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backstory disease
Dec. 8th, 2007 04:44 pmI had not taken to The Golden Compass when it first came out - I thought the imaginary-world geopolitics too cardboard for something supposed to be an analogue of our own world, and the daemons to be terminally annoying - and never finished it. But I suddenly read the whole book (but not the sequels) last week, in preparation, I suppose, for the release of the film.
But the tenor of the film reviews suggests I shouldn't bother. Some have compared it unfavorably with Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings, and oh boy, if that ain't a killer disrec I don't know what is. I chuckled at one reviewer who found unintended associations with old commercials lurking in the CGI. He kept waiting for Iorek, the armored polar bear, to offer Lyra a Coke.
One LJ commenter in a friends-locked post complained that too much of the backstory is revealed in the opening voiceover. This is Backstory Disease, a failure of literary summarizers - and not just film adaptations - everywhere.
Many good stories deal out the background setting in tiny delectable lumps over the course of the story. The reader, having eagerly collected them all, then begins summarizing the story for other people by laying out all this preciously-collected background in a big lump before telling the story. Sometimes they even forget to indicate that this is not the actual story of the book. And they never seem to realize that gathering the information bit-by-bit is a large part of the fun of reading it. Laying too much of it upfront raises the question for the new reader, Why do I want to know all this stuff? I haven't been hooked by the story yet. (I'm not talking about plot spoilers now, though that enters into it.)
Any introduction to The Sandman that begins by telling you that you need to know that "There are seven brothers and sisters who have been since the beginning of time, the Endless," suffers from Backstory Disease. That's not revealed until volume 4, so it's obviously not something you need to know to read the tale. A proper summary of The Sandman might begin, "Morpheus, the Sandman, King of Dreams - he has many names - is captured in 1916 by a group of English occultists," which is how I did so in my article on the series, and let an understanding of who he is emerge in the course of the summary, just as it does for a reader of the story.
Though there's an adventure rescue plot built close to the spine of The Golden Compass, the real story of the book is Lyra's quest for information, about herself and the world. This can be done well or poorly, and my opinion is that Pullman does not do it very well. The information Lyra seeks is already known, and the drive of the plot is built almost entirely out of how quickly she can get someone to tell it to her or, more often, conveniently overhear it. This is arbitrary. Once revealed, even the deepest secret goes right into the assumed background and is no longer hidden from Lyra at all. And then there's the dreadful scene at the end where two characters passionately emote expository lumps at each other so that Lyra can overhear them.
For good or ill, though, that's how Pullman wrote the story, and to change the order in which information is revealed in The Golden Compass is fundamentally to change the structure of the tale. It doesn't have to be that way. Many films, in fact most good films, draw viewers in with the story instead of dumping info lumps on them, and dole out the background later, most skillfully.
But the tenor of the film reviews suggests I shouldn't bother. Some have compared it unfavorably with Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings, and oh boy, if that ain't a killer disrec I don't know what is. I chuckled at one reviewer who found unintended associations with old commercials lurking in the CGI. He kept waiting for Iorek, the armored polar bear, to offer Lyra a Coke.
One LJ commenter in a friends-locked post complained that too much of the backstory is revealed in the opening voiceover. This is Backstory Disease, a failure of literary summarizers - and not just film adaptations - everywhere.
Many good stories deal out the background setting in tiny delectable lumps over the course of the story. The reader, having eagerly collected them all, then begins summarizing the story for other people by laying out all this preciously-collected background in a big lump before telling the story. Sometimes they even forget to indicate that this is not the actual story of the book. And they never seem to realize that gathering the information bit-by-bit is a large part of the fun of reading it. Laying too much of it upfront raises the question for the new reader, Why do I want to know all this stuff? I haven't been hooked by the story yet. (I'm not talking about plot spoilers now, though that enters into it.)
Any introduction to The Sandman that begins by telling you that you need to know that "There are seven brothers and sisters who have been since the beginning of time, the Endless," suffers from Backstory Disease. That's not revealed until volume 4, so it's obviously not something you need to know to read the tale. A proper summary of The Sandman might begin, "Morpheus, the Sandman, King of Dreams - he has many names - is captured in 1916 by a group of English occultists," which is how I did so in my article on the series, and let an understanding of who he is emerge in the course of the summary, just as it does for a reader of the story.
Though there's an adventure rescue plot built close to the spine of The Golden Compass, the real story of the book is Lyra's quest for information, about herself and the world. This can be done well or poorly, and my opinion is that Pullman does not do it very well. The information Lyra seeks is already known, and the drive of the plot is built almost entirely out of how quickly she can get someone to tell it to her or, more often, conveniently overhear it. This is arbitrary. Once revealed, even the deepest secret goes right into the assumed background and is no longer hidden from Lyra at all. And then there's the dreadful scene at the end where two characters passionately emote expository lumps at each other so that Lyra can overhear them.
For good or ill, though, that's how Pullman wrote the story, and to change the order in which information is revealed in The Golden Compass is fundamentally to change the structure of the tale. It doesn't have to be that way. Many films, in fact most good films, draw viewers in with the story instead of dumping info lumps on them, and dole out the background later, most skillfully.
