#ghostroad

[ i n c o m i n g     t r a n s m i s s i o n ] :  [ GROWL ] - The sender growls at the receiver.

Picking herself up off the ground, she brushed her hands over her thighs and murmured something under her breath in Russian before looking up at Robbie -- or was he even Robbie anymore? She wasn't exactly sure how it worked. She hadn't really worked with the Rider before and it was definitely never boring.

A sound caught Natasha's ears and she turned toward the other. Brows furrowed and emerald eyes narrowed. "Did you... did you just growl at me? Excuse the fuck out of you, who just saved your ass?" an incredulous tone came and she held out her hand. "No. No.. just nevermind. You're okay, I'm okay. I call it a win. Let's go."

The Ghost Road, Pat Barker’s 1995 Booker winner, the 41st of 99 books. First sentence: “In the deck-chairs all along the front the bald pink knees of Bradford businessmen nuzzled the sun.”

My favorite Booker so far, or at least one of the top three, is Thomas Keneally’s Schindler’s Ark, rebranded as Schindler’s List after the Spielberg movie came out. Is it a surprise that this one was closest to nonfiction? 

Allied bicycle infantry (photo from National Archives of Scotland) -- though no bicycles are mentioned (as of page 229) in Barker’s The Ghost Road.

I’m perplexed by the line between “fiction” and “non” -- I wrote a dissertation on realism but that didn’t clear anything up. Is that historical figure or that geographical place mentioned in The English Patient a real person or place (I meant to write a post about this but didn’t get to it)? Is that welding technique described in Falling Free a real welding technique?

Nonfiction writers must modulate their level of certainty: this we know pretty much for sure; for this there is some good evidence but also some conflicting evidence; this other thing seems plausible... 

Novelists don’t seem to do that -- characters may be uncertain, narrators may be unreliable (in which case they are basically characters). But is the novelist ever uncertain?