There are lots of things I love about books, elements of craft
and form and plotting that make me gasp or cackle or cheer. I recognize things
that I love might drive other people crazy: metered, epic poetry; the non-ending
of The Lady or the Tiger ; Jasper Fforde’s punny names and craysauce
alterna-history.
I do not love the Sudden-Baby plot device.
I dis-love it so much, in fact, that I have to remind myself that
not all babies that show up in media (print or otherwise[1]) are an
example of this device. Babies that make sense as part of the story, great.
Babies that are seamlessly integrated into the overarching theme, fab. Babies
that come about through careful foreshadowing and relevant circumstances,
awesome. But pregnancies and the subsequent children that arise simply to
heighten the drama? No thank you.
Two of the most egregious examples are Breaking Dawn, the last book in Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series[2], and Shadow Puppets, the seventh book in
Orson Scott Card’s Ender series[3]. Neither
series is centered around families and babies. Until their respective
Sudden-Baby books, there is little indication that babies and related dramz are
the narrative concerns. These series do not deal with the emotional outcomes of
having children, or the intricacies of family life.
I’m rather disinclined to get into the whole Twilight debate, so let’s stick with Ender: The Ender series
(specifically, the Bean extension) deals with child soldiers, political
scheming, and saving the world.
For the first two books of Bean’s chronicle, he and his peers are
children – prepubescent children trained to save the world and exterminate the
bad guys. Then suddenly in Shadow Puppets,
he and Petra are wedded and having children – and Bean has a massive
about-face, a little boy who was mostly only concerned for his own survival is
now a man, whose mission it is to protect his wife and unborn children at any
costs. While this is an admirable goal, the coming-about of is was not well
done. I didn’t see a natural relationship evolving, whose flutters and trials
would eventually lead to domestic feels and progeny, but a Baby (actually, something
more like 9 babies) deployed for the purposes of upping the dramz.
Yes, books need drama. Characters need conflict and something to
fight for. Maybe OSC could see that his child-saving-the-world device had
played out, and needed somewhere to go: fine. But the Sudden-Baby plot device
is not the way. Subtle-Baby is what we need more of: while the announcement
itself may be unexpected, one can think back over the preceding pages and say, “Yes,
okay. This baby makes sense.”
But I didn’t feel anything for Bean and Petra’s babies. Their
feelings didn’t seem warranted, narratively. I saw what OSC was going for –
that this formerly self-involved (in the nicest way possible) child grows into
a loving and protective husband and father; that it’s well and good to save the
world, but if you don’t have anything to connect to on a minute, human level,
what’s the point?; that children grow up and move on, even from the
world-saving business. I saw all
those things, but I didn’t feel them, because the relationship was too abrupt,
the change of feelings was too heavy-handed, and the babies too sudden.
The Sudden-Baby plot device, like books-with-maps[4], is
really just a flip name for larger issues
– the issue of good foreshadowing, the issue of connecting to characters, and the
issue of how to slip in ideology subtly enough that I[5] don’t
notice, rather than have it hit me in the face like an out-of-control Frisbee.
A successful narrative baby deployment? The Parasol Protectorate series by Gail Garriger.
xo,
Devo
[1]
Just finished season 1 of Battlestar Galactica and it is currently up in the
air whether my investment in the series or my dislike of the Sudden-Baby (or
Sudden-Savior) will win. Sudden-Savior is a rant for another time, though.
[2]
Yes, I read all the Twilight books. I
have nothing more to say on the matter.
[3]
(dis?)Honorable mentions go to The Story
of Beautiful Girl and some novel that I can’t remember the name of, but
whatever it was, the Suddenness of the Baby made me throw the book across the
room in frustration and stop reading.
[4] “Books-with-maps” is how I’ve taken to
fending off the numerous high-fantasy recommendations that come my way. More on
that later.
[5]
It is “I” here, because YMMV on how appropriate or sudden a Baby plot twist
feels.
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