Plot – Mystery, fantasy and romance at the dangerous ends of the earth

What makes a book memorable? Is it the ending?

By Karen Abrahamson | November 12, 2017

I’ve recently been through a number of personal ‘endings’: the death of a loved one and the sale of the family home to name two. Both have left me feeling tired and emotionally drained. Even though I recognize that, though painful, these are normal events in life, they are also events that will linger in my mind.

They put me in mind of how some stories stay with us far longer than others. What is it, I wondered, that allows me to forget some books almost immediately after reading, while others stay with me for years. Some people say it is a powerful ending, something that ends with resonance. Others talk about it being a combination of interesting character and setting coupled with a powerful plot. But is it all of these things together, or does one dominate the others?

For example, The Da Vinci Code could be said to have an interesting character in Professor Langdon, an interesting setting (Paris) and an interesting plot (that the descendants of Mary Magdalene and Jesus are alive today). When I think of the book (not my favorite, but I remember it), what is it that makes it memorable? For me, it’s the plot. Paris is there, but not really memorable and Langdon doesn’t really interest me at all. For other readers their experience might be different.

Here are a few of the books that haunt me far more than The Da Vinci Code:
• I will always remember Lord of the Rings and still find it a balm on days when I’m feeling low. I loved the world J.R.R. Tolkien built… and the elves, of course.
• The Historian, by Elizabeth Kostova blew me away with its haunting prose descriptions and suspense, though the ending, to me, was flawed.
• I loved Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance for the evocative location and the tragedy of the story.
• Fatherland, an alternate history where the Germans won the Second World War, was a chilling detective story filled with haunting gray and darkness.
• Louise Penny’s Inspector Gamache mystery series is a guilty pleasure that I have to ration like the best 80% chocolate. I love the town of Three Pines and the complex and quirky characters that populate the place.

So what is it about these books that keeps drawing me back to reread them, or that stick so clearly in my mind? As I look back at my list I realized that it was a very powerful sense of place. Tolkien’s world building went so far as to create a whole elvish culture and a history of Middle Earth right down to the poetry and songs of the place—some of which I learned by heart. Kostova took

me thought Eastern Europe and again evoked a magical and sometimes dread-filled sense of place. Rohinton Mistry brought me to the darkness and the light of Indian culture, including the underbelly of the Indian State. Fatherland evoked serious dread and horror at the final discoveries.

Louise Penny? Well what is there to say? I want to eat the food in the restaurant and stay at the B and B in Three Pines. I want to talk to her characters and walk the road around the village admiring the gardens, the antiques and the artwork, regardless of the fact that I’m likely to end up as a murder victim. (There are a lot of murders in Three Pines.)

So even if there are interesting events in these books, most of all it’s the place and the characters that grab hold of my head and my heart and won’t let go. Sometimes it makes it hard to say goodbye—to a book or a part of life.

What about you? Is it the character-full book, the evocative setting, or the unusual plot that haunts you or keeps you going back to a book again and again? What are your favorite reads?

Books and Geology: Mapping Beneath the Surface

By Karen Abrahamson | April 21, 2012

Cliff-side Monastery, Spiti Valley, India (2000)(photo (c) Karen Abrahamson)

Recently I was reflecting on the difference between plot and story, with plot being the events that happen to keep the story moving, and ‘story’ being what the book is about and the changes that occur to the characters along the way. Frodo starts out as a happy young hobbit, and returns as someone who understands the price that must be paid for the safety of places like the Shire. Bella starts out as this infatuated, clumsy girl who constantly has to be rescued, and turns out to hold the secret abilities to save everyone.

This got me thinking about mapping beneath the surface. In a book, if you are a plotter, you map out where the actions occur, but also the impact the scene has on the character. I started out writing this way, and used wonderful planning sheets like these. This has allowed me to layer stories with the emotional changes that make a story much richer to read.

A similar process has occurred in mapping the world. Once the surface mapping was well under way, people began to wonder how to map the landscape under the layer of dirt and forests we see. Why? To gain a better sense of the layering of the landscape and the connections between places. For example, the discovery of similar strata layers in both France and England demonstrated that once they were a single land mass.

The process of mapping the underside of the earth began around 1750 when a Frenchman named Jean Etienne Guettard asked just such a question about England and France. Though he posed the question, the first person taken seriously for geological mapping was an Englishman named William Smith who spent a quarter of a century mapping England and Wales beneath the ground. Smith had been a surveyor’s helper and a keen observer who noticed and recorded things like strata exposed in hillsides and in mine shafts. Smith was the first person to have the insight that different strata held different fossils from different time periods, which provided a means to date the strata. He also noted that similar fossils were found in similar strata, even though they were separated by long distances. In 1815, the result of his study was a many-colored map of England and Wales that set out the different geological formations.

Off to the fields, Pumamarka (2011) Photo (c) Karen Abrahamson

Such a map can set out the distribution of various geological units such as glacial debris (if it was near the surface) or deeper formations like igneous, metamorphic or sedimentary rock that underlie the topsoil. Of course, having a general picture of the structure of the earth wasn’t enough for a civilization with an increasing thirst for oil and minerals, so processes were developed that measured gravitational attraction from which geologists could deduce the nature of the subsurface geology. Other processes drew on the ancient Nordic use of magnets to locate ore bodies. A more modern magnetometer was developed in the 1930s and mounted on aircraft to gather readings. The Seismic method was developed after 1875 when an English geologist in earthquake-prone Japan, thought to use a seisomograph to determine where the quakes arose from. A similar process was used in 1909 to discover the boundary between the Earth’s crust and its mantle.

Using sonic sounds or thumpers or vibrators to create sound, the sonic process then uses geophones (or hydrophones for underwater exploration) to read echoes from underground formations that tell the scientists what lies underneath.

This has led to the ability to measure the crust of the earth (which measures from about 6.5 kilometers thick under the ocean to 50-75 kilometers thick under high mountains), the mantle which extends from the crust to about half way to the centre, and the dense, partly molten core. Seismology has led to the ability to map oil deposits and layers of water and natural gas that wait in the earth’s crust. But they have also allowed scientists to reach much deeper.

Main Ghat, Varanasi (2000) Photo (c) Karen Abrahamson

Geologists are now able to measure and map the underside of the earth’s crust (I alluded to this here). Which is a lot like understanding the underside of a novel, because, like the geothermal power of the earth that may save us from global warming, it’s really the hot emotional underbelly of a novel that brings out the best of any novelist’s writing.