Thinking recently about two books that surprised me, one from a half-century ago, one recently published. Both going counter to the expected story of the time.
I really wish I could remember the title of the older book so that I could reread it and figure out how it worked. It was a spy story; it was told from the point of view of one of a pair of spies who had been assigned to a foreign city where they were always cold, always afraid of being discovered, always having language problems, always fighting unforeseen obstacles to doing their job.
And in all this, somehow the author managed not to use any proper names. And this was during the Cold War; a reader would naturally assume – well, anyway, I assumed – that the story was about two English-speaking blokes in Moscow. In the winter.
That assumption shattered with the last line of the book, in which the narrator’s partner falls to his death from their apartment. And the narrator looks over the balcony and is filled with a great sadness for his partner, who was really a nice guy, now dead in that icy, foreign city… of Toronto.
This didn’t leave me thinking that Russia spies were necessarily nice people. But it did make me realize that culture conflicts can work both ways, and if we didn’t understand what was going on in the Kremlin, there was a fair chance that the Kremlin couldn’t figure out what we were about either. Obvious… but it took this story to make it real for me.
The second surprise came in a recently published fantasy novel, and I’m going to be vague about it because I don’t want to spoil the book for anybody else who may read it. Let’s just say that we start with a standard fantasy trope – an isolated group of royals and courtiers who live in luxury by oppressing the other 95% of the population. So, naturally, the people rise up and stage a coup, killing most of these elites.
It’s what happens after that was the surprise, because it completely veered away from the usual fantasy endings. We didn’t get “and the rightful, benevolent king was restored to the throne and all was flowers and sunshine.” We didn’t get “and the people governed themselves without conflicts and all was flowers and sunshine.”
No. What we got instead was Bolshevik Russia.
And again, I sat with my jaw dropped, thinking, “But of course! The French revolution, the Russian revolution didn’t bring nice people into power. You knew that!”
Fantasy is escapism, and so are spy stories. But it turns out I like my escapism salted with a bit of “This is how the world really works.”
Now go forth, break the standard narrative, and surprise me.
Mad Genius Club 
11 responses to “Surprise me”
Now I want to read this novel!
Finding the book set in Toronto is complicated by the Gouzenko Affair from 1945, the Canadian version of the obligatory “wait, we’re up to our armpits in commies” situation every intelligence agency in the Anglosphere seemed to have going on. And also, S – The Story of a Spy, which is about a triple agent so confusing I can’t follow the plot synopsis (complicated by some moron who thought the man character was based on him and sued for libel; which seems professionally unwise.)
We’re surprisingly long on Russian themed fantasy novels right now, so I can’t nail down the one depicting Krasniya Oktobre (sp? probably an inaccurate romanization.)
I dimly remember Paula Volsky’s French Revolution fantasy, Illusion.
But I want to read the fantasy novel with the Bolsheviks! Could you do a spoiler alert reply, and press the enter bar a lot for those who don’t want to see? Something like that?
Surprise is really hard. Ideally, the twist ending should have two characteristics.
1) You (or at least, the vast majority of readers), never saw it coming.
2) Once you do know the ending, you think, “Yeah, that makes perfect sense given everything that came before. I ought to have seen that coming.”
It’s too easy to screw up one of those two. Either put in too many clues to your ending, so the readers are just rolling their eyes and saying, “Yeah, that’s obvious. Why is everyone acting like we’re supposed to be shocked.” Or put in too few clues and leave your audience feel like you pulled the ending out of your butt. (Or, in the case of one book I found impressively bad, both. The author telegraphed the twist in the first third of the book, but then put in so many events trying to convince people that his red herring was correct that he ended up having to resort to, “And then half the country had their memories erased” in order to make the twist work.)
Oh dear. That sounds like my problem with a different series, where either the author wrote herself into a corner and couldn’t figure a way out, or her editor said, “No, no, you need to work in something from your non-fiction work. It’ll be fine, trust me!” The surprise ending was a wet newspaper rather than a firecracker.
I read a book where I figured out a character’s secret long before the characters did. The thing is, as soon as I figured it out, I knew that another character, as soon as she figured it out, would try to kill the first character. Some readers might twig earlier and some later, but the second problem was ready for any of them.
My still-unfinished Ex-Ministers of Fate proceeds from the sorts of questioning of assumptions you posit, though it is not structured to surprise any reader with what is actually going on.
The first premise was that high fantasy series always (or often) seem to be leading up to some kind of big war, which is the climax. I realized that while World War II stories are interesting, I find stories set in the immediate post-war world more interesting (particularly when they were written fairly soon after the war). So the initial premise was a post-war private eye in Faerie.
The second was that high fantasy settings tend to do that thing you allude to, where all is right with the world if The Right Ruler sits upon it. Pondering that (and my interest in libertarian thinking and Austrian economics) made me wonder what would happen if the ruler destroyed the center of power. Well, first thing, fae creatures would stop being puppets of fate, and suddenly all have free will…
(…which led to the main story thread and the title: what happens to the Ministers of Fate when they are suddenly out of a job, out of any status, and all the creatures whose fate they decreed realize, wait a minute, why did Urgolas have to die stupidly that way last year? Suddenly most every creature in Faerie wants answers, and isn’t feeling kindly toward you.)
The third premise was a bit more out there, but resonated with me for personal reasons. What if the war suddenly stopped, not only because of the destruction of the seat of power, but also because a hero fated to be there was not there? And what if it was through no fault (or even knowledge) of his own? You find out afterward you were supposed to die a hero, and here you are alive, in Faerie, and you didn’t even believe in magic a year ago.
(Most of my half-written series start off like this. “What if thing that never happens, happens, and you proceed from there?”)
Now I want to purchase vaporware.
I’m working on it, I’m working on it!
All right, I’ve posted the (longish) first chapter here:
https://djasonfleming.locals.com/post/5219053/ex-ministers-of-fate-chapter-one
Ok. The fantasy novel was
The Unwilling, by Kelly Braffet
and it’s not Russian-themed, sorry if I gave that impression. It would have been more accurate to say that what happens after the coup feels like what I know of Bolshevik Russia – committees running everything into the ground, insane and unrealistic operating rules, masses of paperwork, dangerous to be seen as unhappy with the system, and everybody’s still poor and starving.
Not fun to read, but interesting!