Writing about characters with amnesia is tricky. Full-on, "who am I" amnesia especially. You spin characters out from what they do, say, and think. The absence of knowledge about who they are is toubh to build on. Tougher than it looks.
Then too, there's the danger that the mystery about their identity will be too absorbing. If the main thing about them is that they're a big question mark, might not the answers be a letdown?
Patrick Quentin's Puzzle for Fiends takes an interesting approach to the subject. In a brief prologue, he introduces his hero Peter Duluth in his own life with his own wife before a smash cut to him being bedridden with three women telling him he's someone else. And Duluth had appeared in several books before this. So there's really no mystery about his identity, at least not for the reader. Unlike Duluth, we know that. Like him, we don't know how he got from there to here.
I haven't finished the book yet, so I couldn't say how it turns out even if I wanted to. The setup is pretty engaging, though.
2 comments:
I get your point about it being tough to build a workable storyline around a character who has no story. Unsurprisingly, we had to look up the writer on wikipedia and on goodreads for the book Puzzle for Fiends. It turns out, as I'm sure you know, that Patrick Quentin was a group of writers known for a number of novels while the Puzzle books were authored by two of them, Webb and Wheeler.
Of the goodreads reviews this one (google translated from Polish) was my favorite bit:
It's a classic theme, a man with amnesia surrounded by enemies... in this case, an overly loving family. Here, he's also confined to a wheelchair so he can't defend himself at all. But the story moves along pretty quickly, and what would be enough for an author to write a five-hundred-page epic today is resolved pretty quickly here, only to have another twist and crisis come along that needs to be resolved. And then another. Yes, the point of the story is clear to you up front, but as the setting and main threat change several times throughout the book, it's not long enough to get annoying. Plus, you kind of get used to the hero being a jerk.
It does sound like fun. Speaking of fun Numb thinks you might enjoy this one he found:
https://x.com/boriquagato/status/2053864934627291222
It's not impossible to make a compelling amnesiac character, but it's certainly difficult. And it's especially difficult to keep them interesting all the way through.
Yeah, the whole Patrick Quentin situation was weird. It started off as a pseudonym shared by Webb and Martha Mott Kelley, but later Hugh Wheeler joined with Webb, after Kelley and Mary Aswell had departed. Wheeler would later become a well-known playwright, whose work includes the libretto for Sondheim's Sweeney Todd. That's funny, because Peter Duluth is a theatrical producer, but they showed little interest in writing about the theatre.
That's a fair writeup of the book, except that I don't know that the hero is that much of a jerk, compared to pretty much everyone else.
Keep six rats' distance between you? That's certainly a handy visual.
Post a Comment