The Law of Unintended Consequences

In a recent post, Warp and Weft, I was flirting with the idea of adding tension and depth to your narrative by contrasting the style of your writing with the subject matter, suggesting for example that you might try dealing with dark material in a light-hearted manner. With a kind of weird synchronicity, I have just finished reading Alone in Berlin by Hans Fallada, which was first published in 1947 and offers a gripping account of German resistance to the Nazis in Berlin during the Second World War.

Fallada explores what it is like for a country to be occupied by its own bureaucrats and politicians, but he describes the brutalising effect of the Third Reich in an almost picaresque fashion: the boot boys of the Gestapo come across as rogues, an assortment of low lifes on the make, and many of them are fallible, even comic figures.

I found this having a strange effect on me as I was reading: the characters were believable, but the light, almost jaunty way in which Fallada portrayed them became it increasingly alienating.  Their offhand violence and treachery somehow failed to register on an emotional level and I found myself thinking that certainly the first half of the book was almost Brechtian in the style -- I half expected Mother Courage to bob in and burst into song.

When the hero Otto Quangel is arrested, the narrative becomes altogether darker and his tribulations are described with such grimness that it was impossible not to be drawn into his plight.  He himself regrets the repressed way in which he has lived his life, and just as he failed to reach out to the people he cared about most, many of Fallada's characters failed to reach out to me.

Which makes me think that if you are experimenting with your writing, using different stylistic techniques, it is important to keep interrogating what you were doing.  Write with your heart, but make sure that your editorial brain stays alert, so that you don't achieve a dazzling effect in one part of your story, only to pay a high price for it somewhere else.