Traditionally, a novel begins with characters. These are the protagonist (the “hero” that the novel will revolve around), the antagonist (the one that is resisting the antagonist), and other characters that may or may not contribute to the protagonist’s journey. Some protagonist’s journeys are internal, some external. Sometimes the protagonist has ill intent, some are righteous, still others are somewhere in between.
This structure works because the individual reading can relate to the journey, can understand the causal relationships between the character and the story, but it also has limitations.
By telling too much about the characters, they become limiting. The reader doesn’t have as many spaces to place their experiences. If I began the novel with Alex, telling you about his life before the Core, that is the person you would see, not the Alex that has been changed completely by the Core. As Alex tells Alice early on, “what I was is not important. What I am now is all the matters.”
For my first book, The Last Testament, I needed this unidirectional flow, for the Core, I needed something else. In the Core, the main character is the organization itself, an organization that touches many lives, dispersed and unrelated lives. While Alex is the recruiter the novel revolves around, there is an air of mystery that must be maintained, and I have done that, in part, by allowing the flow of each individual’s story without front loading who that character is. For the novel, what the character becomes is more important than what the character was.
The second reason I wanted to place characters with as little background as possible (although some character have more back story than others) is to create a certain feeling as the reader traverses the novel. The entire novel has an empty feeling, as Richmond discovers later, a sterile and void like feel. It’s intentional. The first draft of the novel was a hundred pages longer than the finished product. Most of what I cut was description and detail.
I wanted that haziness between the reader and the work because at the moments the language hits home, at the moments the reader is needed the most, clarity is reached through the reader filling the voids with their own life and their own experiences. The story calms. The language eases. Like Bach, the battle settles. The experience of the reader, of the reader seeing those within he novel being affected by the Core, is what drives the novel itself.
It’s not a novel for everyone, but if you immerse yourself in the world of the Core, allowing the structure as it is to move you, you end Alex’s story wondering what you would be willing to do to protect those you have chosen to love.