The Synopsis Treasury (27 page)

Ian R. MacLeod

(photo by Gillian Bowskill)

Ian R. MacLeod had been selling and writing professionally for more than 20 years. His critically acclaimed novels have been widely translated, whilst his short stories have been reprinted in many Best Of anthologies. He has twice won the World Fantasy Award and the Sidewise Award for alternate history, as well as the Arthur C. Clarke and John W. Campbell Memorial awards. His work stretches genre conventions, and he is often regarded as a “writer’s writer”. He lives with his two dogs and one wife in the river town of Bewdley.

The Art of War and Synopsis

There’s a military saying about battle plans working very well until you make contact with the enemy. The same could be said about any kind of outline or synopsis working well until it comes to the tricky business of actually writing the story. If the writing is already done, or the battle fought, the process becomes a little easier, although there’s always the chance then that, much like most regimental histories, all the blood and the glory gets lost in a dull listing of events and facts.

The relationship between a novel and its synopsis is certainly a fluid and frustrating one. As far as
The Light Ages
is concerned, for example, I could have written a different synopsis, both in terms of mood and plot, at virtually any point in the writing process. It would be different again, with the mixed blessing of hindsight, if I wrote it now. Still, I think that any reader or editor worth their salt will understand that a synopsis is a different beast to the work itself, and can be taken more as a statement of intent than a detailed battle plan. You have places you’d like to get to, outcomes you’ve toyed with, and moods and feelings you’d like to explore, but, no matter how boldly you state them, that’s likely to be it. Books written too slavishly to a synopsis, especially by inexperienced authors (and I would risk the contention that no experienced author would ever expect to stick to a synopsis), feel wooden and wrong. Characters don’t behave as they should. Events feel wrong or rushed.

Still, and at the risk of overdoing the military metaphor, a good synopsis has its uses, just as a good plan of attack does, even if you find you can’t keep to it when the ink and the blood start flying. For a start, there’s a sense, which you hope you can convey to yourself as well as to others, that there’s a book there waiting to be written. Secondly, writing a synopsis makes you look hard at issues in the book you might otherwise have been avoiding. On what might seem like negative side, there’s always the risk that either you or the world at large might realize at this point that the whole project isn’t worth the bother in the first place. But I guess that’s better than spending two years writing, and perhaps not finishing, a book, only to make the same discovery.

It’s obvious from what I’ve said that
The Light Ages
turned out differently from its synopsis; it would have to. Although I was deep into the book when I wrote it, there were still many issues, both ahead and behind of me, which were unresolved. What was really driving Robbie? How big did the ending need to be to work? What was really going to happen with Mistress Summerton and Annalise? Those of you familiar with the book will recognize some of these issues, and those who aren’t can decide for themselves whether the book feels coherent and complete as it lies in synopsis. Even if it does, though, take my word for it, it couldn’t be, and it isn’t.

—Ian R. MacLeod

The Light Ages
By Ian R. MacLeod
A Synopsis

Part science-fantasy, part alternative-history, part magical realism,
The Light Ages
is a big 150-160,000 word novel set in an England in which the Industrial Revolution took place with one fundamental difference: the discovery at the end of the Renaissance of subterranean seams of a strange natural substance called aether. The full manuscript up to the point marked (1) is attached, whilst the manuscript up to the point marked (2) has been written in word-processed draft. Broadly-speaking, the book is about three-quarters done.

Aether, which glows in the dark and casts shadows in daylight, allows mankind to manipulate reality. Metals can be made stronger. Plants and animals can be re-formed into fabulous shapes; there are white-leafed trees, incredible flowers, huge mole-like pitbeasts, even unicorns and dragons. Messages can be sent mind to mind along telegraphs. In the wake of this discovery, England and the world has continued to develop since its discovery, but in a way which has become technologically lazy and inward-looking. There are no wars. The advanced nations sink into their dreams. The Americas and the Antipodes remain largely wildernesses. The guilds, who each cherish their secrets and mysteries, rise in the place of monarchies and parliaments, and England becomes permanently stuck in a world of late Victorian steam and coal and mystery.

The main character, Robert Borrows, is born in the industrial Yorkshire town of Bracebridge which is famous, if for anything, for its deep-set aether engines. His father works at Mawdingly & Clawtson, the big aether factory which pounds day and night in the bowl of the valley. When, after a flash-forward prelude of him as a wealthy grandmaster meeting with a aether-deformed changeling on a ruined bridge on the outskirts of London, the main story begins with six year old Robert’s hard to express disappointment at his Day of Testing; a ritual induction to the guilds with a burning of an aether onto the left wrist. Throughout the story, Robert is both attracted and repelled by the mysteries which always seem to lie just beneath the surface of the ordinary world. As shift sirens blare and chimneys smoke, he’s haunted by his mother’s stories of knights and fairies, and is always seeking a similar place of wonders in the real world. As the book develops through revelations and tragedies and moments of joyous fantasy, Robert’s longing comes to focus more and more on one person, one creature; the beautiful, haughty, and mysterious Annalise. He is introduced to her in the spring after his Day of Testing, when he is taken by his mother on a journey to a deserted railway station, and to a house which is half-coated in engine ice; the white crystalline effusion of used-up aether. There, they are met by a strange, small, dark-eyed woman whom Robbie understands to be that feared creature, a changeling. Changelings, the shadow-folk, about whom Robert has heard but previously scarcely believed, are human beings who have been transformed and possessed by aether. They are regarded with dread and prejudice; monstrous incursions from the world of chaos which aether always opens, but which the rituals of the guilds endless seek to control and make mundane. Mistress Summerton is wizened and brown-skinned, she talks to Robert inside his head, and her eyes are pools of shade, but she is no monstrosity; a human-made fairy. Whilst she and Robert’s mother discuss seemingly grave but unexplained matters, he is sent to play with an aloof blonde-haired girl of about his own age; Annalise, whom he finds strange and fascinating, especially when he sees there is no aether burn on her wrist, and notices a patch of shadowed flesh on her shoulderblade. Is she, too, a changeling? It seems impossible, and yet …

Back in Bracebridge, winter comes in, and Robbie’s mother becomes ill from some initially unexplained disease. Puzzled and angry, Robert makes the acquaintance of a high Guildmaster named Grandmaster Harrat, who seems surprisingly interested in him. As the manifestations of Robert’s mother’s illness become more disturbing, he finds an escape of a sort in visiting Grandmaster Harrat’s house and joining in his messy experiments with creating domestic light from electricity. It becomes apparent that Robert’s mother is becoming a changeling—but of the nightmare kind which every guildsperson shuns and fears; an expression of aether’s essential madness; a coal-eating, fire-breathing demon. Finally on a wet morning after Robert has tried and failed to kill the monster his mother has become with a kitchen knife, the tollman, whose job is to cart such creatures off to a high-walled asylum, arrives. To escape this fate, Robert’s mother throws herself to her death through the bedroom window. That same afternoon, fizzing with grief and anger, Robert goes to visit Grandmaster Harrat. Amid the failure of his experiments with electricity. Grandmaster Harrat confesses his involvement in the process which precipitated Robert’s mother’s illness. Combined with an aether-induced vision, it seems that his mother and her friend Kate, who both then worked in the aether paintshop at Mawdingly & Clawtson, were sent down subterranean tunnels to paint an object in a dark cave; a black haft; a threatening natural growth of aether. Kate’s finger was pricked as she painted it and Robbie’s mother cut her palm as she tried to drag her away. Grandmaster Harrat, who claims that he was following the orders of a mysterious high guildsman, is wracked with guilt. In his grief and Robert’s anger, he dies amid spills of acid and aether, and the house fills with gas and explodes.

After his mother’s funeral, Robert is visited by Mistress Summerton. If she dresses in a big coat and hat, if she wears glasses to cover the glowing blackness of her eyes and weaves around herself a spell or ordinariness, she can pass anything but the closest examination as a small guildswoman. As they wander the market and walk beside the river, she explains the difficulty of living her life, born already deformed, but as a seemingly sane and tame changeling; the early days of torture and testing as the guilds tried to ascertain her powers, the endless sense of imprisonment and secrecy. Annalise, she tells him whilst skirting neatly around any details as to her origins, has left to start out on her life, hopefully as an ordinary person, unhaunted by her patch of shadow flesh and her hidden changeling powers. Thus ends the first part of the book, with Robert wandering Bracebridge and waiting for his life to start, then finally leaping from a bridge to the straw of an aether truck, and heading down towards London.

There, he takes up with Saul in the dubious Easterlies and even more dubious Nethers, and lives a happy life of minor pilfering and odd jobs through his first summer in London. With Saul’s girlfriend Maud, they go the Midsummer Fair in London’s Westminster Park, which is populated with magically aether-transformed trees, and surrounded by the impossible towers and huge aethered domes of the great guildhouses. There, he meets Annalise, or Anna as she has become; now a wealthy young woman about town, fresh from finishing school and with a false past behind her. With Anna’s friend Sadie, she and Robbie go dancing on a pier above the Thames. It’s a magical night. Robbie has never been so happy, or so in love. But they part at dawn with Robbie promised to secrecy as to the truth of Anna’s nature and origins, and the gap between them seemingly bigger than ever. (1)

As autumn progresses, the easy life of minor crime and guildless irresponsibility turns hard. Robbie and Saul become reliant on the heat of the nursery which Maud runs, and grow hungrier as they prowl in search of somewhere where their faces aren’t recognized by the stallholders and the criminal gangs. Things come to a head when they make a half-hearted attempt to rob a wealthy guildsman down by the docks. Somehow, the guildsman falls into the water and floats away, ballooned in his heavy coat. Fearful, and pricked into attempting a life of honesty, they scurry about making deliveries. But here, too, they find they are treading on the toes of competition; this time, the bagmen. After a beating, they have little option but to join the supposed guild of this despised trade.…

Thus is absorbed a large part of Robbie’s early adulthood in collecting rents as a bagman. He remains the butt of stones and chants although the easy-going Saul almost manages to make himself popular. They move out from the Nethers to a tenement in Ashington, where Maud still keeps up a nursery. One of Robbie’s rents is a quiet member of the Fine Cleaner’s Guild called Master Mather. Forever wrapped in his dreams, Robbie sometimes goes up to his loft and watches enviously as the pigeons he breeds flutter out across the aethered architecture of London. But Master Mather suffers from scabs, and always smells of carbolic. It becomes apparent, as Master Mather, cooing in the comer amongst the grey-fluttering pigeons, is served with notices of eviction, that he’s flecked with shadows, and is becoming a changeling. Word travels quicker in London, and the tollman arrives despite Robbie’s pleading. Master Mather is taken away to the Southern equivalent of the asylum where Robbie’s mother was destined. Robbie sometimes visits Master Mather there, and wanders the cells. Instead of the fairy-dreams of his youth prancing in the twilight, he sees grey figures with punched-though eyes clinging to the walls and ceilings like frightened birds, all of them bundled up heedlessly with the odd simple case of deformity and insanity.

Then, one day, Robbie sees the familiar figure of Mistress Summerton wandering a market. After an initial show of reluctance, she agrees that he can meet her where she now lives on the far side the Thames, at World’s End. World’s End was once the site of a great exhibition whose ruins still molder there, but is now where all the engine ice effused from London is piled in sugary slagheaps. Mistress Summerton earns her living here, and her right to remain free, by shaping huge and bizarre flowers to the orders of the high-guilded. She takes Robbie out in her small horseless carriage into the vales of the home counties, and provides the long-delayed explanation of Anna’s origins. Confirming much of Robbie’s vision and the words of Grandmaster Harrat, she tells of how the girl Kate had her finger pricked by the haft of thorns, and then slowly became crusted with engine ice as if from the effusion of a huge spell, and finally sought refuge at Redhouse when she became pregnant. She died giving birth to Annalise, and Mistress Summerton sought out Robbie’s mother, Kate’s friend, as wetnurse to the baby. Through her long life of making flowers for the rich. Mistress Summerton has acquired a surprising amount of wealth, which she now she devotes towards giving Annalise the chance of an ordinary existence.