Click the link below to view the opening chapters of Ergo Sum by Michael Alan. Genre: literary fiction. The professional critique of the story is posted below.

http://www.youwriteon.com/books/bookdetail.aspx?bookguid=53f2f89e-fd78-4d8f-9d57-396e75885b66


Notes about the reviewer: After a highly successful career in publishing, mostly as Editorial Director firstly of Corgi Books and later of Cassell, Michael Legat became a full-time writer and tutor of Creative Writing. He has published five novels and eighteen non-fiction books, the latter including the Best Sellers An Author's Guide to Publishing and Writing for Pleasure and Profit.

Website: http://www.bookends.clara.net/


Critique of Ergo Sum by Michael Legat

ERGO SUM

Michael Alan

At the top of the synopsis it says that this submission is in the category of Literary Fiction. I am never quite sure what that means. It should, I suppose, guarantee that the story’s prose will be of a high quality, but more importantly that it will demand more from the reader than a non-stop-action thriller or the kind of novel in which the only issue is whether the heroine will end up in the right man’s arms. In other words, the ideas which it sets out to put before the reader are probably more important than the plot.

Ergo Sum certainly seems to be primarily a novel of ideas. It made me think of both1984 and Brave New World, and I applaud the ambition to write a book in a somewhat similar vein to those classics.

These chapters seem to me to have a number of major strengths. It is obvious that you have a real understanding of how words and phrases and sentences and paragraphs and chapters work, with the result that the material flows effortlessly and is easy to read. The dialogue always sounds natural and the exchange of views between Stone and his students is never less than interesting. The Prologue gets the book off to a good start, and it sounds as though the ending will be both striking and satisfying. The concept behind the story strikes me as original, and the synopsis demonstrates that you have something important to say.

And what about weaknesses? Well, there are two things which bother me considerably. The first concerns the characterisations. One can hear Stone’s precise tones, and his sometimes mischievous treatment of his students adds a very welcome touch of humour to the story. The reader gets a very clear picture of him (indeed, I wondered whether he was drawn from life). But apart from him the rest of the people in the story so far have not really come alive for me, and, since he is not particularly likeable, there is no one with whom to empathise. Winthrop is not quite as remote as the other students, but is only on the verge of engaging the reader’s interest, and the main characteristic which comes over is one of aggression, which doesn’t help to make her sympathetic. The remoteness for me is exacerbated by the fact that you usually call her ‘Winthrop’ rather than by her first name, although since her first name is Addison that wouldn’t be much of an improvement because it sounds like another surname (perhaps I’m being too British – Americans are much more used to what to me seem outlandish first names than we old-fashioned Brits are). In general you often prefer surnames, without either ‘Mr’ or ‘Ms’ and this, at least in my view, makes it less easy for the reader to get to know the characters. Since Ms Winthrop is apparently the principal character I would also introduce her much earlier in the book. Even in literary fiction readers like to latch on to and identify with the main character, and the earlier you can allow them to recognise and like that person the better.

At the moment I am not sure what the other students – Jackson and Barnes, Alcott and Howell – are doing in the story. This is, of course, one of the problems that a critic has when only a part of the novel is available – it is easy to make a comment on some aspect of the submission which one wouldn’t necessarily do if the complete work had been read. Anyway, judging from the material in front of me, the scenes with the students do not seem to add anything other than a contrast with the situations in the lecture hall. And apart from the interest in sex manifested by Jackson and Barnes I don’t really know anything about any of them.

My second problem concerns the pace of the story. By the end of these specimen chapters I had read some 8,000 words – almost a tenth of the projected length, and I had little idea of what the book was about, where it was going, which of the characters other than Stone and Ms Winthrop I should be interested in, if any. I had not read the synopsis – I never do read synopses until after the specimen chapters, because I want to put myself in the position of the ordinary reader who comes to the book without knowing what it is about (such a reader may of course have a blurb to help him/her, but blurbs often give little away). I feel that you need to get to grips with your theme much earlier than at present. It is a bit like whodunits (which I think you would call ‘mysteries’) – in the heyday of writers like Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers and the like it was quite normal to spend the first three or four chapters in setting the scene before anyone was murdered, but nowadays readers want the body on page one, or pretty soon after. I think you should also cut or shorten anything which is not essential, such as the scenes in which the students talk among themselves.

The characterisations and the pace are the two major flaws which I see in these chapters, but I must also mention the confusion you wrought in my mind when Ms Winthrop, after making her way through mysterious ands forbidding territory, found Professor Stone apparently dead, only for him to come alive in the following chapter. What is that all about? ‘Oh!’ I said to myself. ‘This is science fiction, is it? Professor Stone is either an alien himself or has been possessed by an alien.’ Then I thought, ‘Perhaps it’s meant to be symbolic.’ I am pretty sure that you don’t want your readers to think on either of those lines, and whatever your reason for putting that scene in you really ought to give some explanation.

A minor problem for me is Winthrop’s ‘Mother Ge’. I was brought up short each time the two words appear, because I didn’t know what they meant and I didn’t know how to pronounce mentally the second one. From reading the synopsis I realised that ‘Ge’ is short for ‘Gaia’. Then why not ‘Mother G’ or ‘Mother Gaia’? And whatever version you use, I think you need to give an indication of what Gaia means to Winthrop. You may think that this is an incredibly unimportant criticism and that I am nit-picking, but anything in a story which makes the reader pause because he/she doesn’t know what is meant is a mistake, because it takes her/him out of the story. Moreover, if Winthrop has to explain her allegiance to the Earth Mother early in the narrative I think this will be a useful additional factor in the build-up of your main theme.

Finally, I wonder about your title. Will the Latin put off potential readers? I suppose it would not do so as far as the kind of reasonably intelligent readers you are aiming at are concerned. Nevertheless…



My criticisms of your work are quite harsh, and will probably annoy you. Please swallow any irritation that I have caused with them and ask yourself whether it is worth taking them on board and trying to solve the problems which they present. I wouldn’t be so critical if I didn’t think your work was of a high enough quality to warrant complete frankness on my part.


Michael Legat