Havemercy, Jaida Jones and Danielle Bennett
I liked quite a bit about Havemercy (in particular, the role-play sensitivity training exercises for the Dragon Corps, which was very nicely done), but it also has its problems. Chiefly, plot (but also gender), and my issues with this tie in with an in-progress email I’ve been failing to send to alecaustin about writing fanfic vs writing original fic. It’s probably unfair to make Havemercy bear the brunt of my criticisms, but it was a useful focus; I will try to use it as an example rather than as an exemplar.
My argument in my unfinished email is about how writers think about stories, and that in the main a lot of fanfic writers start with the characters (and hopefully a situation) whereas original fic writers usually start with the situation (and hopefully the characters). I'm not sure how much of this is personal style - personally I skew much harder towards the start-with-an-idea side (probably why I find writing fanfic very difficult) - and how much is what they're writing, as you can't write a lot of fanfic about original characters and expect an audience. I think you can write a good story with a heavy bias towards one side or the other, but I think the approaches have different risks in terms of (potential) failure.
I think (and I’d be happy to hear differing opinions) that writers who start with character, whether they're writing original or fanfic, can run into problems with dropping plot & setting *or* falling so far in love with their characters that the characters distort the story and the author fails to realise they have not given the reader any actual reason to like their moody long-suffering protagonist (I have this second problem with Felix in Sarah Monette’s Melusine, Alec in Ellen Kushner’s Swordpoint, Hannibal Lecter in everything Thomas Harris has gone near after Red Dragon, and pirates in pretty much everything). I think writers who start with ideas can end up with default or cardboard characters, or a very mechanical research-heavy story (fond memories of reading Peter Hamilton space operas. Not.)
A lot of what I’ve seen come out in genre (especially fantasy and YA) seems to come from the character-driven side of the spectrum. Much of this, particularly trilogies, seems to be lacking in adequate plot, and what there is is obvious and reactive, where “reactive” for my purposes means that events wait for the characters to be ready for them; yes, characters should drive events, but the converse is also true, and all too often other characters conveniently fail to act or interfere. In Havemercy there are many sources of potential tension, action and complication that are just ignored or left hanging, which is frustrating for me and bad for the book, because it makes the characters look stupid or lazy, and slows down the pacing so that these faults become even more apparent.
Havemercy is a largely city-based fantasy mid-war with clockwork dragons as an aerial fighting unit, with the main plot arc relating to the city’s loss of magic, and the impairment of the dragon troops as a result. My favourite plot-line is Thom’s, where he’s a student doing his thesis on the rather undisciplined and uncouth corps who has the misfortune to be assigned to provide them with sensitivity training, and this works well for me (I’m unhappy with where this plot-line ends up - it’s an appalling cliché - but at least I had fun getting there). The other plot-lines have odd gaps. Neither the vital foreign ally Royston’s been sleeping with, nor the diplomat’s wife (Rook, ditto) have speaking parts, which is even more odd when the ally is actually in the opening scene, sleeping (or faking?) while Royston gets carted off. I don’t know if they’re both still in the city when Royston returns, and the threat they represent - the withdrawal of Arlemagne’s alliance - never seems to be all that important. When illness overtakes all the city’s magicians they are locked up, quarantined, and Hal has great trouble getting in there, but once he’s in he can wander around all over the place. And the magicians know things about the problem, but don’t compare notes until Hal shows up… The dragon corps are vital to the city’s defence, but there’s only fourteen of them, which may well be due to a limit on how many dragons can be made but that’s not really explored, and there are no trainees/cadets, no injuries during fighting until the final battle. The city is, as usual for fantasy cities, made up of a slum with a surfeit of whores and the palace (possibly also with its own surfeit), the Versity and the Airmen building and, presumably, vast unexamined sources of economic growth and the thriving middle classes.
What I get instead of plot is character, dialogue and interactions, but for me at least it’s not enough. If I’m reading slash fic (or Georgette Heyer, or Jilly Cooper before she started adding exclamation marks to all her titles) I am prepared to be tolerant of or even enjoy pages of jaded ex-rake and naïve intellectual wandering around quoting poetry at each other, but even then I would like some believable conflict and a reason to be invested in the characters, and having people getting caught in the rain not once but twice (the first time Hal is up a tree, for reasons I am unable to ascertain from the text) is not really enough to make me caught up in their noble suffering. Instead, it makes me think that they should have looked up at the sky before going for a walk in all that lush green countryside.
Havemercy also has some gender issues. There are four pov characters, all male, divided up into two pairs with intense emotional relationships between them that no mere female could possibly tamper with. Royston’s sister-in-law has the largest human female part, which is as a shrill one-dimensional force of ineffective adversity, and she fades rapidly into the distance; there’s also her daughter, who largely escapes characterisation, a number of wives and whores off-stage, a girl Rook hits on at a ball whose name he has trouble remembering (and which I have completely forgotten), a magician who gets to be the only one to die of the plague on-stage - “She had beautiful hair,” the other characters reminisce helpfully, and Antoinette, who gets to sit mysteriously in a library and hand Hal a book when he goes roaming around looking for the solution to the illness. That’s it. The dragons are all female, and the city’s female, but I’m not really sure that helps in terms of active self-determination. I was mentally cross-casting characters (a skill honed largely by watching Pixar movies because Pixar do perfectly competent female characters but seem to have some sort of rigid quota system operating where two per movie is dangerously close to Amazonian anarchism - I cross-cast most of Ratatouille in a prolonged fit of annoyance, and it worked perfectly well) and, while it doesn’t work with Thom, and making Royston & Hal female doesn’t really add much, making Rook female and keeping all of his behaviour and attitudes would have made me very happy and created a lot of interesting tensions, as well as making much more sense when Hal does his “Is he your special friend?” thing to Thom two seconds after arriving in the big city from his sheltered no-such-thing-as-gay country existence.
Ahem. Anyway, I liked a number of things about Havemercy, but it didn’t come together for me as a story. I said above that if I had a reason to be invested in the characters I would like some of this better, and this may reflect on me as reader rather than the book, as character identification is a tricky question - all the characters I mentioned in the parenthesis in para 3 have many defenders out there) but I do feel that, even if I liked the characters more, I would still want them to have more to *do*.
My argument in my unfinished email is about how writers think about stories, and that in the main a lot of fanfic writers start with the characters (and hopefully a situation) whereas original fic writers usually start with the situation (and hopefully the characters). I'm not sure how much of this is personal style - personally I skew much harder towards the start-with-an-idea side (probably why I find writing fanfic very difficult) - and how much is what they're writing, as you can't write a lot of fanfic about original characters and expect an audience. I think you can write a good story with a heavy bias towards one side or the other, but I think the approaches have different risks in terms of (potential) failure.
I think (and I’d be happy to hear differing opinions) that writers who start with character, whether they're writing original or fanfic, can run into problems with dropping plot & setting *or* falling so far in love with their characters that the characters distort the story and the author fails to realise they have not given the reader any actual reason to like their moody long-suffering protagonist (I have this second problem with Felix in Sarah Monette’s Melusine, Alec in Ellen Kushner’s Swordpoint, Hannibal Lecter in everything Thomas Harris has gone near after Red Dragon, and pirates in pretty much everything). I think writers who start with ideas can end up with default or cardboard characters, or a very mechanical research-heavy story (fond memories of reading Peter Hamilton space operas. Not.)
A lot of what I’ve seen come out in genre (especially fantasy and YA) seems to come from the character-driven side of the spectrum. Much of this, particularly trilogies, seems to be lacking in adequate plot, and what there is is obvious and reactive, where “reactive” for my purposes means that events wait for the characters to be ready for them; yes, characters should drive events, but the converse is also true, and all too often other characters conveniently fail to act or interfere. In Havemercy there are many sources of potential tension, action and complication that are just ignored or left hanging, which is frustrating for me and bad for the book, because it makes the characters look stupid or lazy, and slows down the pacing so that these faults become even more apparent.
Havemercy is a largely city-based fantasy mid-war with clockwork dragons as an aerial fighting unit, with the main plot arc relating to the city’s loss of magic, and the impairment of the dragon troops as a result. My favourite plot-line is Thom’s, where he’s a student doing his thesis on the rather undisciplined and uncouth corps who has the misfortune to be assigned to provide them with sensitivity training, and this works well for me (I’m unhappy with where this plot-line ends up - it’s an appalling cliché - but at least I had fun getting there). The other plot-lines have odd gaps. Neither the vital foreign ally Royston’s been sleeping with, nor the diplomat’s wife (Rook, ditto) have speaking parts, which is even more odd when the ally is actually in the opening scene, sleeping (or faking?) while Royston gets carted off. I don’t know if they’re both still in the city when Royston returns, and the threat they represent - the withdrawal of Arlemagne’s alliance - never seems to be all that important. When illness overtakes all the city’s magicians they are locked up, quarantined, and Hal has great trouble getting in there, but once he’s in he can wander around all over the place. And the magicians know things about the problem, but don’t compare notes until Hal shows up… The dragon corps are vital to the city’s defence, but there’s only fourteen of them, which may well be due to a limit on how many dragons can be made but that’s not really explored, and there are no trainees/cadets, no injuries during fighting until the final battle. The city is, as usual for fantasy cities, made up of a slum with a surfeit of whores and the palace (possibly also with its own surfeit), the Versity and the Airmen building and, presumably, vast unexamined sources of economic growth and the thriving middle classes.
What I get instead of plot is character, dialogue and interactions, but for me at least it’s not enough. If I’m reading slash fic (or Georgette Heyer, or Jilly Cooper before she started adding exclamation marks to all her titles) I am prepared to be tolerant of or even enjoy pages of jaded ex-rake and naïve intellectual wandering around quoting poetry at each other, but even then I would like some believable conflict and a reason to be invested in the characters, and having people getting caught in the rain not once but twice (the first time Hal is up a tree, for reasons I am unable to ascertain from the text) is not really enough to make me caught up in their noble suffering. Instead, it makes me think that they should have looked up at the sky before going for a walk in all that lush green countryside.
Havemercy also has some gender issues. There are four pov characters, all male, divided up into two pairs with intense emotional relationships between them that no mere female could possibly tamper with. Royston’s sister-in-law has the largest human female part, which is as a shrill one-dimensional force of ineffective adversity, and she fades rapidly into the distance; there’s also her daughter, who largely escapes characterisation, a number of wives and whores off-stage, a girl Rook hits on at a ball whose name he has trouble remembering (and which I have completely forgotten), a magician who gets to be the only one to die of the plague on-stage - “She had beautiful hair,” the other characters reminisce helpfully, and Antoinette, who gets to sit mysteriously in a library and hand Hal a book when he goes roaming around looking for the solution to the illness. That’s it. The dragons are all female, and the city’s female, but I’m not really sure that helps in terms of active self-determination. I was mentally cross-casting characters (a skill honed largely by watching Pixar movies because Pixar do perfectly competent female characters but seem to have some sort of rigid quota system operating where two per movie is dangerously close to Amazonian anarchism - I cross-cast most of Ratatouille in a prolonged fit of annoyance, and it worked perfectly well) and, while it doesn’t work with Thom, and making Royston & Hal female doesn’t really add much, making Rook female and keeping all of his behaviour and attitudes would have made me very happy and created a lot of interesting tensions, as well as making much more sense when Hal does his “Is he your special friend?” thing to Thom two seconds after arriving in the big city from his sheltered no-such-thing-as-gay country existence.
Ahem. Anyway, I liked a number of things about Havemercy, but it didn’t come together for me as a story. I said above that if I had a reason to be invested in the characters I would like some of this better, and this may reflect on me as reader rather than the book, as character identification is a tricky question - all the characters I mentioned in the parenthesis in para 3 have many defenders out there) but I do feel that, even if I liked the characters more, I would still want them to have more to *do*.