just the one. A daughter.’

‘Lovely.’

The woman next to me pushed away the remains of her baked potato and started on her chocolate pudding.

Later she was joined by a tall man with a beard wearing a T-shirt with the slogan: ‘My Peace is Growing’. Being literal I stalled for a moment, believing the guy was a Christian or some other kind of religious.

Writers criticise Tesco for ‘chilling’ Thai libel actions
· Leading authors sign letter to retailer’s chief executive
· Supermarket chain urged to uphold human rights

*

Jacob Russell looks at beginnings:

I wanted to begin with opening paragraphs rather than sentences, precisely to get past the “hook” –the workshop clincher that’s become a cliché of the genre. Though short fiction typically opens in medias res, a story that dispensed altogether with opening exposition would likely be received as “experimental,” or in some way, unconventional. The opening exposition, we all know, may establish setting, tone, introduce characters, present necessary facts; those are the obvious functions, but some of these may not come till later in the narrative, and none of them alone quite hit on what may be the defining features, those that truly begin the story–which initiate the process and stamp everything that follows with its particular identity, such that, were the writer to violate what has been laid out in that beginning, she would have to change it–or lose the story in a narrative cul-de-sac.

*

An interesting report from the Literary Saloon at Metaxu Cafe, on the PEN World Voices Festival in New York. An impressive line-up moderated by PW-editor Sara Nelson, and including publishers Edwin Frank (New York Review Books), Michael Krüger (German Hanser Verlag), Halfdan W. Freihow (Norwegian Font Forlag), and Morgan Entrekin (Grove/Atlantic) made for a good trans-Atlantic mix and showed up the gaps in different cultural approaches to translation and publishing.

. . . perhaps a translator is a bit like a Chinese restaurant owner, who finds himself serving mostly a non-Chinese clientele: should I assume my diners have unadventurous palates and always serve them the familiar “chow mein” and “kung-pao chicken”? Or should I assume that everybody is a potential epicurean and serve up complex flavors from regions and with ingredients that they would not have heard of? How do I transmit to my diners, in the famed dish of “Westlake Carp Braised in Vinegar,” the flute on the causeway and lingering scent of the lotus flowers just above the water?