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Journey to the centre: Great middle lines – 12

A few days ago in Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet, I found an account of Sherlock Holmes performing one of his earliest deductions, at exactly the middle of Part I. You can read about it here.

Halfway through Part II of this short novel, Doyle wrote a short paragraph that was not about scientific deduction but rather about an eerie countdown, guaranteed to keep the reader turning pages. The character John Ferrier is given a deadline – 29 days – to hand over his daughter in marriage to one of the Mormon men.  The next morning, at the breakfast table, his daughter points upwards:

In the centre of the ceiling was scrawled, with a burned stick apparently, the number 28. . . . That night he sat up with his gun and kept watch and ward. He saw and he heard nothing, and yet in the morning a great 27 had been painted upon the outside of his door.

*****

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Journey to the centre: Great middle lines – 11

Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet is the first of his novels about the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes and his partner Dr Watson.  I turned to the physical centre of the book to find its change of direction, and came across a long paragraph describing a Mormon caravan of wagons, horses, walkers, and toddlers, all making their way towards the West of the great North American Continent.  The Mormons are a source of some major players in the story.

However, the novel has two parts, and I found at the centres of Part I and Part II the kind of mysterious statements that urge the reader to read on and discover how Sherlock solves the crime.

Halfway through Part I, a shonky detective, Lestrade, believes a murderer has written part of the name Rachel on the wall, in blood.  But Sherlock’s logical reasoning produces a different theory on how the man was murdered:

“Poison,” said Sherlock Holmes curtly, and strode off. “One other thing, Lestrade,” he added, turning round at the door: “‘Rache,’ is the German for ‘revenge’;  so don’t lose your time looking for Miss Rachel.”

File:Friston-holmes.gif
Original illustration of Holmes with magnifying glass, by D. H. Friston (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

Part II next time . . .

*****

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Pairs

Marianne from East of Málaga challenges us this October to find photos of pairs.  She defines it: A pair is a set of two things used together or regarded as a unit.

These lighthouse feet made me stop and look twice – the rust in its reddishness turns deterioration into art.  The lighthouse is set on a big concrete block so its feet were at my eye level as I wandered around it.

Lighthouse feet, Port-Vendres, France
Lighthouse feet, Port-Vendres, France

And a pair of nights ago I photographed a pair of bottles and two pairs of eyes on a pair of sons.  We were in a restaurant provocatively named Me and Mrs Jones (that’s not a pair).

Bottles of Canberra water in 'Me and Mrs Jones' restaurant, Canberra
Bottles of Canberra water in ‘Me and Mrs Jones’ restaurant, Canberra

Marianne likes us to spread the blog love, so I’ll tell you I loved a poem I read here.  In fact I printed it out and stuck it on my fridge.

And I read a blog about amazing historical embroidery at the Burrell Collection in Glasgow, including a video demonstrating how women kept their arms out of the way of crinoline skirts, here.

*****

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Journey to the centre: Great middle lines – 10

Today I’ve found a book on my shelf which I’d forgotten about because it’s not memorable, despite its fame as a prizewinner.  I’d bought it and read it because of an excellent piece I knew by the same author;  it was about translating, a thing I love to do.  So, I know he’s a great writer.  I don’t think, however, that Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending, the reflections of a self-indulgent older man, deserved a big prize.  Nevertheless, it has a middle as all writing does, and the narration on pages 75 and 76, at the rough centre, is well-written, the work of a close observer.

Here the narrator is lunching with his ex-wife, discussing an issue which has arisen about one of his ex-girlfriends, ‘The Fruitcake’:

There was a silence.  We ate.  Then Margaret tapped her knife against my plate.

“And if the presumably still-unmarried Miss Veronica Ford happened to walk into this café and sit down at our table, how would the long-divorced Mr Anthony Webster react?”

She always puts her finger on it, doesn’t she?

“I don’t think I’d be especially pleased to see her.”

Something in the formality of my tone caused Margaret to smile.  “Intrigued?  Start rolling up your sleeve and taking off your watch?”

I blushed.  You haven’t seen a bald man in his sixties blush?  Oh, it happens, just as it does to a hairy, spotty fifteen-year-old.  And because it’s rarer, it sends the blusher tumbling back to that time when life felt like nothing more than one long sequence of embarrassments.

*****

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Journey to the centre: Great middle lines – 9

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë is the first adult novel I ever read.  I remember the moment when I was thirteen and found it on the school library bookshelf, and I remember how grown-up I felt reading it.

In my $1 edition I bought at a flea market, I searched today for the pages at the centre of the novel, where I was surprised to find Jane and Rochester falling in love;  this then is the turning point.

It’s a huge problem for her;  he is anything but available.  Jane feels now, at 19 years old, as though she has mastered life.  But the second half of the story from here on will reveal that she stands not on a rock of love but on quicksand, while above her, hidden in the attic, is his mad wife:

“A sneer, however, whether covert or open, had now no longer that power over me it once possessed:  as I sat between my cousins, I was surprised to find how easy I felt under the total neglect of the one and the semi-sarcastic attentions of the other – Eliza did not mortify, nor Georgiana ruffle me.  The fact was, I had other things to think about;  within the last few months feelings had been stirred in me so much more potent than any they could raise – pains and pleasures so much more acute and exquisite had been excited than any it was in their power to inflict or bestow – that their airs gave me no concern either for good or bad.”

*****

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Journey to the centre: Great middle lines – 4

The Reader by Bernhard Schlink (translated by Carol Brown Janeway) is 216 pages long and the middle page (of my edition) is p. 108, where Hanna, a former guard in a Nazi concentration camp, is on trial for her part in locking women prisoners in a church which was then bombed and burnt down.  Two pages later, on p. 110, Hanna asks the judge a question which leaves him, and us the readers, on shaky ground.  The judge searches for an answer, stalls for time, and eventually answers unsatisfactorily.  We the readers read on, hoping a better answer is offered in the second half of the novel.

Here’s the portion of the conversation that puts the ball in the judge’s court:

‘Did you not know that you were sending the prisoners to their death?’
‘Yes, but the new ones came, and the old ones had to make room for the new ones.’
‘So because you wanted to make room, you said you and you and you have to be sent back to be killed?’
Hanna didn’t understand what the presiding judge was getting at.
‘I … I mean … so what would you have done?’ Hanna meant it as a serious question.  She did not know what she should or could have done differently, and therefore wanted to hear from the judge, who seemed to know everything, what he would have done.

*****

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Journey to the centre: Great middle lines – 3

Today, telling my daughter-in-law about the turning point at a novel’s centre, I picked up a book lying on her table, Wuthering Heights, to demonstrate.  I calculated the number of pages in the story, then halved it and turned to that page, ending up at p. 166, the early part of Volume Two where Heathcliff asks Nelly Dean how Catherine died.  Nelly replies:

‘Her life closed in a gentle dream – may she wake as kindly in the other world!’

And Heathcliff responds darkly, horrifying many of the readers in 1847 who were frightened by this unstable, devilish man and what he was going to do with this consuming love in the second half of the story:

‘May she wake in torment!’ he cried, with frightful vehemence, stamping his foot, and groaning in a sudden paroxysm of ungovernable passion. ‘Why, she’s a liar to the end! Where is she? Not there – not in heaven – not perished – where? Oh! you said you cared nothing for my sufferings! And I pray one prayer – I repeat it till my tongue stiffens – Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest, as long as I am living! You said I killed you – haunt me, then! The murdered do haunt their murderers.’

*****

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Journey to the centre: Great middle lines – 2

To find the centre of The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco (translated by William Weaver), I have to begin by counting the pages of the first prologue which precedes the second prologue. The first one appears to be a kind of introduction by the author, an account of how Eco came to write this story. But he’s shrewd; the first prologue is all fiction, just like the rest of the story.  Added to the pages of the story, (pp. 3 – 493), the total number in my edition is about 498, making the centre a sub-title page, “Fourth Day”.  But I turn the page and find the spot where the young monk, the narrator, starts to feel certain his fellow monks are not simply dying one by one, they are being murdered.  A coincidence is revealed at this halfway point, leading the reader to guess why the monks in this wealthy Italian monastery are being permanently silenced.

“The other day I observed Venantius’s hands, when the blood had been washed off, and I noticed a detail to which I attached little importance. The tips of two fingers of Venantius’s right hand were dark, as if blackened by some dark substance. Exactly – you see? – like two fingertips of Berengar now. In fact, here we have a trace also on the third finger. At the time I thought that Venantius had handled some inks in the scriptorium. . . . “

*****

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Journey to the centre of a novel: Great middle lines – 1

In the middle of a novel, a few lines often show the reader that a character’s world is about to become unfamiliar and unsafe.  It can be a turning point, a point where a journey begins and when the action starts.

I’d like to share some of these lines with you.  I’ll go to the half-way point of a novel, give or take a page, and scan it for something I wish I’d written myself.  Today I picked up The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien, turned to the opening page, p. 13, then the last page, p. 253, and calculated the rough centre would be at about p. 120.  I read the page and found these admirable words, which indeed are the point where a journey begins:

“There are no safe paths in this part of the world. Remember you are over the Edge of the Wild now, and in for all sorts of fun wherever you go. Before you could get round Mirkwood in the North you would be right among the slopes of the Grey Mountains, and they are simply stiff with goblins, hobgoblins, and orcs of the worst description. Before you could get round it in the South, you would get into the land of the Necromancer; and even you, Bilbo, won’t need me to tell you tales of that black sorcerer.”

*****

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I spy with my little eye

Marianne from East of Málaga asks
what can I spy
and what is my point of view?
I spy with my little eye
a window I can’t see through:

One of the stained glass windows by Leonard French in the National Library of Australia
One of 16 stained glass windows by Leonard French in the National Library of Australia
Bottom panel of a stained glass window by Leonard French, National Library of Australia
Bottom panel of a stained glass window by Leonard French, National Library of Australia

The glass is about 20cm thick, hand-chiselled and set into pewter-coloured concrete.  The artist is an amazing Australian, Leonard French, who made 16 of these windows for the National Library in 1967.  They are all visible from the foyer of the library through the interior plain glass walls of the café and the bookshop.  The windows on the side of the building receiving the morning sun are in warm colours, those you see here decorating the walls of the café.  On the other side of the foyer, the afternoon sun side, the colours are cool blues and purples filling two walls of the bookshop.  French had a philosophy that art should be accessible to the masses and not just for viewing, a philosophy which makes me happy every time I sit at a window table in the café (I’m a little less happy when they’re all taken.).  The chiselled edges of the glass are not sharp.  I know this because I like to stroke it.  The sun shining on the glass makes it glow and makes it warm to touch, but not hot.  A spirit-lifter.

As part of the photo challenge, Marianne suggests we recommend two blogs.  Two come to mind immediately:  The Wanderlust Gene and Covetotop.  Their blogs don’t just have interesting photos of faraway places, but more importantly for me they are well-written.  I’m always on the lookout for readable writers.