Day 16: Inspiration; on K. J. Parker

I thought it might be a good idea to write a bit about someone who has been a significant inspiration to me in recent years: K. J. Parker. This author, responsible for such novels as Evil for Evil, The Proof House and The Folding Knife, is something of an enigma. Little is known of Parker's true identity; even gender is a mystery. But while that's lovely speculation fuel, I care about Parker because of what she has written. In particular, The Engineer Trilogy (Devices and Desires, Evil for Evil, The Escapement) stands as one of my favorite bodies of modern fiction, telling the tragic tale of a man, sentenced to death for a petty crime, who escapes and sets a war in motion just to be reunited with his wife and daughter.

There's a lot to love about these books. The setting is well developed, the plot is engaging, the characters widely varied and thoroughly human, and the whole thing is wrapped up in expertly-crafted prose. Finally, there is a remarkable consistency across the three novels--Parker has no doubts about what sort of narrative voice he/she wants to have, and at a more abstract level, one gets the sense that every moment that the reader is shown is not only carefully chosen, but also very deliberately matched to the perspective that gives a scene the most impact. I struggle fiercely with my desire to reveal choice tidbits as my instincts tell me to settle down, recommend the books and let you discover it on your own, but I think I can illustrate my point effectively with an example that doesn't require quite so much in the way of specifics.

There is a scene about two fifths of the way into the first book in which an official of the country that sentenced the (arguably) main character to death is sifting through the man's former belongings, and comes across a book of poetry he wrote himself. He finds the whole thing amusingly bad, and the following wry observation is made:

Psellus rested the book on his desk. So what? Right across the known world, in every country with some measure of literacy, there were millions of otherwise sane, harmless people who were guilty of poetry.

 'Guilty of poetry' cracks me up every time, but this flippancy is not merely to show that a character or the author have a cutting wit (no need to flaunt what is naturally evident in the book as a whole). No, it's a very wise decision in service of a point. If the man who had written said poetry had recalled it, it would have lent the scene a great tenderness in the best case, and a sort of maudlin sentimentality at worst. Instead, seen and criticized through the eyes of a man part of the inescapable political machinery of the world, it becomes a victim of the tragic inertia of a society that treats people like parts and worships the idea of its own perfection. It emphasizes why the sort of man who would write such poems ends up feeling compelled to sacrifices so many lives to oppose the order of a society that had defined his whole world.

I have much to learn from re-reading these books, as I have been doing lately, and I hope to greatly improve my own writing thereby.

Still learning,
~L