Story Structure in Omar el Akkad's What Strange Paradise

Reading like a writer, one of the things I appreciated most in el Akkad’s novel was its storyline, an interweaving of plot that unfolds in two times/spaces: Before and After. Before takes place mostly on the migrant boat Calypso, adrift on the Mediterranean Sea. After is a Greek island, with its uncomfortable mix of locals and tourists. The story moves back and forth from one to other, charging toward the moment in between.

The tension that burns in this book is cooking in both the Before and the After plot lines. They each feature a vulnerable main character who is in jeopardy and struggling for his life and freedom. As often happens in the real world, random bad luck has put Amir’s story in motion. He follows his stepfather, Quiet Uncle, to a market and is lured onto a migrant ship with the promise of a sightseeing tour. In fact, the ship is packed with illegal refugees heading toward Europe.

When Quiet Uncle discovers that Amir has boarded the boat, he pleads with the ship’s handlers to send the 8 year-old back to Alexandria.

“What difference does it make to you? He got on by accident.”

“Nobody got on by accident,” the man said. “We’re happy to pay his fare if you can’t, but then he’s not yours anymore. He’s ours, and we have a right to recoup our costs.”

So Quiet Uncle pays for a place for Amir on the upper deck using the remains of his cache of money.

El Akkad ratchets up the tension gradually but inexorably in both the Before and After storylines. We know, because After precedes Before in the book, that the ship capsizes and spreads its human cargo along the beach of a vacationer’s paradise. That only spurs on us further to find out just what happened.

I noticed that little events were all that was needed for readers to reach the grand and weighty ideas about justice, truth, morality. When the stakes are life and death, it is better to ground your scenes in the mundane and the trivial—peoples’ petty disputes and habits and comforts—or it will all feel too much.

What Strange Paradise was excruciating but never too much. In the After, the tension is just as high. Will Amir escape, or be caught? Here the conflict is not brought by confrontation with Nature (the mighty Sea) but so-called Civilization—sharpened to a lethal weapon in the hands of Colonel Kethros. Kethros will stop at nothing to catch the two children, for Amir has a local host and would-be saviour, Vanna.

In Colonel Kethros’ quest, he visits the director of a refugee camp to probe her for information about the missing children. Madame el Ward is in fact secretly helping Vanna to help Amir escape. She tells Kethros she’s too busy to be bothered by his missing kid; she’s managing a population of traumatized survivors, without proper support, and plenty of bureaucratic hurdles.

“We have children who can’t sleep though the night, we have people who don’t talk anymore, who try to slit their wrists with canned-food lids. This place is hell.”

“Hell? Really?”

Kethros shares a memory with her, from his days as a peacekeeper. The soldiers he worked with took bribes from their captives which increased with “inflation” once there was disparity and some people who could pay more than others. The lesson Kethros wants the director to take from his tale is that “inflation” has happened at her refugee camp too.

“…Now the going rate for suffering is higher. Now everyone has to claim they’ve been raped, tortured, their whole family wiped out, down to the pet dogs and the goldfish. Pretty soon they’ll be claiming they’re already dead….”

Colonel Kethros’ ugly logic—a kind of capitalist calculation, the “inflation” of suffering—of course assumes that it is only refugees playing this game of one-up-manship. They are the ones who need to impress with their suffering, they must use it, they must embellish, even lie, to try to cash in that suffering for freedom. To exit the Before and be granted an After.

Before/After turns out to be not just a structure for the novel’s story, but also its theme, as the title of the novel suggests. What is this, that comes after life? Paradise? Death? A second chance, or a dead end? What is the After in relation to the Before, and how much of what it is relies on what we presume it will be? At the limit, at the divide, what gets us from one thing to the other. Perhaps a fantasy, a preconceived idea. Perhaps it is (in)justice. Or else just physics and biology, an accident of Nature?

Journeying with Cormac McCarthy on The Road

I must admit I’d already watched the movie before cracking open this brilliant novel. I was horrified by the movie, in a good way; it’s a stunning film. The effect of McCarthy’s book on me was less chilling, more haunting. Reading as a writer, what are some of the things I learned from The Road?

Sometimes it’s better to leave important things unexplained and unspoken. McCarthy has the confidence to leave certain major questions unanswered. Why is the Earth dead? What happened? How and why did human society descend into the anarchy that rules this vision and storyworld? These questions, which are immediate and pressing to the reader, are simply never answered here. This backstory is left undetermined. Though it seems by the physical details presented to us, (e.g., the ash, the lack of living species), that McCarthy knew that backstory for himself. In other words, he didn’t just cop out of telling it, he quite precisely left it off the table.

Why? Maybe because it’s not his business here to care about what happened, only to tell the story of those left after, of those who are trying to survive. It is unnecessary for us to know the catastrophe that caused this conflict, this fight for survival. It would distract us and occupy our time. And isn’t it even a little more unnerving to not know?

Make the most of structure. It’s not only in poetry that the structure and rhythm of a work impacts its meaning. In this novel McCarthy builds the plot and the storyline brick by brick. Rather than chapters, there are typically short sections of text—sometimes one line, sometimes a paragraph or two, sometimes several pages—interrupted by whitespace, that lead us onward.

These snippets of storytelling can read as aphorisms, condensed lessons, or even snapshots of lives in this precarious wilderness. The physical pattern the sections alternating with section breaks resembles footsteps, stages, or steps along a long road, mimicking and emphasizing the journey and the plot of The Road.

The effect is to draw the reader along bit by bit, chunk by chunk. The reader experiences fragments and makes associations to connect those fragments and experience an unfolding temporality. This is something readers do within any novel, it seems to me, yet here the abnormally large number of formal and physical caesurae emphasize the reader’s work of building associations, taking steps, forging ahead when one is invited to pause or break off. Quite cunningly, the reader is made to feel alone and thrown back upon herself.

Notice how the gaps also serve as transitions. When I began writing fiction I’d written argumentative essays for many years, and I was bedevilled by I what I felt as the difficulty of connecting events and aspects of the unfolding story I was writing. (When laying out an argument the connections are of course crucial to the overall plausibility of your thesis. I was still operating in essay mode.) Eventually I learned to give up on trying to forge connections for readers; readers will make them.

A writing instructor and novelist once told our class that he’d “spent all morning trying to figure out how to have a character recall something about his son,” eventually concocting something about the guy noticing a stain on his shirt and thereby having his memory jogged. Ridiculous! Just have the character think of his son. Just write that recollection where the work requires it to emerge.

If you have a huge vocabulary, wield it carefully. McCarthy is known for his enormous vocabulary and the precision of wording he employs. If there is a word for “that level of of wet sand under which the swell of the waves reaches”, and apparently there is, McCarthy will use it. (I forget the word, unfortunately! Suggestions?)

For someone like me, who enjoys words for words’ sake, it’s pleasing to encounter new and esoteric ones. It can feel jarring, though, to encounter such gems when they remove me temporarily from the storyworld. Who is the character who would choose the word “palimpsest” in a sentence while fleeing for his life? There may well be such a person, of course, but is he the character I know here? Or is the author hiding behind his character, egging him on, a thesaurus in hand?

I suppose there are different approaches to vocabulary in relation to voice and the merging and blending of author/narrator/character points of view. I tend to want to filter storyworld through the voices of particular, rooted, limited characters and be as plausible as possible in this effort. I want the reader to experience the storyworld as those characters do. How does it work for you? How do you make your vocabulary decisions?