IN SEARCH OF A NOVEL PLOT

RD. James discovers that for

even the best writers an original idea is a scarce commodity

A NOVELIST who is visited by what he or she thinks is an original idea experiences a surge of excitement which is invariably ill- founded; experience shows that there are no new ideas, only fresh treatments of the old. This, of course, particularly applies to plot. The adage states that there are only five and I have been amusing myself trying to identify them.

The Cinderella story and its sub-plot of love triumphant over difficulties is a theme which covers virtually all the novels of Jane Austen and such very different writ- ers as Charlotte Brontë and Barbara Cart- land. Then there is the mystery and its solution, plots ranging from the conven- tions of the classical detective story to the subtle investigation of hidden motives and

unfolding psychological discoveries, including novels which manage, like Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone, to combine both. Another category is the hunt and the hunt- ed, which covers novels of espionage rang- ing from the patriotic simplicities of Buchan's The Thirty-Nine Steps to John le Carre's fascinating exploration of personal and international treachery. Then there is the confrontation of opposites, whether of ideas or across boundaries of age, sex, nationality, religion and social class, a box which can conveniently accommodate a wide variety of novels old and new. I'm uncertain about my fifth category. Explo- ration of the human condition is an easy opt-out which covers all categories. Per- haps I should choose revenge, always a powerful plot-maker.

Another categorisation could be by the seven deadly sins. It is difficult to think of a novel which doesn't deal with at least one of that reprehensible list: gluttony, sloth, envy, lust, avarice, wrath and pride. The popular Victorian novelist, Hall Caine, claimed that he found the plots for all his sensational books in the Bible, and I can see that the Old Testament, in particu- lar, is a fertile field for literary harvesting. An example is the story, told in the Second Book of Samuel, of King David walking on his roof and beholding the wife of Uriah the Hittite washing herself. The King, immediately in love, sends for her and, learning subsequently that she is pregnant with his child, writes that fatal letter to Joab: 'Send ye Uriah in the forefront of the hottest battle, and retire ye from him, that he may be smitten and die.' This treachery and its dramatic sequel could, and probably has, inspired a large number of novelists, all of whom could write hap- pily in the knowledge that they would face no accusation of plagiarism.

Detective stories and clue-making abound in the Old Testament. One of the earliest examples is to be found in Gene- sis, when the smooth-skinned Jacob, wear- ing the skin of goat kids on his hands, steals from his father the blessing meant for Esau, the first-born: 'The voice is Jacob's, but the hands are the hands of Esau.' The Apocrypha, of course, gives us the well-known story of Susanna and the Elders, surely one of the earliest examples in literature of successful cross-examina- tion.

It seems to some of us novelists that a good idea for a novel, whether related to plot or theme, is like a benign infection borne on the air, waiting to be caught and used by others if one doesn't get the book written quickly. I particularly sympathised with Susan Hill who, in the issue of The Spectator of 18 January this year, described an astonishing series of coincidences of plot, detail, theme and setting between her books and the books of others, although neither author had the slightest knowledge of what the other was writing. She must be beginning to think that she has only to plan a book to discover that an equally highly regarded novelist is already working on the same theme.

This kind of coincidence seems not to happen with crime fiction, somewhat sur- prisingly in a genre which, after all, depends heavily on plot and in which origi- nal ideas are not easily come by. As a Blackwood's reviewer wrote in the late 1800s of the latest Sherlock Holmes: 'In view of the difficulty of hitting on any fan- cies which are decently fresh, surely this sensational business must shortly come to a close.' We know that 'death hath ten thousand doors to let out life', and most of them have been used with varying degrees of ingenuity over the centuries. A number of clues, too, in this sensational business are fairly well-worn — the torn letter, the trail of blood, the dropped handkerchief — and there is inevitably a limited number of credible motives for murder. In one of my novels, a detective sergeant tells the young Dalgliesh that the four Ls cover them all — love, lust, loathing, lucre. Even so, I don't recall two crime books pub- lished close together which bear any real resemblance.

I did, however, have an interesting expe- rience a few years ago when I was talking to a group of would-be writers at Cam- bridge. I was talking about possible ideas for a plot and said that some writers occa- sionally found them in newspaper reports. There had that day been the story of a pathetic, maternally deprived woman who had stolen a baby from outside a super- market, and we explored how that could be used in a crime novel. I suggested that the woman could be given a husband or boyfriend who was both violent and crimi- nal. Finding she had taken the baby with- out detection, he could have the idea of blackmailing the parents for the child's return. We developed this theme together. That night I picked up the Ruth Rendell paperback I had brought with me, previ- ously unread, and discovered that Ruth had indeed dealt, with her usual admirable skill, with just that plot, and had devel- oped it in much the same way I had been elaborating. I suppose I should be grateful that the whole group, including me, didn't decide to do the same.

My present interest in the extraordinary coincidences of fiction and in the way an idea is taken up by different people arises from two coincidences in connection with my new novel, The Children of Men. Unusually for me, this began when I read a review of a scientific book which men- tioned the extraordinary and unexplained fall in the last 30 years in the sperm count of western man. I began to ponder on what the world would be like if, suddenly and without warning, the human race ceased to be able to breed. I had read a number of apocalyptic novels in which homo sapiens was wiped out by a rapidly spreading, fatal pandemic. One I remember from child- hood was called The Red Death, although I can't recall the writer. Another, of course, is On the Beach by Nevil Shute, where the cause of the calamity is radiation. But I thought I was the first to imagine a world in which suddenly the human race was unable to reproduce itself. I should, of course, have known better. After my book appeared, Brian W. Aldiss wrote to me pointing out that it is almost 30 years since he published Greybeard, a novel also set in Oxford and in the not-too-distant future, envisaging a world in which the human race has become universally infertile through radiation. Mr Aldiss's powerful novel is suffused with grief at the loss of children and, like others, he uses the genre novel to explore themes of importance to him. I should have known of this book, since we share the same publisher. Grey- beard has never been out of print and will reappear in hardback next year, and in paperback from Penguin Books.

A more recent and more remarkable coincidence has been brought to my notice by the editor of The Spectator: a short story by Walter Voght, published in 1984 and translated from the German. I can't even have subconsciously recorded it, since I have never read nor previously heard of it. It is short and starkly told and reads more like a synopsis for a novel than a short story. But the resemblance to The Children of Men is uncanny. Voght describes a world in which the entire human race and the animal kingdom are all struck by sud- den infertility. He calls the year in which the last children were born Year Zero and the children the Last Ones. I called them Omegas and, like my Omegas, the Last Ones are pampered and spoilt. They carry the weight of the hopes of mankind, hopes which are finally disappointed. Walter Voght describes how in some countries the Last Ones are sacrificed to the gods; I state that they are ritually sacrificed in fer- tility rites. Voght postulates that, as the population ages, laws are passed to guar- antee the maximum concentration of pop- ulation in approved areas. In my book, the Council of England makes plans for peo- ple to move into towns so that facilities and services can be guaranteed to the last possible moment. The conclusions of the Voght short story and my novel are radi- cally different and they are totally dissimi- lar in style, setting and characterisation. But the central idea is identical. Brian Ald- iss, however, undoubtedly thought of it first, since Greybeard was published in 1964. But perhaps I am unwise even to write these words; it is inviting an aggrieved letter from someone pointing out that his grandfather published a book remarkably similar both to Greybeard and The Children of Men many years before.

Mind your language

Gloria in excelsis Deo . . . At this time of the year more people hear the words of the Gloria than in any other week. And glory is one of the few words of Latinate root that occur in the prayer. God, high, earth, goodwill, men and so on are all of proper Germanic origin.

This is, if you consider it, somewhat surprising. We are used to the idea that language with a higher Latin word- count is more elevated (as in the rolling periods of Dr Johnson's prose). The language that men do use, as Wordsworth expressed it, is thought to have more Anglo-Saxon elements. It shows the daring of the translators of the Reformation that they eschewed gilded Latin phrases in favour of plain English. Oddly, in more recent times, when language has been intended to be more comprehensible to the man in the pew, there has actually been a change from English to Latin: Holy Spirit has replaced Holy Ghost.

Dot Wordsworth