I recently read Elaine Dundy's The Dud Avocado, and not only that—I also read the back. Here is a blurb!
Take one zippy, curious 21-year-old American named Sally Jay, just out of college. Drop her in the middle of Paris's Left Bank. Add an Italian diplomat, an American theatrical director, a couple of painters and a white slave trader. Mix until all bubbles. The result: A delightful few hours of sparkling reading entertainment. Summing up: Froth and frolic.
(It's the trade in slaves that really makes it frothy, I think.) Now as it happens the slave-trading aspect doesn't really come to the fore until quite late, though a more perceptive reader than I might have seen things coming. (On the other hand it's not really clear that "white slave trader" is the aptest description.) And since I had of course read the back before reading the insides, and even periodically in interludes while the reading of the insides was not actively pursued, I had occasion to wonder, as I approached the end of the book, when this final preordained plot element would come into play. (In fact I fell to wondering this at one point only a few pages before exactly that happened.) Because, you know, in a conventionally ordered book you can't effectively disguise that things must shortly begin to come to a close. The result of all this: nontrivial tension. A white slave trader is no small thing to just drop in the last, say, thirty pages! Or however many it was. (That to another it might not have been so abrupt a drop is immaterial.) One attends more closely to what's happening simply because it doesn't seem to lead in a promising direction. When's it gonna happen?
becomes a thought practically unevictable from one's head.
One experiences (which is a way of saying that I have experienced) something similar at concerts, when a performer walks out with an multiple instruments (three clarinets! two saxophones! seventy-eight percussives!) or is present on stage without yet having done anything for a while. (Or when a short man in a white suit stands on your yard during a gang fight.) Sometimes—if the music will include improvisation, for instance—you just don't know whether everything brought out will actually be used. (Sometimes one gets the feeling in improv concerts that something is used just because it was brought out.) But that presumably doesn't happen with fully notated music, when the stage is cleared between pieces. You wouldn't bring it out if it weren't part of the piece. But sometimes it doesn't become part of the piece for a while, and, at least if the music hasn't got one's rapt attention, it becomes possible, then, to wonder, well, when's he gonna use that?
In my view, this should be exploited! If Alasdair Gray can design his own book jackets, surely he can have inserted into the jacket text false information about the contents of the book so as to manage his readers' expectations. And it would quite simple to instruct musicians to bring out, and laboriously arrange about his seat, many instruments which he will in fact not otherwise use. (Did this happen in the performance of Kagel's Atem I saw? I cannot recall.) Though it would be somewhat trickier to prevent the authors of reviews or program notes from giving the game away.
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