Last year a bunch of us did a sort of online book group thing and read The Quincunx by Charles Palliser together, all 1,200+ pages of the fucker. The vast majority of us felt that was at least 1,000 pages too many. It was an intriguing premise but dragged on for far too long and ultimately disappointed on nearly every level. If you are remotely interested there was a daily discussion on this blog which you can find here.
Some later editions of the paperback come with an author's afterword. Mine did not. I have finally managed to get hold of a copy thanks to Ladawn, one of our Book Swap regulars, so thought I'd revisit the book one last time to see if Palliser managed to share any words of wisdom.
Well, he sort of does and he sort of doesn't.
His account of the book's gestation, writing and eventual publication is interesting, especially as it harks back to a time when one publisher would put out the hardback of a book and a completely different one would do the paperback (in this case Canongate followed by Penguin).
When he talks about some of his intentions when writing the book - using the Victorian model, unreliable narrator, a structure build around the number five etc. - he does vanish up his own arse a bit and I couldn't help but laugh at his obvious frustration when readers and critics either called it a pastiche or didn't understand some of his key concepts.
But the most revealing thing of all is that he admits, more or less, that the book is a sprawling mess which completely ran away with him. OK, so he doesn't say this in so many words but he gets pretty close. For fuck's sake, his original synopsis was close to 100,000 words in itself! He does say that it got out of hand and that at one point it was almost twice its final length. Sweet Jesus!
Anyway, I wanted to pop back and post about this extra section and see if anyone else had read it and wanted to comment. Feel free to fire away.
I'm only about 3881634 pages into the novel itself, but read the author's afterword before starting. I think that he comes across as having a very high opinion of himself, which I don't like, but I suppose it's interesting to bear in mind what he was trying to do with it as I go. I particularly like the part where he says that, on being made aware of the mathematical plot structures, one of his readers promptly read the entire thing over again! What a loony.
Posted by: Jemimah | January 26, 2013 at 10:16 AM
Jemimah, our thoughts are with you at this difficult time.
Posted by: Scott Pack | January 27, 2013 at 11:22 AM