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Why you need an app to understand my

novel
Iain Pears has always written complex books his latest, Arcadia, has 10 separate
story strands. To make his readers lives easier, he turned to interactive technology
Iain Pears
Thursday 20 August 2015 13.05
I began Arcadia a novel conceived and written for an app over four and a half
years ago when a lot of people were musing about digital narrative. After working
my way through three publishers, two designers, four sets of coders and a lot of
anguish, I am no longer surprised that few others have done anything about it. I
also understand why the NHS database could go five times over budget and not
work. What should be a simple task write story, create software, publish turns
out to be anything but in practice.
I do not even have any natural enthusiasm for computing, which now perplexes
me even more than it did when I began, and I certainly did not want to thrust
myself into the vanguard of digital innovation. Rather, I undertook the project
because I had reached the limit of my storytelling in book form and needed some
new tools to get me to the next stage. I have always written novels that are complex structurally; in An Instance of the Fingerpost , published many years ago now,
I told the same story four times from different points of view; The Dream of Scipio
was three stories interleaved; while Stones Fall was three stories told backwards.
All worked, but all placed quite heavy demands on the readers patience by requiring them to remember details often inserted hundreds of pages before, or to
jump centuries at a time at regular intervals. Not surprisingly, whatever structure
I chose there were some who did not like it.
As I wanted to write something even more complex, I be gan to think about how
to make my readers lives as easy as possible by bypassing the limitations of the
classic linear structure. Once you do that, it becomes possible to build a multi stranded story (10 separate ones in this case) where each narrative is complete
but is enhanced when mingled with all the others; to offer readers the chance to
structure the book as best suits them. To put it another way, it becomes fairly
straightforward (in theory) to create a narrative that was vastly more complex
than anything that could be done in an orthodox book, at the same time as making it far more simple to read.

So, the reader can begin with the character of Henry Lytten, an academic, and
follow his route as he takes time off writing a story to ca tch a possible spy; as he
writes, the reader can switch to the story of Jay, one of his characters, and the
order of reading determines whether Jays actions are caused by Lyttens writing,
or the other way round. Or the reader can follow Rosie, who looks after Lyttens
cat until she meets Jay. Or perhaps Angela, a minor character for much of Lyttens
story, who Rosie finally meets and simultaneously never meets. Minor characters
can become major ones at will, and central characters become bystanders equall y
easily.
Keeping control of all these plot lines was difficult, and when moulding them into
the software it was vital to keep a strict discipline, making the technology the
servant of the story rather than its master; the worst outcome would have been a
sort of techno livre dartiste that generated visual shock-and-awe to the point
that the actual story became almost irrelevant. The app was conceived to help the
business of reading, not to make the reader go wow. Arcadia is ultimately just
a story; a tale of three worlds, historical, ideal and dystopian, with a cast of characters whose actions and decisions change and affect their surroundings and interconnect endlessly. It is also about memory and storytelling, and the possibility
of drawing together fragments of all the great tales of the world as they are remembered by one or other of the characters.
Ebooks are now quite venerable in computing terms, but it is striking how small
an impact they have had on narrative structure; for the most part, they are still
just ordinary books in a cheap format. An analogy is the early days of cinema,
when film-makers did little more than plonk cameras in front of a stage and film
a play. It took some time before they realised that by exploiting the new possibilities the technology offered cutting, editing, closeups, lighting and so on
they could create a new art form that did not replace theatre, but did things
theatre could not. Computing power properly understood and used can perhaps
eventually do something of the same; not supplant orthodox books which are
perfectly good in most cases but come into play when they are insufficient.
Writing Arcadia did produce odd effects in ways that an ordinary book or e book
could not; scenes became more episodic and vignette-like; the demands of shifting from one point of view to another, and then to multiple ones in different
worlds, required different ways of writing. Most peculiarly of all, I found that the
story was most easily structured by looking at it visually; whole strands were expanded or even deleted simply to create a more pleasing shape in the writing
program I was using. On every occasion, the more satisfactory the appearance,
the better the story read, and I still havent quite figured out how that works.
As the story evolved, so did the design of the app and that, in turn, influenced
the story, even though I decided early on to be rather conservative. It has minimal
graphics, no music and no animations. The reader does not choose outcomes or

influence decisions, and there are no prizes or levels. You read the text; how you
see characters depends on how much of it you read, where you start, and whether
you read strand by strand, or hop from one to the other.
Above all, the way the strands of story could be mixed or kept separate offered a
liberation from those shackles known as genres. It is inevitable that authors, consciously or not, slot themselves into some category or other, and if they do not,
others will do it for them. Writing Arcadia loosened those restraints. It is a spy
story, a fantasy, a historical novel, a romance, a mythology and a work of science
fiction. It is a meditation on literature and narrative, or just a light -hearted romp.
Naturally that means that one strand or another, one theme or another, may displease. But you can always leave that bit out.

Arcadia by Iain Pears is published by Faber on 3 September. You can buy the
app by clicking here.

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