total prologuia

[kaigou]

In the past twenty-four hours I've gone through three books: Ludlum's Prometheus Deception (DNF), Liu's Soul Song (near-DNF), and Robb's Innocent in Death. I won't go into why I did, didn't, or only barely finished each of them but I will say the use of exclamation points in Ludlum's book -- man, I think the guy used up the entire publishing house's quota for at least two years.

All three, curiously enough, used prologues. Liu's prologue follows a pattern I've seen in other stories that are heavy on the romance but don't have actual meet-up until the second (or third) chapter. She uses the prologue to introduce one-half of the couple, and the pattern seems to be that the POV-character met in the first chapter is automatically the other-half of the destined intended couple.

Robb/Roberts, following mystery-genre rules, introduces the victim in the prologue. She at least has the decency to not actually kill him; she just introduces him a little bit before death. With the first chapter, then, the story lands on the detective/cop POV as she arrives to investigate the reported dead body.

Ludlum's prologue was the most awkward. It's a clandestine operation gone wrong, no names given and no significant POV noted. Chapter one starts... five days later. It was such a short break that I found myself thinking of chapter one as, uhm, a second prologue. Especially since chapter 2 or 3 then starts five years later. I ended up feeling like I'd read three prologues before I finally got to the actual story.

There have been times I've skipped prologues. I do tend to read about two pages of them and then jump to chapter one. I won't invest more than that in a prologue -- although if I get to the end of chapter one and I'm seeing signs of characters who were in the prologue, I may go back and read the rest of the prologue before continuing. If I get to chapter 3 and there's no mention of any character who appeared in the prologue... those books I've been known to just pitch then and there. Just on some kind of limited-time, limited-energy annoyance factor.

But what's more of a curiosity in this case is that each prologue isn't just "this is action taking place before the story" -- because Ludlum's took place 5 weeks before, but the other two had prologues that were just shortly before, if not almost concurrent with, the opening chapter's action. So it wasn't to create a break between "then" and "now" like I see in a lot of instruction manuals for authors. It was more to narrow the focus-beam within the genre's context.

IOW: The Robb book was in the mystery/thriller section. If that prologue turned out to be about a guy who did not die, but in fact meets the cop in chapter one and they're dating by chapter three... I'd be spending a fair bit of the rest of the book waiting for him to kick the bucket. Because, hello, that's why you have a prologue in a murder mystery, right? So I can see Dead Guy just before, or right as, he kacks it?

For Liu, if the prologue had been of, say, the female character's childhood, or maybe of, I dunno. A conversation with her friend prior to whatever, I would have spent the rest of the book waiting for that friend (or the 'other' character from the prologue) to show up and be the love interest. Because that's the genre, so the prologue is supposed to prime me for the way things will unfold.

That's why I ended up rewriting the (test) prologue, because the original version played too hard on what (seems to me to be) a strong romantic plotline, of "here, meet the Love Interest so you have this image in your head to tide you over while you get comfy with the main protagonist." The goal of the prologue was simply to show one character's arrival in Stockholm, or the events that lead him to that arrival; one or the other would suffice for giving hints that he'd arrived and not intended to stay. But it's the what that gets the focus that underlines (or countermands) the genre's pattern: a mystery focuses on someone who dies, usually pretty early in the book. A romance, well, that's obvious. A thriller hints at clandestine things, implies suspicious or mysterious events.

I don't know if westerns have prologues. What other major genres consistently use prologues?

---

if you're wondering about the DNF for Ludlum:

The really irritating thing about Ludlum -- through no real fault of his own -- is that he got trademarked after death, and now there's books like "Robert Ludlum^TM's The Cassandra Compact" and whatnot. GRRRR. It's not a Ludlum book if it's not written by Ludlum, people!

Just as bad, not all of his ghostwritten books are trademarked so obviously, which is why I wonder whether Prometheus Deception was a ghostwriting effort and I just ended up with a copy that isn't so noisy about that (or it just had a really bad editor?). It's both heavy on the exclamation points in narrative, and I mean really heavy on them. Even worse, it's incredibly clunky, over and over, for explaining the protagonist's actions. The Bourne series was relatively decent about giving some sign of preparation, to give the impression of what Bourne had to do/buy/steal to be able to handle the bad guys. Prometheus is more like, "protag approaches bad guy guard, and shoots him in the face with a neural sedative!" -- followed by a long paragraph about how protag had picked that up beforehand.

Plus, there's so many serial numbers and faux hightech brand-names for weaponry that I actually checked the cover page a few times to make sure I hadn't accidentally picked up the Eisler book instead. One of the things I liked about the Bourne series was that Ludlum didn't play that "dump all the tech on you in long paragraphs" or the "throw out twenty geeky tech-names for things and weaponry and fight moves at once" like Eisler and even Clancy, which Clancy will do when he really gets going. (Though Clancy, what I recall, did it more for large objects like tanks and ships and subs; Eisler does it mostly for smaller weaponry like grenades and guns and gadgets; Ludlum is doing it for both in this book.)

Comments

[sans-pertinence.livejournal.com]

Oh Robert, what happened? Once upon a time I loved you. (I do love Clancy's sub geek-outs but only because I'm a sub geek. :P)

So. Read anything that wouldn't make me want to spork my eyes out good lately?

[kaigou.livejournal.com]

I'm not saying I didn't love Clancy's geeking out -- just that what works in his stories (in terms of piling on details) doesn't always work, because when those details come right in the middle of a high-tension scene... WHUMP. That was the sound of the tension falling over and smacking itself face-first into the floor.

The problem with Ludlum's books, too, is that only some are identified as ghost-written. The first five or six after his death, it appears, got his name but no indication of whether it was a draft left unedited, or just an outline of an idea, or fully ghostwritten from scratch. Sigh.

[http://users.livejournal.com/tesserae_/]

Though Clancy, what I recall, did it more for large objects like tanks and ships and subs

From my perspective, Clancy's way more fun when he's writing about sonar than people. Hunt for Red October was an exception; the only other book of his that I enjoyed was Red Storm Rising, because it's almost exclusively engineering porn.

Would you say any of these prologues were actually necessary to the telling of the story?

::clutches coffee::

[kaigou.livejournal.com]

I could not put down Red October, or Red Storm, when I read them, and yeah, I geeked, as well.

I'd say the Liu and Robb prologues were not absolutely mandatory, but to a great degree used (and thankfully short, for all that) because it's a demand of the genre. That's been my impression, at least. I should not that neither author uses prologues all the time, so not really mandatory.

Ludlum's... well. I can see why someone might argue for them, but I'm not certain the two-parter prologue was needed in its entirety. At the very least, it could have been truncated and retained the punch needed.

[tiercel]

Um... DNF means?

[kaigou.livejournal.com]

Did Not Finish.