I came to the
thriller genre innocent as a newborn baby.
In fact, I didn’t
even realise I was writing one until I was more than 10,000 words into my novel
Jihadi: A Love Story. Beta readers
kept telling me I was writing a thriller, and at first that left me a little confused.
I had no idea what the definition of a thriller novel was. I looked that up and
found that International Thriller Writers considered a thriller to
be a novel driven by ‘the sudden rush of emotions, the excitement, sense of
suspense, apprehension, and exhilaration that drive the narrative, sometimes
subtly with peaks and lulls, sometimes at a constant, breakneck pace’. Another
definition told me that a thriller matched a resourceful human protagonist,
often cut off from his or her support network, against one or more
better-equipped villains out to destroy the protagonist, his or her nation,
and/or world stability. I had no problem with any of that, so I kept on writing.
But some questions kept nagging at me. Why do thrillers – novels from a genre
that had apparently chosen me, rather than me choosing it – get so little
respect? What was I getting myself into with this book? Why do we so often think
of thrillers as something you read on a long airplane flight, to distract
yourself and then set aside, as opposed to something you read to for joy, for
learning, for growth as a person?
The answer came
back (and it was my own, nobody else’s): Because thrillers aren’t real
literature.
Yes. I’m ashamed now
that this thought flashed across my brain pan. And yes. I know it isn’t true. I
promise, I didn’t speak those words out loud when I thought them, and I promise
I haven’t spoken them out loud since, and I promise that the first time I’ve
had the courage to type them is right now, for this blog. I typed those five
disgraceful words out as a means of full, repentant disclosure. I really don’t
know what came over me.
I do know
thrillers can be real literature. By ‘real literature’, all I mean is a book
that an intelligent person would want to at least consider reading twice. (Edward
Wilson’s A Very British Ending comes
to mind.) Here are three things I did in my novel in the hope of helping it to
fall into that category.
I tried to emphasize character development. The protagonist
of my story, Thelonius Liddell, also known as Ali Liddell, is a US intelligence
agent accused of terrorism, held in a secret overseas prison. We follow him
from boyhood into his mid-forties, and he is manifestly not the same person at
the end of the book as he is when we see him as a youngster. The story gives us
his major life decisions, his lessons, and his attempts to atone for the
mistakes he feels he’s made. In short, his character arc. It is meant to be a
broad arc. I meant him to go on a journey of transformation.
I chose big themes and tried to explore them in depth. A
novel has to be about something, and even though mine might appear from a
distance to deal exclusively with topical issues, I actually wanted it to
operate along lines that would still be relevant and important fifty, a
hundred, or two hundred years from now. These included justice, love, striving,
authenticity, and the influence that one’s own perspective has on the search
for truth. If any of that sounds elitist or high-minded, I don’t mean it to. I
still wanted to write a page-turner. Given that a good story always carries some
thematic message, though, I think a thriller is likelier to reward the reader,
and inspire a second look, if it chooses big themes and follows them wherever
they may lead.
I chose metaphors and images with care. Hemingway put
forth something known as the ‘Iceberg Theory’, under which the metaphors and
images chosen by a writer are held to be capable of carrying far more of the
meaning of the story than the more commonly relied-upon narrative elements of
description and dialogue. Thus a character’s holding a cigarette with a long
ash that’s about to collapse may say more about the smoker’s fragile mental
state than any number of descriptive sentences about the character, or than
something the character says. I tried to write the novel bearing the Iceberg
Theory in mind.
It’s a bit
pretentious, I know, appealing to the status of ‘literature’ for any book one
has written. That’s really for someone else to decide, not me. All I am sharing
here is what I understand ‘real literature’ to be – that which one would be
inclined to read again, having finished it – and my conviction that, despite
that dark lapse in thinking I shared earlier, of which I am heartily ashamed,
and which I will not type here again, great thrillers can indeed come under
that heading. At any rate, I tried to write one that did.
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