THE FIRST FIVE PAGES
Gareth Rubin
Turning the gothic genre on its head in his tete-beche novel The Turnglass meant the author needed to create parallel introductions
Paul Ceely
OK look, this is going to be tricky. In this slot I’ve got to tell you about the first five pages of my new novel. The problem is, my novel has two sets of the first five pages. Bear with me.
You see, The Turnglass is a tetebeche book – two entwined stories printed back-to-back and head-to foot. You read one, it ends in the middle of the book, you flip the book over and read the other tale. And you can read either story first. Or both at once. They’re pretty rare now, though they used to be more common.
So you see why it’s going to be a bit tricky. But let’s go. Like I said, there are two stories. One is a classic British gothic piece set in 1881 on the tidal island of Ray off the coast of Essex.
We open with our hero, a young doctor named Simeon Lee. He’s out of cash and working the slums of London in order to fund his cholera research. He hopes to find a vaccine (his latest ploy involves mixing our blood with gorillas’ – no, I don’t know why that idea came to him either).
Now, as authors, we want our heroes to be likeable. No, no, that doesn’t mean they have to be good people. The vile Humbert Humbert, in Lolita, is anything but good. But there’s something about him that makes us want to watch him – if only to see him destroyed. And yet, you need the skill of Nabakov to make such an unpleasant human likeable. Much easier to create one who wants to do good (eg curing the sick). And if he’s had a difficult childhood so much the better. And so Simeon is strapped for cash, he wants to help the sick, and his parents were snooty lower-middle-class types who showed him little love.