“What was it like?” asked Carmine, who seemed to enjoy celebrity tittle-tattle.
“The back of his head? Hairy,” I replied cautiously, “and it might not have been him. In any event, keep your interpretation loose, and don’t telegraph. Let the readers do the work. If you’re going to explain everything, then we might as well give up and tell everyone to stick to television and movies.”
“Were there any goblins?” asked Pickwick as soon as we walked back in.
“I didn’t see any. Did you, Miss O’Kipper?”
“No, no, not a single one.”
“Mrs. Malaprop,” I said, “we’ll be having royalty for tea tomorrow. Better bake some silver and have the buns cleaned.”
“Very good, Mizzen Exe.”
“Here,” I said to Carmine, handing her the complete script for my part. “I have to go out for an hour. I’ll test you on it when I get back.”
She suddenly looked nervous. “What if someone starts to read us while you’re away?”
“They won’t,” I replied, “and if they do, Mrs. Malaprop will point you in the right dictation. Just take it smooth and easy. The rest of the cast will help you along.”
“What do I do with Skimmers?” she asked with a faint tinge of panic in her voice. All rookies feared Dippers, Skimmers and Last-Chapter-Firsters.
“There’s no hard-and-fast rule. Skimmers move in a generally forward direction, and with experience you’ll figure out where they’re going to land next. But the main thing is not to waste time with the nuisance reader—in a word, prioritize. Find the stable, methodical, bread-and-butter readers and give them your best. Leave the Skimmers and Dippers high and dry if there’s a crisis. When things die down later, you can pick them up then.”
“And students?”
“A breeze. They’ll pause at the end of each sentence to think quasi-intellectual deep thoughts, so as soon as a full stop looms, you can be off dealing with someone else. When you get back, they’ll still be pondering about intertextuality, inferred narratives and the scandalously high price of the subsidized beer in the student union.”
She was quiet and attentive, so I carried on.
“You should show no discrimination with readers. Treat the lip movers as you would the New York Times critic. You might not be able to distinguish between the two at first, but you soon will. Yossarian said that you can get to know individual readers by the way they read you. Mind you, he’s been doing it a long time, and Catch-22 gets reread a lot.”
“You’ve met Yossarian?”
“He was just leaving the room after giving a talk. I saw his foot.”
“Left or right?”
“Left.”
“I met someone who was beaten about the head boy Sir John Falstaff,” remarked Mrs. Malaprop in an attempt to show that she, too, hobnobbed with celebrities.
“I talked to someone who held Pollyanna’s hat for three whole pages,” added Carmine.
“Small fry,” remarked Pickwick, eager to outdo us all. “Sam Spade himself actually spoke to me.”
There was silence. This was impressive.
“What did he say?”
“He said, ‘Get that stupid bird out of my way.’”
“Well, pretend to be a soldier and elope with my ward,” remarked Mrs. Malaprop, her word choice rendered clean and clear by the sarcasm. “You can dine out on that one for years.”
“It’s better than your dumb Falstaff story.”
“The thing to remember,” I remarked, to stop the argument before it got to the next few stages, which were insults, crockery throwing and punches, “is that the more readers there are, the easier it becomes. If you relax, it actually becomes a great deal of fun. The words spring naturally to your lips, and you can concentrate on not just giving the best possible performance but also dealing with any readers who are having problems—or indeed any readers who are trying to cause trouble for you and change the book. You’ll be surprised by how strong the power of reader suggestion can get, and if you let readers get the upper hand, it’ll be Smilla’s Sense of Snow all over again.”
Carmine looked thoughtful. The Sea Worms incident was a sobering lesson for everyone, and something that no one wanted to repeat.
“I’ll be back as soon as I can,” I said, preparing to leave. “I have to meet with Commander Herring. Mrs. Malaprop, will you show Carmine around the series and do the introductions? Start with the Gravitube and the Diatryma. After that it’s all fairly benign.”
4.
The Red-Haired Gentleman
Despite the remaking of the BookWorld, some books remained tantalizingly out of reach. The entire Sherlock Holmes canon was the most obvious example. It was entirely possible that they didn’t know there was a BookWorld and still thought they were real. A fantastic notion, until you consider that up until 11:06 A.M. of April 12, 1948, everyone else had thought the same. Old-timers still speak of “the Great Realization” in hushed tones and refer to the glory days when the possibility of being imaginary was only for the philosophers.
I stepped out of the front door and walked the eight blocks to the corner of Adams and Colfer. A bus arrived in a couple of minutes—they always do—and after showing my pass to the driver, who looked suspiciously like a Dr. Seuss character on furlough, I took a seat between a Viking and a nun.
“I’m on my way to a pillage,” said the Viking as he attempted to find some common ground on which to converse, “and we’re a bit lean in the ‘beating people to death with large hammers’ department. Would you like to join us?”
“That’s most kind, but it’s really not my thing.”
“Oh, go on, you might rather like it.”
“No thank you.”
“I see,” said the Viking in a huffy tone. “Please yourself, then.” And he lapsed into silence.
It was the nun’s turn to speak.
“I’m collecting,” she said with a warm smile, “for the St. Nancy’s Home for Fallen Women.”
“Fallen in what respect?”
“Fallen readership. Those poor unfortunate wretches who, through no fault of their own, now find themselves in the ignominious status of the less well read. Are you interested?”
“Not really.”
“Well,” said the nun, “how completely selfish of you. How would you like to be hardly read at all?”
“I am hardly read at all,” I told her, mustering as much dignity as I could. There was an unfair stigma attached to those characters who weren’t read, and making us into victims in need of saving didn’t really help, to be honest.
The Viking looked at me scornfully, then got up and went to the front of the bus to pretend to talk to someone. The nun joined him without another word, and I saw them glance in my direction and shake their heads sadly.
I took the bus across the Fantasy/Human Drama border, then changed to a tram at Hemingway Central. In the six months since the BookWorld had been remade, its citizens had learned much about their new surroundings. It was easier to understand; we had usable maps, a chain of outrageously expensive coffee shops in which to be seen, known as Stubbs, and most important, a network of road, rail and river to get from one place to another. We now had buses, trams, taxis, cars and even paddlewheel steamers. Bicycles might have been useful, but for some reason they didn’t work inside the BookWorld—no matter what anyone did, they just wouldn’t stay up. Jumping directly from book to book had rapidly become unfashionable and was looked upon as hopelessly Pulp. If you really wanted to be taken seriously and display a sense of cool unhurried insouciance, you walked.