Once Upon a Prime, page 9
At that point I think guiltily of the decisions I’d advised my daughter Emma to make earlier that day when we’d been reading The Warlock of Firetop Mountain together. “So you’re saying that maybe the reader goes straight for the shiny silver amulet, but actually…”
“It’s the wooden duck you needed, yes,” he says.
So be warned.
There are differences between constructing a game book and constructing a computer game. In a computer game, the program can keep track of what objects are where. Suppose one section says, “You enter the hidden chamber. There is a bag of gold on the floor, which you may take if you wish. You may exit either north or east.” In a computer game, if you take the bag of gold, then if you go back to the chamber, the program will not tell you there is a bag of gold on the floor. But the book can’t tell whether or not you have picked up the gold without having two versions of the rest of the story, which would double the length of the rest of the book. It’s also very clunky to have instructions like “This room has some gold in it, unless you already took the gold on a previous visit.” So the book can’t allow you to return to that room.
If you can’t go backward and forward like this, how many choices would a reader get to make, and therefore how many parts of the book will they see, during a typical read-through? It’s usually between 100 and 150, says Sir Ian. For me that’s a very impressive ratio—you are seeing around a third of the book’s content each time, while making a very large number of choices.
That leads to another crucial property of the book’s design: a single choice must not cut out huge swaths of the adventure, or there won’t be room for those 150 choices. Remember that the writer also has to maintain the overall story arc to make it a compelling adventure. Each choice has to be meaningful too. There has to be an actual consequence of going left instead of right, or of talking to a person or not talking to them. “Because if it’s the same no matter what you choose, then why bother making it interactive? There are multiple layers of the component parts of making a thrilling adventure in which you are the hero.”
There’s a real mathematical tension here between efficiency, control, and choice. We’ve already seen that to avoid a book the size of a house, we have to have pinch points where many story lines converge. This means that great skill is required in the wording of these passages. Readers will be coming from several points, and whatever happens has to make sense to everyone. There’s another aspect of word choice that Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone were very careful with, right from the start: “I’m proud to say that we never assumed it was a male playing these books.… When they meet someone it’s ‘Fellow stranger’ and ‘You’re a very fine-looking person.’ … I’m very proud that even in 1982 we did that, and I think that’s key to its popularity.” I think he’s right.
Finally—asking for a friend—what is Sir Ian’s view on cheating? Good news: he’s okay with it. “I call it peeking around the corner,” he says. Another tactic is the “five-finger bookmark.” This is the technique of keeping your fingers in the pages from the last few choices, so that if your latest decision proves to have been unwise, you can think better of it. Discretion, after all, is the better part of valor.
* * *
In “choose your own adventure” books, readers influence their own journey through the story. But even when the author remains fully in the driver’s seat, the narrative path down which they direct us may be far from a straight line. The simplest examples are what are called reverse poems. These poems are first read in the normal way, from top to bottom, but then after the last line the reader is asked to reread the poem in reverse, from bottom to top. Usually, the top-to-bottom version is pessimistic, and the bottom-to-top version challenges that negative worldview. The poem “Lost Generation,” by Jonathan Reed, begins with these three lines:
I am part of a lost generation
And I refuse to believe that
I can change the world
When read in reverse, those first three lines become an optimistic assertion of possibility:
I can change the world
And I refuse to believe that
I am part of a lost generation
If you want to write your own reverse poem, there are plenty of templates available.2 The way to do it is to have statements like “It’s a fact that” or “It’s not true that” interspersed with assertions, as in the following:
Math is just numbers.
It’s not true that
Math is beautiful.
Now read it in reverse.
Geometrically speaking, what a reverse poem does is to add a mirror line so that we reflect the poem back on itself, creating a poetical palindrome. A more explicit use of geometry is found in the (very!) short story “Frame-Tale,” by the American writer John Barth, which appears in his 1968 anthology, Lost in the Funhouse. A frame tale is a story within a story, like the play within a play in Hamlet. “Frame-Tale” consists of a single page, with a few words printed on each side, along with the instructions “Cut on dotted line, twist end once, and fasten AB to ab, CD to cd.” Cutting along this line gives you a narrow strip. On the first side of the strip are the words ONCE UPON A TIME THERE. On the other side are the words WAS A STORY THAT BEGAN. Now, if you just glued the ends of the strip together you’d get a band with ONCE UPON A TIME THERE on the outside and WAS A STORY THAT BEGAN on the inside. But introducing the twist creates not a band but a mathematical surface known as a Möbius strip.
The Möbius strip is a strange and interesting thing. Discovered in 1858 by the German mathematician August Ferdinand Möbius, it has what sounds like an impossible property: it is a thing you can create from an ordinary piece of paper, but it has only one side. I beg you to make one right now. Just take a narrow strip of paper, give it a twist, and tape the ends together. If you hold the Möbius strip anywhere, one of your fingers is on the top side and one on the bottom. But if you draw a line along the center of the strip, starting on your chosen “top” side and parallel to the edges, you’ll find the line eventually passing along what was the “bottom,” and a bit later coming back to the place you started. What this means is that the Möbius strip has just one surface! In spite of this, it’s still true that at any given point, there’s a matching point on the reverse, so at each stage there appears to be a back and a front—but this is just an illusion. I can’t stop myself from asking you to cut the Möbius strip along the central line you’ve just drawn and see what happens. Nothing to do with literature, but it’s really cool. And if you cut the resulting thing in half along its center line, something even crazier happens—do try it.
Anyway, the effect of the instructions in Barth’s story is to create an infinite loop of stories: “Once upon a time there was a story that began ‘Once upon a time there was a story that began “Once upon a time there was a story that began ‘Once upon a time…’”’” Here’s the thing, though: the fact of its being a Möbius strip (a literal, physical plot twist) isn’t really taken advantage of. The effect—of a story whose end is its own beginning, forming an endless loop—would be produced more simply with a circle. Just write the sentence “Once upon a time there was a story that began” on one side of a strip of paper and glue its ends together. So I would say that “Frame-Tale” really ought to be classified as a circular story, rather than a Möbius strip.
The best circular story I have read is by the Argentine novelist Julio Cortázar. “Continuity of Parks” is just over a single page long, so I hope you will forgive me for potentially spoiling it for you by summarizing the plot. A man sits down in the green chair in his study to finish reading a novel. In the novel, two lovers are planning a murder. After their final tryst, they depart into the night, she in one direction, he in the other. He silently enters the house of the man he plans to kill, creeps up the stairs, and enters the study, where his victim is sitting in his green chair, reading … And then you can of course start the story again and read it, this time knowing the fate of the man in the green chair.
In circular stories, every time we return to the beginning, every new “Once upon a time” adds another layer of narrative distance. If we use Hilbert Schenck’s idea from Chapter 2, that each additional level of narrative distance creates another dimension in the story, then these circular stories are examples of infinite dimensional narratives. However, we can never actually realize these dimensions, because we must at some point put the story down. I don’t know what the highest-dimensional story ever written is, and in some sense this is a battle that can’t be won because as soon as we did find a winner, we could create a story beginning “I once read the following story” and then quote the now second-place tale in full.3
Circling back (if I may) to Möbius strips, at least one writer has made fuller use of their properties. The British author Gabriel Josipovici published a collection called Mobius the Stripper in 1974. (This isn’t a typo, by the way—the spelling used by Josipovici is Mobius, not Möbius.) The title story has text split into a top and bottom half throughout. You can read either half first. The story in the top half is about a man called Mobius, who is indeed a stripper at a nightclub—he physically strips in order to try to mentally strip away the baggage of society and find his true self. The story in the bottom half is of a writer in a slump, trying to free his mind and come up with new ideas. A friend suggests he go and see the act of this guy Mobius, and that starts the writer thinking. He decides to make up a story about Mobius, even though he has never met him—that’s where the bottom story ends. Now we can seamlessly loop back into the first story, but this time we see it as a story created by the writer.
This could have been just another circular story. However, Josipovici is cleverer than that. In traveling around a real Möbius strip, as we noticed earlier, at any point on your journey there is a corresponding point on the reverse side—you’ll reach it exactly halfway through your trip. Mobius the Stripper mirrors this: events in the two halves of the story leak through into the other halves, just as ink on a Möbius strip would show through faintly on the other side. The stories bleed into each other, and it is impossible to say which is the “real” story—is the author writing a fictional account of a real Mobius, or is Mobius entirely imagined, in which case, where did the author get the idea from? Incidentally, there is a higher-dimensional analogue of a Möbius strip—a “solid” that doesn’t have an inside or an outside. It’s called a Klein bottle (after the mathematician Felix Klein). Please write to me if you’ve heard of any Klein-bottle-shaped novels!
* * *
The reader can choose from two possible paths through Mobius the Stripper, and many more through The Warlock of Firetop Mountain. But in all the examples we have seen so far, although readers can make choices, they are still following a road map created by the author. Even those 100 trillion sonnets from Chapter 1 require you to put the lines in a prescribed order. There are books, however, that throw away the map completely. Our combinatorial cavalcade continues with my contender for the best value purchase of all time, a 1969 book by the English writer B. S. Johnson, memorably described by his biographer Jonathan Coe as “Britain’s one-man literary avant-garde of the 1960s.”4 Johnson, born in London in 1933, was a fascinating character. His father was a stock clerk at a bookshop; his mother had been a maid and then a waitress. He didn’t follow the sort of path we expect of our literary greats. By age fourteen he was at a school whose aim was to prepare pupils for future office work, where he was taught “shorthand, typing, commerce and book-keeping, besides the usual things.” He left at seventeen with the School Certificate, which, in theory at least, qualified him to go to university, but “no one had ever gone to University from Kingston Day Commercial School.” So he got a job.
Five years later, a friend at work (he was an accounts clerk in the payroll department of a bakery) showed him the prospectus for Birkbeck—a college of the University of London that held all its lectures in the evenings so that people working during the day could still get a university education. Birkbeck started in 1823 and is still going—I was amazed and delighted to discover Johnson’s Birkbeck connection because I have been teaching there for nearly twenty years and am constantly banging on about the vital importance of giving people the chance to pursue higher education at any stage in their lives. Anyway, Johnson applied, was accepted, and started studying at Birkbeck in the autumn of 1955. He did well and decided to become a full-time student, transferring at age twenty-three to another London college, King’s (in spite of the Birkbeck registrar’s attempt to dissuade him by saying that at King’s he would be “surrounded by eighteen-year-old girls”). He wrote poetry, plays, and film and television scripts, as well as soccer and tennis match reports for national newspapers, but it is for his seven novels that he is best remembered.
Each of them experiments with form. For example, in Albert Angelo, a hole is cut into pages 147 and 149 so that the reader can look ahead to an event that will take place on page 151—we can perhaps think of this as adding a loop to the “graph” of the story. In House Mother Normal, a story is told from nine different viewpoints over nine chapters, each, except the last, having twenty-one pages. But there is additional structure. Each event in the narrative occurs at exactly the same place on the same page of each chapter. The story then becomes, instead of a single line, a series of parallel curves overlaid—it is a plane rather than a line. Poignantly, the narrators at each stage have increasingly advanced forms of dementia, and as their thoughts become more fragmentary and disordered, this externally imposed structure becomes more or less the last remnant of order staving off the chaos of senility.
Johnson was not the first to experiment with this kind of structure. House Mother Normal echoes a 1947 short novel by Philip Toynbee, Tea with Mrs. Goodman, which features events described by seven characters entering and leaving the same room at various times, with, for example, Time Period 4 being described by Narrator C on page C4. But there is little humanity in Tea with Mrs. Goodman—it’s another example of the fact that structure for the sake of structure, in literature just as in mathematics, risks being arid and pointless. As Jonathan Coe writes, “Everything that is sterile and academic in Toynbee’s novel he [Johnson] humanizes: formal experiment becomes not a substitute for emotion and sympathetic involvement but the very means by which these things are brought about.”
In 1969, B. S. Johnson published The Unfortunates. It is “a book in a box,” consisting of twenty-seven chapters, or sections. The first and last chapter are specified, but there are also twenty-five intervening sections that can be read in any order. They are not numbered, and because the sections are not bound into a book, there is no default order to follow. Your path is totally random. Each reading order will give you a different experience because of the knowledge that you have, or don’t have, when you read a given part of the plot. The Unfortunates was not the first book to exploit random choice. A few years earlier, the French writer Marc Saporta had published Composition No. 1, an unbound novel whose pages could be read in any order at all. But this makes it extraordinarily difficult to tell any kind of story, and moreover, it detracts from the randomness because, as Johnson wrote, it imposes a different kind of structure on the material, “another arbitrary unit—the page and what type can be fitted on it.”
What turns The Unfortunates from an arch intellectual exercise into a successful and meaningful work of fiction is that the form is chosen for a reason, and the use of the form enhances the meaning of the work. The novel concerns a sports journalist traveling to report on a football (or, as our American friends have it, soccer) match. This arises from a real-life incident in Johnson’s life, when as one of the sports reporters for The Observer newspaper, he was by chance assigned a match in Nottingham to report on. When he arrived at the train station, he realized with a jolt that this was the same town where he had first met a dear friend of his, Tony Tillinghast, who had recently died of cancer at just twenty-nine years old. Johnson described how on that day “the memories of Tony and the routine football reporting, the past and the present, interwove in a completely random manner, without chronology.” When submitting the finished manuscript, Johnson wrote to his editor that “to me, at least, it really does reflect the random way in which past and present interact in the mind: it is an enactment of randomness which the bound book simply cannot achieve.”
Each of us reading The Unfortunates constructs, by our choices, a different book. How many potential books, then, are in the Unfortunates box? As you might imagine, it’s quite a lot! Let’s do a toy example just to get a feel for things. Consider the obscure art house movie The Incredibles. If you are not familiar with it, this was a 2004 Pixar movie about a family of superheroes: Mr. Incredible, his wife, Elastigirl, and their kids, who also have various superpowers. Given how much money it and its 2015 sequel made, it was surely only a matter of time before we got origin story movies for Mr. Incredible and Elastigirl. In fact, having looked into it, I discovered that there was an official Disney book in 2018 called A Real Stretch: An Elastigirl Prequel Story. Let us postulate a future in which you can plan a movie marathon consisting of The Incredibles along with Mr. Incredible: The Prequel and Elastigirl: The Prequel. The order in which you watch them will affect your experience of each film. How many Incredibles movie trilogy experiences can you have? Movie 1 can be any of the three. For Movie 2, you’ve already used up one option, so you now have only two movies to choose from. For Movie 3, you’ve used up two of the three options, so there’s only one choice left. We can see the possibilities in a diagram:
