Read in Ned

Amy Carrill

Every fiction writer attempts to create a story world, but very few succeed.  Too many stories remain two-dimensional, never enticing a reader beyond black and white pages into sound, sensation, and color.  But when a story world is well wrought, it is a thing of beauty.  A reader is drawn deep within another sensory realm entirely, but so seamlessly that he only realizes the effect upon emerging.  You might have experienced that effect yourself, the sensation of suddenly surfacing from a waking dream and realizing that for the past seconds, minutes, hours, you have existed someplace far apart and beyond.  Authors who can induce that experience are true artists.

The following three books offer wonderfully textured story worlds.  But they are each very different from the others, not only in the specific worlds themselves but in the techniques used to create them.

Quicksilver, by Neal Stephenson, is set in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in America, Europe, and beyond.  It is (I can’t say it any better than its jacket) “history, adventure, science, truth, invention, sex, absurdity, piracy, madness, death, and alchemy,” all wrapped within the astonishing scientific theorizing and discoveries of that era.  The book may sound a bit daunting, but it isn’t.  Stephenson creates richly detailed intellectual and physical environments, but in such a lucid way that that the story is an effortless pleasure to read.  And for those of us who have studied the history of natural philosophy, or read Isaac Newton’s The Principia just for the fun of it, Quicksilver is a special treat.

In The Last Banquet by Jonathan Grimwood, the aristocrat Jean-Marie d’Aumout lives through the reigns of Louis XV and Louis XVI while pursuing his passion for new tastes and flavors.  The stereotypical images of that era involve ostentation, debauchery, and excess.  In contrast Grimwood conveys the setting with minimalist descriptions.  The effect of that minimalism is both interesting and unexpected, creating a collusion between writer and reader in forming the story world.  As when a painter creates a shan shui landscape, Grimwood sketches deftly outlined forms without much specific detail.  The reader, in turn, fills those outlines with vibrant imagery from her own already-existing notions of the era.  Each reader, then, experiences this particular story world in her own unique way.

Some people might shy away from a book whose title contains the words “necromancer” and “death.”  Be that as it may, The Death of the Necromancer by Martha Wells unfolds in a luminously detailed fantasy realm that fully engages sensory perception.  Unlike Greenwood, she errs on the side of providing extensive description, and though that description verges on excessive at points, the cumulative effect pulls a reader deeper and deeper within Wells’ imaginative vision.  Wells might not be a literary writer, nor even a stellar craftsman, but she is an artist.  She effortlessly draws a reader into a world that seems almost inevitable, a world from which a reader suddenly awakens, having lost all track of time.