Title : Whittled from a Bone of Cain (revised)

Author : Ardin Lalui

Genre : Literary Fiction, Novel

Read Opening Chapters

Rating : Best Seller Chart Book

Synopsis
Adam had two sons, Cain and Abel. And Cain killed Abel with a rock and now we're all of us descended from Cain. And I guess that's how it was always supposed to be.

View professional critique in the next post

I have small concern with the Frank-Jo scene at the gas station. Wouldn’t they talk while drinking their beer (even allowing for the fact that they drink it down quickly)? It feels odd that, having met up again by chance after all these years, their conversation dwindles away to nothing when there is surely much to be said or asked in both directions. I realise that you might be withholding information about how Jo and Frank know each other, but it smacks of a device to keep the men from talking about something because you don’t want the reader to know too much too soon. Like an omission, accidental or intentional, on the author’s part rather than a naturalistic companionable silence between two men drinking.


Vernon’s chapters . . .

I like the use of the 1st-person in Vernon’s chapters, to make a clear and immediate distinction between his and Frank’s strands of the novel. It enables the reader easily to reorientate from one chapter to the next. However, I do have a slight concern over occasional “leakage” in tone and register, where Vernon’s 1st-person narrative “voice” sounds too Frank-like. For example, the occasional dropping of the definite article at the beginning of a sentence “Old man said . . .”, in Vernon’s section; “Station was deserted” and “Cop must have seen . . .”, both in Frank’s sections. Similarly, some of Vernon’s reflections seem too wise for his years, and too close to Frank’s more sardonic, experienced take on life (e.g. when Vernon observes: “It went and got right under my skin the way the truth has a habit of doing”; or “I tell her I’ve got plenty use for the truth”; or “seems like religion comes cheap with age”; and when he refers to the Bible’s teachings on women: “I didn’t know the Bible really covered it.”) Generally, I think you characterize Vernon very well and make him quite distinct from Frank, but these few glitches blur the lines somewhat and make Vernon harder to credit, as a 12-year-old boy, albeit one who is having to grow up sooner than he might wish.
What you capture well, with Vernon, is the sense that he is a lad who wants to grow up “right” and not be like his dad – that he has a moral core, riddled with anxiety about the difficulty of becoming a decent man when there are so many ways to fail in that mission, not least an implicit concern that he will turn out to be his father’s son come what may. Also, mixed in with this, is his understated, unconfessed desire for a father figure in his life. Like Frank, Vernon is a wonderfully subtle, complex and involving character.

As with the Frank sections, there are some terrific set-piece scenes in chapters 2 and 4: the encounter with the pretty girl, Antije, and Vernon’s confused feelings towards her and his reflections on the nature of virtue; and especially good is the extended conversation between Vernon and Mr Lydenburg. Chapter 4 ends with a couple of great lines. Firstly, there’s Vernon’s reflection: “I guess that was my price, a red Peter Stuyvesant”, then the exchange with his mother: “Have you been smoking?”, “Aw, Mom, he’s dying. He deserves more respect than kids like me telling him what he can and can’t do.” This reply from Vernon is not only very funny, in its subtle misdirection of his mother’s attention away from his crime of smoking, but is also revealing of Vernon’s character and the nature of the relationship he has with his mother.

Conclusion

There is so much to admire in these chapters. In terms of the line-by-line writing, you have an enviably spare, lean, unfussy style that at the same time manages to be lyrical, especially in its description of place and evocation of mood and atmosphere. If Jack Kerouac, Cormac McCarthy and Annie Proulx collaborated with Hemingway and Steinbeck, this is the sort of prose they might produce. (The line, in the first paragraph of chapter 1: “. . . real gone beaten souls . . .” could be straight out of On the Road.) Of course, that suggests a certain American-ness to your writing, which might be indicative of your reading influences but does raise a couple of potential concerns that might trouble an agent or editor: (a) is your writing, if not derivative, then too obviously influenced and therefore “familiar” rather than original?; and (b) is the prose style and idiom appropriate, linguistically and culturally, to the novel’s South African setting (albeit a deliberately universal, quasi-Biblical reinvention of South Africa)? I don’t have a problem with it, but others might and so I’ve flagged it up for you to consider.
But you do write wonderfully well, with great assurance, both in the main narrative passages but also in the dialogue exchanges, which are consistently naturalistic, sharp and convincing. You are particularly skilled at capturing that laconic, masculine expression where little is said at the surface but much is there to be inferred beneath the words and in the silences in between. Hemingway did this. So did Raymond Carver. It’s of a piece with the general subtlety, understatement and restraint that characterises your prose and which makes it so enjoyable and satisfying for the attentive reader.
What I also like very much in these chapters is the way you set up your novel’s central premise and its thematic context: the convergence of Frank’s and Vernon’s stories, set against the backdrop of a separatist, fundamentalist Christian, whites-only town in the new South Africa. It’s a strikingly original and fascinating premise for a novel, rich in ideas but foregrounded by strong storytelling and characterisation/relationship dynamics. And you’re typically subtle in teasing out the information for the reader without slipping into exposition (we get to learn about Orania bit by bit, and through various means: the exchange between Frank and Justice; Vernon’s internal thoughts; the Jo/Frank exchange.) It evolves organically with the storytelling rather than being clumsily shoehorned in.
As for the novel as a whole, as summarised in the synopsis, it might be worth revising the synopsis once you’ve completed the first draft – it will be easier and less “bitty” to write at that stage. You might also want to keep the synopsis more fully focused on the Frank and Vernon strands, relative to the stories of those around them. Even so, with the synopsis as it stands, I imagine a literary agent or publisher would immediately see the novel’s potential as a story, as well as the quality of the writing displayed in the sample chapters.
Can I wish you every success in completing this first draft and in developing the novel towards a pitch for publication after that.





Martyn Bedford
for youwriteon.com

What an incredible crit. You should be glowing right now. Keep up the good work. I wish you the best.

jen Jen

"There are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts." Charles Dickens

Thank you everyone for this great encouragement!!