You know what a book is, right? It’s three hundred pages of dead tree that begin at the beginning and end at the end.
Right?
Well, not always, pal. Sometimes a book is a wild little beast that looks all cute and adorable when it knows you’re watching it, but turns feral when your back is turned. Like a Mogwai if you feed it after midnight.
Yes, some books start at the beginning then spin upside down and back to front, have three endings one after another, restart again and again and then disappear into a black hole.
Trick books like that are something of an obsession of mine, which is why I resurrected the nineteenth-century format of the tête-bêche book for my novel The Turnglass. Tête-bêche novels have two stories printed back-to-back and head to foot. You can start from either end then when you finish the story you flip the book over and read the other one. In The Turnglass, one is a gothic story that takes place in Victorian England, the other is a noir tale set in 1930s LA. They’re devilishly entwined, to the extent that each (somehow) takes place within the other.
But let’s delve into some other stories that play with form. Hold on tight, it’s going to be a wild ride.
Through the Looking-Glass (1871)
Alice’s second adventure is one of the cleverest format-breaking novels ever written. Not only is it a wide-eyed skedaddle through a world of talking animals, nonsense poems, and inverted reality, but if you follow closely, it’s a chess puzzle. Most of the characters that little Alice meet are, or represent, chess pieces: the White Queen, Red King, etc. The girl herself is a white pawn. Each chapter sees her jump over a little brook into the next square. Properly follow the movements of the pieces and you realize that the book ends in a perfect checkmate of the Red King. It all makes more sense when you know that Lewis Carroll was also Charles Dodgson, lecturer in mathematics at Oxford University and his Alice novels followed his smash-hit An Elementary Treatise on Determinants: With Their Application to Simultaneous Linear Equations and Algebraic Equations.
House of Leaves (2000)
One book that won’t make any sense whatsoever as an audiobook is Mark Z Danielewski’s ingenious psychodrama hidden within a horror story. Ostensibly the story of a possessed house with a doorway down to a hellish dark realm where you never know where you are and where you are heading, the real story takes place in the physical margins of the pages as the narrator becomes obsessed with the tale he is retelling and gradually breaks down, losing his humanity. Words grow and shrink on the page, spiral and fade away. There’s even a supplementary chapter set outside the main book, where a hidden story is encoded acrostic-style into the text. Disturbing and brilliant.
The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969)
Jon Fowles’s influential novel was part of a wave of 1960s experimentalism. Set in the Victorian era, it’s all very normal—a semi-tragic story of an affair between a gentleman, Charles, and a woman, Sarah, who has been abandoned by a former lover, that turns our badly à la Thomas Hardy—until the author becomes frustrated and begins to intervene in the story, eventually becoming a character himself. It’s all topped off with three separate alternative endings. It’s not just a game, though, Fowles was examining power: the power to determine one’s fate and the power (or lack of it) that Sarah has in Victorian society as a woman bereft of a man.
The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle (2018)
Stuart Turton took the format of an Agatha Christie country house murder mystery and dropped a Clue board on top of it. The product is a story that keeps restarting, with the central character, Aiden, reliving the day over and over again, until he solves the mystery. It’s a clever structure that deliberately frustrates the reader, who becomes increasingly desperate to discover the truth and so break out of the time loop.
If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller (1979)
Here’s a confession: this is the only book on the list that I haven’t been able to finish. Italo Calvino’s knowingly post-modernist novel is the most intricate and most insane of all. First off, it’s written in the second person: you, the reader, are the main character as you follow a surreal quest to track down a book called If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller. But every time you think you’ve found what you’re looking for, it morphs into a different book in a different genre, and you start reading that book instead. It’s incredibly disorienting and hard-going. Oddly, Sting named an album after it.
An Instance of the Fingerpost (1997)
Less well-known than it deserves to be, Iain Pears’s highbrow murder mystery describes a death and its investigation in seventeenth-century Oxford. What makes it a stand-out affair is that it is split into four parts, each narrated by a different man with a narrow view of the matter. Each narrator is unreliable in a different way (one is mad, one is a liar, one doesn’t understand what happened, one has been lied to) and the reader is left to pick out the truths and put them together to form a fair image. It’s very clever, very scholarly, and the solution to the mystery itself is mind-blowing.
***
