My pal Kelly McBride introduced me to the novel "How I Live Now,"
written by Meg Rosoff. Employing a narrative strategy that goes
back at least to "Huckleberry Finn," Rosoff tells the story in the
voice of her protagonist, a 15-year-old New York girl named
Daisy. Plagued with family problems and an eating disorder, Daisy
travels to England to live with distant relatives in an Edenic country
setting. Paradise is lost, however, when the country is invaded
and occupied by an unnamed army.
The author caught my attention with this sentence:
I got cold
quicker than any of the others, who were having races and sitting on
rocks by the edge like turtles to soak up the sun before jumping in
again, so I got out then flopped down on a blanket in the warm sun and
waited patiently while the heat stopped the shivering in my skin and
gradually warmed my blood all the way through and then I just closed my
eyes and watched the petals fall and listened to the heavy low buzz of
fat pollen-drunk bees and tried to imagine melting into the earth so I
could spend eternity under this tree.
Let's do the math. That sentence is 105 words, and yet I swim
through it with ease. It helps that the author gives us the
subject and verb of a main clause early: "I got cold ..."
She can then build on that meaning with additional phrases and clauses
tied together by conjunctions such as "and" and "so." Those words
are so small that we often underestimate their power to "conjoin"
language.
Here is an even longer sentence, where children witness the execution of British soldiers assigned to protect them:
Someone else was screaming and when I turned back the whole world
seemed to have slowed down and grown quiet and from inside the silence
I watched the guard go right back to chatting with his friend and saw
Major McEvoy's head roll back for a moment and his eyes close and a
look of despair crumple up his face and in that split second I wondered
whether he was really that attached to the kid and then it was with
horror that I looked down and saw that Joe was still alive, gurgling
and trying to move the arm that wasn't caught under his body and when I
looked back at Major M I realized he was doing what he felt was his
duty as a member of the armed forces defending a British national and
still in slow motion he was climbing out of the truck and his plan must
have been to get Joe on his feet somehow and then to safety when I
heard about a hundred shots from a machine gun and the momentum of the
blasts hurled Major M backward across the road away from Joe with blood
welling up in holes all over him and this time you could see Joe's
condition was 100% dead with brains splattered everywhere and our
driver didn't wait around to see what might happen next but just
stepped on the gas and as we drove away I thought I felt tears on my
face but when I put my hand up to wipe them it turned out to be blood
and nobody made a single sound but just sat there shell-shocked and all
I could think about was poor Major M lying there in the dust though I
guess he was much too dead to notice.
Wow. That sentence is more than 250 words long. In this
case the author is accomplishing several narrative tasks at once:
-
To take a horrible moment and render it in slow motion.
-
To add adrenaline to the action and the language, leaving the reader breathless.
-
To get us inside the head of a young girl confronting a grotesque reality.
Also notice how little punctuation appears in that text. This gets us back to conjunctions. Rosoff uses "and" 14 times, giving the word a special power to connect clauses and phrases without additional
punctuation. None of this is journalism, of course, but I'd still
argue that it is the job of every writer to master the long
sentence.
