The Fury by Alex Michaelides and some thoughts on time
The Craft Review #6 "I warned you at the start, that's not the way this is going to go”
“I am aware of the conventions of this genre. I know what's meant to happen next. I know what you're expecting. A murder investigation, a denouement, a twist.
That's how it's supposed to play out. But as I warned you at the start, that's not the way this is going to go.”
The Fury by Alex Michaelides
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This is the synopsis for The Fury from Alex Michaelides’ own website (I loved his first, best-selling novel, The Silent Patient, and was excited to read this one.)
This is a tale of murder.
Or maybe that’s not quite true. At its heart, it’s a love story, isn’t it?
Lana Farrar is a reclusive ex-movie star and one of the most famous women in the world. Every year, she invites her closest friends to escape the English weather and spend Easter on her idyllic private Greek island.
I tell you this because you may think you know this story. You probably read about it at the time ― it caused a real stir in the tabloids, if you remember. It had all the necessary ingredients for a press sensation: a celebrity; a private island cut off by the wind…and a murder.
We found ourselves trapped there overnight. Our old friendships concealed hatred and a desire for revenge. What followed was a game of cat and mouse ― a battle of wits, full of twists and turns, building to an unforgettable climax. The night ended in violence and death, as one of us was found murdered.
But who am I?
My name is Elliot Chase, and I’m going to tell you a story unlike any you’ve ever heard.
It’s certainly a bold claim. This is the story of a movie star with a movie star life-style, told by an unreliable narrator who slides in and out of our sympathies, narrated as a locked-room style mystery — 7 people are trapped on an isolated Greek island.
By the morning, one of them will be dead.
It is entertaining and clever.
But is it a story unlike any you’ve ever heard?
The reason the story works is because of an adroit play on time or rather with time, as if, for Michaelides, time has become as relative as Albert Einstein considered it to be:
“The distinction between the past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”
I used to be scared of time.
My novels all took place over the course of about a year and a half as that was all the timescale I thought I could manage.
When I started writing psychological thrillers, I flexed my writing wings and stretched time. A day could spool across several chapters if that would serve to increase the tension.
A moment by moment drip of sweat, prickle down the spine, the sudden ratcheting of a heart rate…
I used a time slip to create a plot twist in my seventh book and third thriller.
But a story that spans decades, even generations, that I’ve avoided. This was initially because I didn’t think I could handle that span of time, but also because I was worried about keeping the tension and suspense going over so many years.
The wonderful
has this to say about time in Eleven Urgent and Possibly Helpful Things I have Learned About Writing:“Whether your story is linear or fragmented, chronological or experimental, I need to know where I am in time, and, ideally, why I am at that place in time at this point in the story. I need to feel that you as the writer are fully in command of time and the way I am moving through it in your narrative.”
As ever, Jeannine is spot on.
Signposting to the reader where we are in time is absolutely crucial and it can be as simple as saying:
Two months had passed and it was now October.
The past two weeks had disappeared in a whirlwind of parties and clubbing.
It had been three weeks since I’d moved in, and I was no nearer getting hold of the money: our house was due to be repossessed in two months. As Thalia kept reminding me, we’d be out on our arses in time for Christmas.
(I’m semi-paraphrasing from the thriller I’m currently writing, The Footballer’s Girlfriend, in which, during the edit, I realised I’d not been up-front enough about the passage of time. And which, by the way, has consequences, not least the reader’s dislocation in space and time, but also, authenticity. I mean, I had lavender flowering in October for goodness sake.)
Jeannine goes on to talk about Narrative Time Awareness.
“Narrative Time Awareness: 1. The point in time from which you (or your narrator) narrate; 2. The proximity of narrative time point and the action, and 3. How on purpose that feels.”
And this is exactly what Alex Michaelides is doing in The Fury.
This is Michaelides flexing narrative time awareness with aplomb and most definitely on purpose.
This is what Michaelides does and this is how he plays with time: