An American writer friend of mine, late one night in a bar in New York, leaned over to me once and whispered, ‘You know the trouble with readers? They’re dumb. You spend a chunk of your life making your books all rich and sophisticated and full of hidden meanings for them to stumble on. And they never get there. They just read the story and then they’re done.’
Here’s another perspective on that viewpoint. Authors can sometimes be very stupid. They assume a level of knowledge, sophistication and commitment on the part of their readers that is simply unrealistic. They become obsessed with small details no one notices. They lose themselves in the trees and forget that people are there to see the forest.
I know. I’ve been there.
Florian is a famous Venetian café in the Piazza San Marco. I used the place – sparingly – in The Cemetery of Secrets (or Lucifer’s Shadow depending where you are in the world and when you bought the book).
That story got a lot of acclaim. Here’s part of the review by one of America’s veteran critics Dick Adler writing about it in the Chicago Tribune:
Tasty little insider jokes abound: The 1733 hero wonders in a letter why the pompous owner of a popular coffeehouse called Triofante ‘doesn’t just name the place after himself and have done with it.’ The fact that the 1733 owner’s name was Floriano Francesconi, and the present-day coffeehouse (now the home of the $20 cup of espresso) is named Florian’s, is part of the book’s pleasure. Vivaldi is a sadly grotesque but still powerful musical force, and even the French writer Rousseau comes in for his share of needling.
Add horribly believable scenes of violence, enough sex to ensure the city’s reputation for romance, as well as great gobbets of food and scenery both splendid and squalid, and you begin to see why Lucifer’s Shadow is unputdownable.
Great review. Dick Adler, though, knows Venice well. He used to live there. I reread that book shortly before it was republished in the UK as The Cemetery of Secrets. I was amazed at the number of in-jokes I’d stuffed in. Why? For the old mountaineer’s reason I guess – because I could. That work was written under extraordinary circumstances. It was to be the final book in my then publishing contract. I seriously believed it might be the last novel I ever managed to publish. So I bunged in everything I could to see what it looked like.
I don’t do that now. The problem is that those in-jokes only made sense to someone who knows Venice, and knows it very well. No casual visitor was likely to get them. You had to visit the place, read some serious history books, become absorbed entirely in the city. Here’s the catch: that’s what I’m supposed to be doing on behalf of the reader, then recreating it for their imaginations. They shouldn’t have to bring much more to the party except some spare time, a willingness to read and an open, receptive mind.
It is terribly tempting to be over-sophisticated when writing fiction – to assume a level of knowledge on the part of the reader that is simply impractical. As we’ve established, readers in Victorian times could devote themselves to long and complex books because they had nothing else to do. Today they’re fighting not to be distracted by something else before they turn the page.
So in-jokes and arcane sophistication are, for me, out. I write fairly long and complex books in the first place. They also demand that the reader be willing to imagine themselves into another country, and become acquainted with unfamiliar aspects of history. I doubtless tread a fine line and cross over it on occasion. But you can’t push those poor souls too far. They simply won’t go there.