The Book of Night Women 5/5

First of all, this book is great. Hard to read. There’s a lot of suffering and torture in it. But it’s excellent. Deeply moving, disturbing, grand, profound.

I had a strange experience with the structure of the plot. It’s apparent from the beginning that this is a Hero’s Journey. The hero gets brought into the mysterious new world of the conspiracy. She refuses the call. Great! Right on track, that’s what the hero is supposed to do. Next the mentor character is supposed to do something (die, usually). That inspires the hero to jump into the adventure with both feet.

This is where it goes off the rails. The mentor character, Homer, never seems to succeed in inspiring Lilith, the hero. Lilith keeps going to conspiracy meetings, and keeps refusing the call. Over and over, refusal after refusal.

And then the rebellion happens, and fails.

So there’s no crossing the threshold, no descent into the underworld, no tests & allies phase, no approach to the fortress, no ultimate ordeal, no escape with the elixir, no return to the ordinary world.

I think this is part of what makes the middle section of the novel a bit slow. There’s a sense that the real action is happening off-screen, where we can’t see. The hero has refused to take part in it. The pace and interest picks up again when she gets swept up involuntarily in the action nearer to the end.

But there’s so much violence and so many compelling characters and so much relationship complexity that the story would carry you right along despite any plot deficiencies.

If this is a plot deficiency. Which in the end I think it’s not.

I’ve decided that James is saying something with this structure. This isn’t the story of a successful rebellion, after all. It’s a plot structure with a limp. A scarred plot structure. A structure that oppressive colonialist forces have deformed, maybe.

In any case, signalling that he’s going to take us through a Hero’s Journey and then not doing it is saying something. What he’s saying I’m not necessarily sure. But he didn’t do it by accident.

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