Lots of the ordinary. But juxtaposed enough with the extraordinary that we look at the absurdity of the ordinary in our own lives and say, “Yeah, if I could get rid of that, I could write my own novels (or slay dragons, or figure out why I keep getting dead).”
One of Holt’s great successes is to show how sometimes we let the ordinary and mundane fill up our lives when we could be having greater adventures, whether we have one of the three known Portable Doors or not.
Other writers do this too, of course. I think to Douglas Adams and Arthur Dent being the great maker of sandwiches, of course, among many other things Adams does. It’s a common fantasy or science fiction trope, and just about everyone from JRR Tolkien and JK Rowling and Ray Bradbury do it to some extent, some with more success than others.
My favorite example of this leans toward the conversation Mr. Halloway and Mr. Dark have in front of the cigar store in “Something Wicked This Way Comes,” where Dark is intent on finding Will and Jim but Halloway succeeds in throwing him off the trail by loudly bragging up the twenty-five cent cigar he’s just purchased at the cigar store. The cigar smoke is just the beginning of his methodic madness to blind the Dust Witch to the location of the boys, and it’s done not in a deliberate, sequential manner, but by chance and inspiration.
But Holt, I think does something a bit different with it. I’m still trying to pin down exactly what, but here are a few samples that stood out to me in “The Better Mousetrap”:
(I write a bit more about this scene in my previous Tom Holt post.)
The Door opened again in the back wall of a Marks & Spencers in west London, and Frank stepped out, looking unusually grave. Putting out a fire, saving several lives and many millions of pounds: morceau de gateau. Now he was going to have to do something really difficult and scary. He was going to try and buy a shirt.
Holt goes on for more than a page as Frank attempts to buy a shirt, fretting he’ll end up looking like a waiter in whatever he picks out – something Emily confirms when next they meet, on their way into more mortal peril.
Then there’s this, where Emily faces the greatest of perils:
That’s, um, fascinating. Does the dream also record how Emily Spitzer manages to kill the greatest dragon of all time armed only with a mobile phone and a roll of peppermints?
Of course.
Well?
The dream also ordains: Don’t spoon-feed the lazy cow, make her figure it out for herself.
Ah. The dream sounds suspiciously like my mother.
Dealing with dragons, well, Bilbo can tell us how that works out. Maybe not the time to fret about feeling poorly treated by your mother. But there you are again, grounded in reality as the character talks to an actual dragon in the darkness.
We’re clearly in a fantasy world, but a world so anchored in our own we can almost imagine ourselves making these same Choose Your Own Adventure Choices, only getting muddled when things go badly and we find ourselves facing one of those “deadly” situations we encounter in real life and think are so terrible to behold.
Maybe that’s what Holt does right with the absurdity of the ordinary.
More ideas for my own novel. Chuck Jones is right. Fill your head with ideas, lest nothing ever come out of it, if I can paraphrase the man.
Just one funny thing on this book. A Goodreads reviewer commented on the number of grammatical errors in the novel. I didn’t see any, but I wasn’t looking for them. But I did note whomever wrote the blurb on the back probably wrote the blurb for other Tom Holt novels in rapid succession, as Jane, one of Holt’s other characters, shows up on the back cover but not in the book, where the role of Jane is adequately filled by Emily Spitzer.
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