A Book of Two Halves

At about the halfway mark of The English Monster I was enthralled. The book is set partly in the early 1800s, at the scene of a pair of horrifically spooky mass-murders (that are actually true to life) and the bumbling police attempts to catch the killer, and partly way back in Elizabethan England. The back cover boasts of a character embarking on a journey to trade in human souls, and as fantastical as this sounds it soon turns out that the souls come with breathing bodies attached, and are those of the first black slaves. The hero, William Ablass, sets out innocently to crew a ship, meeting a young Francis Drake on board, and soon finds himself capturing unsuspecting West Africans and porting them to South America to trade with the Spanish. All of this stuff is thrilling: the book jumps between the two time periods easily even though they seem entirely unconnected, and gives a really thought-provoking history lesson. Imagine the fear and plain stupefaction of one day being with your family and people, doing as you always do, and the next being shoved onto a ship by men with weapons you've never seen before, and later being forced into work without pay, never returning to your home again.

It's when the author, Lloyd Shepherd, tries to blend the two strands of his novel that things unraveled for me. I recently read an article on writing which stated that there is one important question an author needs to answer: "why should the reader care?", and with this stuck in my mind I struggled towards the end of The English Monster. It just seemed so desperate to tie things together, and a hundred pages before the end of the book everything that was going to happen was already clear. I've had brilliant (I think) ideas before that have trundled away as I wrote them down, and I wonder if Shepherd experienced this with The English Monster: whether he felt his ending was just as strong as his beginning, or if he found it a slog to get the words "The End" onto the page, unable to string his ideas to novel length. I've only ever struggled to complete a short story, easy enough to abandon if it starts meandering, but I can't imagine the frustration of being 200 pages into a story and running out of things to say. It's such a cruel thing on the author: if I had started at the end and read backwards, by the time I'd finished The English Monster I would be eulogising on how it gets better and better the more you read, but instead I'm left slightly cold at the steady decline of the book.