I like to think that there's an unspoken covenant between writer and reader. The writer is expected to offer an entertaining, thought-provoking, cathartic*, well-written work for the reader, and the reader is presumably expected to be entertained, provoked to thought, emotionally purged, and appreciative.
Outside of that, as with anything else in life, it's a matter of preference. For myself, I tend to be style-driven as well as plot-driven, so I gravitate toward authors who meet my standards for a well-crafted sentence, and will frown in the middle of a reading if I realize that an author has had more than three characters "roaring in delight" during the narrative.**
My original statement about the reader-writer agreement is intended to leave a lot of room for the writer to exercise his craft, which is as it should be. However, I have to admit to a personal rider to the original agreement: I must be able to identify with the protagonist to a certain extent, and their fate should not be one of futility.
What do I mean by that? As an example, there's a novel that I no longer own called
Acts of Conscience, written by William Barton. The main character was not terribly likeable, but when he started raping little teddy-bear shaped aliens, Barton started to lose me. He lost me completely when he failed to make those acts of rape something that I could see as a necessary part of the plot. As a counter-example, in the
Thomas Covenant series by Stephen Donaldson, I was able to accept that the titular character commits an act of rape in the first book. It's a tragic event, partially caused by his reaction to the unexpected remission of his leprosy, and it sets up a sequence of equally tragic events.
In my recent reading of
Iain M. Banks' Matter, I had some issues involving the plotline and my view of the author/reader agreement. Broadly speaking (and unfairly simplified), the story deals with events surrounding a royal family located in the depths of a gigantic layered world. The kingdom is just entering its industrial revolution, and there's a certain irony in this development considering their location in a world constructed by alien technology uncounted millenia ago. The widowed king has two sons, the eldest a drunken, womanizing wastrel, the other a bookish academic, and a daughter, who has emigrated to the far more technologically advanced outside universe.
The king is killed by his closest advisor, an event witnessed by the eldest son. In fear for his life, the prince flees the planet in search of help, accompanied by a trusted servant. The younger son manages to evade several subtle (and not so subtle) attempts at assassination, but after being injured in an encounter with an ancient alien weapon, is beaten to death by his father's killer as he lies dying in bed. The killer is then destroyed in the alien weapon's departure for the core of the world.
The eldest son meets his sister, returning home after being informed of her father's death, and they return to the planet. Upon their arrival, the sister discovers that the alien weapon has the potential to destroy the entire planet, and their quest for justice becomes a fight to save the world. They confront the weapon, but find themselves enormously outmatched. One of the other two, servant or prince, must offer themselves as a decoy to allow the sister to make a last-ditch attempt to destroy the weapon. The prince becomes the decoy and is killed, and the sister, eviscerated, destroyed, left with nothing but her head and a fragment of spine, detonates the small antimatter reactor in her head as she lies in the clutches of the weapon.
The End.
Okay, there's a brief epilogue in which we are shown the prince's servant returning home to his family and somewhat smugly announcing his decision to run for political office in the void left by the death of the royal family, supported by riches provided by agents of the society to which the sister had emigrated. Thank you for at least letting us know that the world wasn't destroyed, Mr. Banks.
Now, I like Banks as an author, and I realize that part of his strength is his willingness to break with convention. I'm also sufficiently sophisticated as a reader that I don't demand that the main characters survive the novel. However, in this case I found myself thinking that whether they'd saved the world or not, I really didn't feel that any of the characters deserved the manner in which they'd been treated. My description above of the conclusion is not all that much more detailed than the one in the story - we're given no insight into the prince's decision to sacrifice himself, it just happens, and although his sister has had her consciousness backed up before leaving the outside universe, we are not given any opportunity to see her restored backup reflect on the original's fate.
I realize that real life is full of the murder of innocents, unacknowledged and unexplained sacrifices, and solitary, unseen final moments of martyrdom. But honestly, if I found real life to be all that appealing, would I be reading science fiction?
* I use catharsis here in the technical sense as derived from the ancient Greeks, wherein it refers to an emotional release offered by the arts of theatre, music, literature, and so on. In modern vernacular it's ended up being more related to closure after a tragic event, but originally it referred to any emotion evoked by "good art" - laughter or pleasure as well as sadness.
** William Forstchen,
The Lost Regiment: Rally Cry.
