Word: nicholson
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...general rule, writers of fiction are flabbergasted when they read their first screenplays. The dialogue is eye-strainingly self-conscious, the characters flail about with disingenuous emotions and the "stage" directions describe less than clues on a treasure map. Geoff Nicholson's newest novel, Bleeding London, is a book that should have been a screenplay...
...Nicholson constructs the book as a series of vignettes that ricochet between various times and modes of exposition--several scenes are unveiled as journal entries--but that all converge on London. Not surprisingly, the city becomes the novel's catchall metaphor, and therein lies the book's essential problem: to complete the metaphor, the characters get stitched rather awkwardly into the narrative, as if merely to cover holes in its fabric, and the clumsiness of their insertion detracts from the clever manipulations of Nicholson's plot...
...Then Nicholson throws his change-up. The very next scene reads as an undated journal entry from a guy named Stuart (in you guessed it) London. But unlike Nicholson's earlier chapters, "The Walker's Diary: The Penultimate Days" gives a man's account of London meanderings and musings that is wistful, genuine, eerie and, above all, nuanced. It is, in fact, so scintillating that it shines light on another flaw in Nicholson's text: it needs to be written in the first person. The peculiarities of Nicholson's style--in particular, his penchant for sprawling over-description--sound flat...
Despite his journal, Stuart never rises far above the plot-aid rank of Nicholson's other characters. A tour guide with an uncanny knowledge of London, Stuart seems merely manufactured to attach himself to Judy (the self-declared incarnation of the city), clinging long enough to influence the story before breaking off like a virus--never quite away from her, though never really part...
Though the story requires one or two leaps of faith along the way, its orchestration is undeniably remarkable. Nicholson begins, cloudily, in medias res, and labors throughout the middle of the novel to thread his scenes together. He presents his readers with a scene and then, subtly, shows how it came to be. The early appearance of Stuart's diary, for example, is explained by a later scene wherein his wife snoops through his desk and alights on a computer disk. His non-linear development echoes the innovation of the cubist painters as it fragments, abstracts and reconfigures the narrative...