Diana Wynne Jones, Archer’s Goon (1984); Also, a Lengthy Digression on the Subject of Plot

Plot is very mysterious to me, perhaps the most mysterious element of fiction. That may be because I have yet to write a plot entirely to my satisfaction. I have written characters I believe to be authentic, paragraphs with a pleasing rhythm, and even a few metaphors of which I am proud. Plots, though, are great slabs of machinery with all kinds of moving parts. A plot does not fit into the palm of your hand the way a metaphor does. I would love to write a novel in which everything falls into place at the end with a resounding click—I admire novels with that sort of architectural exactitude—but my ideas are always a little too unruly. They always want to radiate out from—rather than to converge on—a central point.

Plot in fiction fills a similar role, I think, to melody in music. (I can’t seem to write melody very well, either.) Melody, after all, is progression; it is forward motion. Not constant motion: there must be rests in the right places, and some notes must be held longer than others. There should also be, for variety’s sake, moments of high and low tension, half-steps and leaping intervals, dynamics. Most importantly, and most mysteriously, each note in a good melody will seem to be, on some almost primordial level, the natural successor to the preceding note. A good melody feels right, even when it surprises—in much the same way that a good plot does.

Certain writers seem to have a gift for constructing plots, just as memorable melodies seem practically to erupt from the pens of certain composers. (Chopin, Gershwin, and Tchaikovsky spring immediately to mind.) On the basis of Archer’s Goon, Diana Wynne Jones is one of those writers for whom stories simply spill forth. She has the knack. That isn’t to say she didn’t to work long and hard to hone her talent; I have no doubt she did. But there is something so delightfully offhand, so effortlessly graceful about the way the plot unfolds in Archer’s Goon that one can hardly doubt the presence of a natural storyteller. Here is a clever orchestrator and a master melodist, a writer who, without seeming to try, conjures a whole succession of those moments of narrative inevitability—of intuitive rightness—that fill readers with the same kind of exhilaration as a musical crescendo.

I don’t like to summarize plot, and in the case of a book like this, which might almost be classified as Plot for Plot’s Sake, it seems an especially pointless exercise. Here is all you need to know: Howard and his little sister, the aptly named Awful, come home from school to find a very large and intimidating thug in the kitchen. The Goon (as he is referred to through most of the novel) says he’s been sent by someone named Archer to collect 2000 words of writing from their father. He says he won’t leave until the words have been written. And with that, we’re off. It is almost impossible not to keep reading from there. Who is Archer? Why does he need the 2000 words so badly he would send a goon (or Goon) to retrieve them? How did Howard’s father become involved with these shady characters? Jones keeps piling on the questions until you wonder if she can possibly answer them all. She does, and then the story ends, because, of course, the questions were the point all along. Oh, there are plenty of nice embellishments along the way: humorous situations, flights of fancy, a large and skillfully delineated cast of characters. But psychological depth is not exactly the main draw here. You keep reading to find out what happens next.

Plot is possibly the most undervalued aspect of fiction in literary circles. (Melody has, interestingly, also gone rather out of fashion in contemporary classical music.) In his book How Fiction Works, James Wood, widely considered the preeminent critic of our time, employs the phrase “the essential juvenility of plot.” He doesn’t feel the need to justify his wording. Just: plot is juvenile. As if this were quite self-evident. In his recent-ish New Yorker review of David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks, he opens with some ironic jabs at “storytelling,” which we can assume he equates with plot: “Meaning is a bit of a bore, but storytelling is alive. The novel form can be difficult, cumbrously serious; storytelling is all pleasure, fantastical in its fertility, its ceaseless inventiveness. [...] And the purer the storytelling the better—where purity is the embrace of sheer occurrence, unburdened by deeper meaning.”

Needless to say, James Wood and I do not quite see eye to eye on this issue. (Although I didn’t like The Bone Clocks very much either—not because of an excessive focus on storytelling, whatever that might entail, but because I found its storytelling ineffective. But that is another review and shall be written another time.) I don’t buy Wood’s absurd Story vs. Meaning dichotomy, for one. Consider Spenser’s Faerie Queene (or really any allegorical work): the poem is pure story. It contains no characters in the modern sense. Very little in the way of psychological insight. The many layers of meaning of the text are all conveyed more or less entirely through things happening. Through events. Prior to the advent of the psychological novel, “occurrence” was in fact generally how meaning was conveyed.

Furthermore, I’m not convinced that readers would flock to a book filled with “sheer occurrence.” (I am convinced most readers would categorically reject such a book. It would be akin to somebody rambling about a dream they had for hundreds of pages—written as a fantasy, at least. The realist version I suppose would be rather like the world’s driest biography. At any rate, the resulting book would either resemble life far too closely or not at all.) While people are, I will concede, quite willing to subject themselves to two hours of sound and fury when watching a movie, I am not sure they are so forgiving with books, which are more time-consuming and lack the sheer spectacle a movie can provide. A storyteller’s job is not simply to string a set of pretty occurrences together like pearls. A good storyteller must also provide some incentive to find out what will occur next. And that typically involves burdening those occurrences with meaning of some sort. The events must be somehow interrelated, whether thematically or through cause and effect; characters must be motivated by their circumstances to act; their actions must be either rewarded or punished; etc.

Back to Archer’s Goon. Jones imbues her charming occurrences with just enough meaning to make you want to keep reading, but no more—and that, I suppose, is the novel’s weakness, if I must be a Grinch and identify one. I can easily imagine James Wood decrying the book’s “damning lack of insight into the human condition”—except I highly doubt that James Wood ever reads children’s books, or thinks about them very deeply if he does. Archer’s Goon really is quite a hermetic book, thoroughly outlandish in every respect apart from its characters, who are always convincing but rarely more than one-dimensional. The whole affair is rather like a Rube Goldberg machine: there isn’t a whole lot of reason for it to exist, except it it just so ingeniously constructed that you can’t help but admire the effort and imagination that went into its creation.

Is that enough? For me, yes. I admired Archer’s Goon in much the same way that I admire The Nutcracker Suite, but more intensely, because I have heard the songs of The Nutcracker Suite hundreds of times and I have never read a book by Diana Wynne Jones before. “How does she do that?” I thought at several points (just as Tchaikovsky’s infallible ear for melody makes me wonder, “How does he do that?”). I think Plot for Plot’s Sake is as defensible an artistic philosophy as any other form of aestheticism (let’s not, for brevity’s sake, get into whether aestheticism is defensible as a whole), and the plot of Archer’s Goon certainly satisfies in an aesthetic sense. It is wildly creative, perfectly cohesive, and relatively devoid of cliche: as I have said, a wonderful little contraption, and a refreshing reminder that fast-paced storytelling need not rush mindlessly from one cliffhanger to the next with a few stopovers at boring conventions in between. Jones’s ability induces awe, and that’s certainly one of the functions of art.

But plot is not, for me, the be-all and end-all, and even if I could put together a plot as clever as the one in Archer’s Goon, I’m not sure that doing so would satisfy me artistically. The fact is, as much as I disagree with James Wood about basically everything, I am actually, like him, a big fan of meaning—which is probably why I would not canonize Archer’s Goon as a favorite novel of mine, although I did enjoy reading it very much. A lot of my favorite writers I admire more for the layers of meaning in their work than for their storytelling ability. Angela Carter, a writer very near and dear to my heart, was not a great architect of plots. I don’t think they interested her very much beyond their allegorical potential. (I wish she were still alive; I would have loved to see her give James Wood a stern lecture on the subject of allegory.) She makes a valiant effort to keep things lively in novels like Nights at the Circus, but one gets the sense that plots never came as naturally to her as multivalent symbolism and verbal acrobatics. Indeed, she admits as much herself: “From The Magic Toyshop onwards I’ve tried to keep an entertaining surface to the novels, so that you don’t have to read them as a system of signification if you don’t want to.”

That’s one of the things I’ve always admired about Carter: as demanding as her writing can be, you never get the sense that she is unsympathetic to readers. She wants to entertain, but she has serious things to say, too, and those things, for her, take priority. And while her plotting is never as adept as the poetry of her language, I do think her novels are enriched by the effort she made to give them, as she says, entertaining surfaces. Because it’s precisely the layeredness of her stories that has always resonated with me, the sense that beneath every occurrence lies a multitude of meanings.

I hope that in my own writing, as I become more comfortable with plots, I am able to find a happy medium somewhere between Carter’s density of meaning, which risks occasional ponderousness, and Jones’s bare minimum, which risks irrelevancy. My ideal novel is one you cannot stop reading because you have to find out what happens next—and later cannot wait to read again, more slowly this time, because you have to sort out what it all means.