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Succinct characterisation by Richard Flanagan in his Man Booker Prize winning novel "The Narrow Road to the Deep North"

"After his sentencing, his Australian defence council, a flabby man with wet, glistening eyes that reminded the condemned Korean of scalpel blades, pleaded with him to lodge a petition for clemency." p.320

"Named after the noted Melbourne gangster, because of both his surname and a dark charm – emphasised by damp marsupial eyes, at once alert and vulnerable, and underlined by a pencil moustache–the once sleek Squizzy Taylor was now very thin, a form that lent him a villainous look he had never before had, further adding to the aptness of his nickname." p.270

'He turned away and looked back at the bookshelves. He was in any case thinking of Ella, whom he had met in Melbourne while completing his surgical training, Ella's father was a prominent Melbourne solicitor, their mother from a well–known grazing family;her grandfather was an author of the federal constitution. She herself was a teacher. If she was sometimes dull, her world and her looks still burnt brightly for Dorrigo. If her talk was full of commonplaces learnt as if by rote and repeated so determinedly that he really was 't sure what she thought, he nevtheless found her kind and devoted. And with her came a world that seemed to Dorrigo secure, timelss, confident, unchanging, a world of darkwood living rooms and clubs, crystal decanters of sherry and single malt, the cloying, slightly intoxicating, slightly claustrophobic smell of polished must.' p.64

 

Permalink 2 comments (latest comment by Jonathan Vernon, Thursday, 8 Jan 2015, 10:39)
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Edited by Jonathan Vernon, Thursday, 19 Jun 2014, 07:52

Fig.1 Character

Story is character, and character is indicated through actions clearly associated with a set or single character trait. Game for yet another stab at getting some fiction finished and published this is proving its worth. Whether I can sustain a story about a young man sinking ever deeper into the quagmire of a crater-like shell-hole full of mud in Flanders in early October 1917 (First part of Passchendaele during Third Ypres) is another matter. 

Meanwhile my inability, or procrastination over taking a module in Intermediate French (L120) has garnered a response from OU Student Services: I have another six weeks during which time I can figure out how to pay for it. 1p for ever view of this blog would do. Instalements. Not that this will arm me to take on the French Legal system over a timeshare my late father bought in 1973 sad I should study Law, but it's the wrong kind of law. 

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