How do you introduce multiple plot strands?

Mick Herron’s spy thriller The Secret Hours has a complicated plot structure, a large cast of characters, and a storyline that stretches across thirty years. I’ll walk you through the chronology and plot structure in a later post; in this post, I’ll show you how Herron uses part divisions to help readers understand the structure of the novel and to introduce three different sets of interrelated characters and story questions.

Like most novels, The Secret Hours does not have a table of contents, so we don’t see the part titles before we start the book—we encounter them, like everything else in the novel, exactly when Herron wants us to see them. The first words of the novel, in fact, are the first part division: “Part One: Devon, Soon.” The innocuous “soon,” which many readers, in a hurry to start the story, won’t even notice, thrusts us into the future, dangling us over an empty abyss. If what we are about to see is “Soon,” when is “now,” exactly?

If readers wonder about this question, Herron distracts us from it with a showstopper opening, starting with an audacious first sentence: “The worst smell in the world is dead badger.” We bought this novel expecting spies and instead we get dead badgers in Devon? The first sentence is in present tense, but it declares a universal truth, not pegged to a specific time—just like Jane Austen’s famous opening to Pride and Prejudice: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”

The second sentence doesn’t seem to get us closer to the spies: “He’d encountered it on his morning walk down a green lane; had caught the odour without seeing the corpse, but had guessed what it was before returning later with a shovel.” Notice we don’t even have a name for this narrator yet (another reminder that you can parcel out details slowly), nor do we quite understand where we are in time. This second sentence is in past perfect—often called the past of the past—telling us only that our narrator is remembering something that happened before his present moment. He encountered the badger one morning; sometime “later” he tried to bury it. Finding he can’t, Max (we get his name in the fifth sentence) decides to avoid the spot for a while in the hopes that someone else will deal with it. However, that expected future—in which a farmer or even nature could take care of the problem over the course of weeks—never arrives because in the last sentence of the paragraph, the spy narrative finally kicks into gear: “Which was why he wasn’t sure the badger would still be there a couple of nights later, when he was running for his life.”

Now we’re alert! Why is he running for his life? And why is he wondering about something as trivial as a dead badger in this moment? It takes the whole book for the first question to be answered; we learn the answer to the second question later in the chapter. But before we can get back to the badger—literally and figuratively—Herron has to rewind the story again, to the moment when Max, “not so much struggling with insomnia as letting it do its worst,” hears an intruder entering his kitchen window. His response tells us a lot about him: Rather than panic, he dresses quietly and tries to remember the location of his flight kit. This intrusion is an eventuality he has trained and prepared for, we understand via these small details and hints. We also learn more about the identity he’s assumed for the past twenty years as he quietly slips down the stairs.

In the middle of a long paragraph packed with details, Max nonchalantly disables the intruder with a poker and climbs out a side window. Herron is deliberately restrained in his description of this action, in his language as well as in its placement:

Notice the verb tenses here: “would have jabbed” and “had he known.” This is the conditional tense, which has the effect of making the action seem hypothetical. The traditional tools to make this action punchier would be to use short paragraphs and strong verbs: “He jabbed her hard at the base of the skull…” Instead, the emphasis of the sentence is on that last clause: “if he survived the night.” Herron is still building the suspense here.

The original intruder is joined by assistants and that’s when Max starts his run, cutting across a dark field in the hope that will slow them down—a hope that dwindles when he realizes one of his pursuers is on a motorcycle. This moment, not the moment with the poker, is the one Herron has been writing toward. As soon as Max realizes the motorcycle is behind him, we get these two sentences: “Time grows elastic at moments of stress. Apparently science supported this proposition, though for Max it was lived experience: the ever-slowing thud of his feet hitting the ground, the speeding up of the racket behind him.”

He makes a plan for his next move if he can just make it across the field. And then we get this showstopper of a passage:

What I’m going to draw your attention to repeatedly throughout my analysis of this book is just how good Herron is at distinctive description. I’m sure I could easily find ten scenes of people being chased by a man on a motorcycle and none of them would sound like this one. What’s the magic here? I see three things:

First, theme: As you’ll see in later posts, time is an important theme in The Secret Hours (oh, look there, a time reference in the title itself!), and Herron has a lot to say about the lived experience of time—the way some moments feel long and others short; the way some memories are buried and others stay with us; the many ways in which the past can reach out and change the direction of the future. Note that both the first sentence (“Time grows elastic at moments of stress”) and the last (“if tomorrow ever came”) are related to this theme. Writers often weave theme statements into quieter moments of a novel—into conversations, for example, or the sometimes hushed and portentous final lines of a chapter. But what Herron’s showing you here is that you can also work them into the most suspenseful moments of a scene.

Second, interiority: Herron pays a lot of attention to the inner workings of his characters’ minds and seems always to be asking himself, “What would be going through this character’s mind in these specific circumstances?” What is Max thinking about, in this too-slow run across a field? He’s thinking about his specific plan to make it to a three-way junction up ahead, but the suspense of that will be over in just another page. In contrast, his meditation on age and aging—his concession that he’s no longer young, his consolation that he’s not yet elderly, and his recognition that even escaping this situation does not mean he can outrun death forever—will continue to resonate throughout the novel. And, as a fifty-year-old, I can relate to this particular mix of feelings about age and aging, even though I’ve never been chased across a field by a motorcycle.

Third, figurative language: Another quality that makes Herron such a good writer is that he seems allergic to cliché. A first draft of this passage might have described the motorcycle “roaring”—a description that is now so familiar for motor vehicles that we no longer even recognize it as a metaphor. To make the metaphor fresh, Herron goes back to its roots. What roars? A lion. Without using the term roar, how else can he summon the metaphorical energy of a beast ready to pounce and devour? Herron redirects this energy to the motorcycle’s headlight, which is “clutching” and “swallowing,” and then to the motorbike itself, “its breath on his arse.” (This specific flavor of figurative language is called personification—giving human qualities to an inanimate object.)

There’s one more bit of figurative language that may also relate back to Herron’s close attention to interiority: He’s really thought about what Max can see as he runs across the dark field, pursued closely now by the motorcycle with its bright headlight, and that’s his shadow stretching out in front of him “like a giant.” Max imagines the giant attacking his pursuers, and the strong verb forms here—“smite” and “pound”—set up the fast rhythm of the climax, as he grips the gate and hurls himself over.

The lesson here is that when you are writing a suspenseful scene, you don’t always need to go faster—to strip down the sentences, increase the paragraph breaks and white space, and speed up the action. Done correctly, going deeper—slowing down, paying attention to the point-of-view character’s sensory experiences, psychology, emotions—can be just as effective at building tension and interest for readers.

After Max gets away, just twenty-five pages into the book, we come to part two, titled “Monochrome, Then & Now.” We know Max has escaped, but we also know he’s on the run, and we are curious about who he was in the past and why he’s being hunted now. The lingering suspense of part one gives Herron the leeway to deliver a quieter opening to part two, in which he needs to accomplish a lot of set-up work for the overall plot of the novel. And, unlike the inherent interest of a man running for his life, part two focuses on the mundane world of bureaucrats and government agencies, with only political rivalries to provide spice.

Here’s the first sentence of part two:

We are in the hands of an omniscient narrator here rather than a specific character, but it’s an omniscient narrator with a distinctive voice. This narrator is a little world-weary (most certainly, one of those “in the know”) and a realist if not a pessimist, a set of attitudes that find an outlet in sarcasm and humor. It’s an Austenian voice, in other words. Remember the first line of Pride and Prejudice I quoted above? Here’s the second:

Both of these narrators are telling us what was intended or assumed, and then implying that these intentions or assumptions are going to be tested.

Also, like the Austen sentence I just quoted, Herron’s sentence happens to be in passive voice, which you may not have even noticed due to the effectiveness of that savage little Peppa Pig barb: “the establishment of the Monochrome inquiry . . . was intended to leave the Service rattled” (my emphasis). Herron uses passive voice here to build suspense for the story questions he’s just introduced. Who established the inquiry and why? We get the answer only at the end of this page-and-a-half long paragraph packed with details. The Monochrome inquiry is the prime minister’s revenge against the Security Service for the political scandal that cost him his position as foreign secretary under the previous prime minister.

We then follow the news of the inquiry as it “circulates Westminster” and starts to generate reactions within the Service:

The reaction of that “guv’nor”—First Desk of the Service, whose point of view we enter but whose name we never get—is what the omniscient narrator is gradually leading us to. First we see her from the outside: “in First Desk’s office, with its frostable glass wall overlooking the boys and girls on the hub, the reaction was curiously muted.” Then from her current assistant, Erin Grey’s, point of view: “she did not, in the view of the young woman who was her administrative assistant that season, seem unduly worried by the prospect.”

After a few turns of dialogue between Erin and First Desk, we move to the point of view of First Desk, learning two pieces of consequential information: That a former First Desk was a Russian spy, and that this First Desk, despite her stated confidence that the Monochrome inquiry will go nowhere, has a “nagging awareness that, times without number, what started out an inconsequential piece of mischief could gather quiet momentum” and decides to prepare a contingency plan. “She was First Desk, after all. Contingency plans were what she did.” Unspoken, but hovering between the lines, is the motivation that explains so many of First Desk’s actions throughout the novel. Most of her contingency plans are to protect the public or those in power; this contingency plan is to protect the power of the security services.

The next chapter brings us forward two years, presumably to “now.” In separate scenes, we are introduced to Griselda Fleet and Malcolm Kyle, two low-level government bureaucrats who have been tapped to conduct the Monochrome inquiry. Both Griselda and Malcolm are POV characters, and we are given a lot of access to their backstories and motivations; we understand that they, like Max, are going to be primary actors in whatever plot is still unfolding before us. Part two is not all set-up, however; Herron introduces two shots of story suspense. First, we see a short scene with a new POV character, codenamed Ratty, which reveals there is a mole on the Monochrome panel—a group that includes several politicians and the pompous Sir Winston as titular head, in addition to the bureaucrats Griselda and Malcolm. Second, at the end of part two, by which point the Monochrome inquiry has stretched on for almost two fruitless years, Malcolm discovers that a classified file has been snuck into his shopping cart at the grocery store one evening. After Malcolm and Griselda decide to photocopy the file, distribute it to the panel, and call a witness, we get these final lines, linking us up once again to the “soon” of part one:

Part three of the novel, titled “London, Now,” does indeed bring us back to Max’s story thread. But part four, titled “Berlin, Then,” marks the third opening of the novel. And this one could conceivably have been the spot Herron started the novel, because it takes us further back in time than we’ve gone yet, to 1994. In a later post, I’ll examine the structure and chronology of the novel in more detail so we can decode why Herron didn’t start the book here, but right now let’s examine it as one last opening:

In contrast to the beginning of part two, in this opening we seem to be fully embedded in the point of view of a single character—the witness who has been called before the Monochrome panel to answer questions about the file that was slipped to Malcolm—but there are hints, even here in this first sentence, that the POV isn’t quite as straightforward as it looks. For example, we don’t know her name, only her classification as “witness #137.” (Later in the scene, she tells the story of being handed her new “workname,” Alison North, before being sent to the field office in Berlin.) The first sentence also hints at the multiple narrative layers at play. The phrase “explained to herself afterwards” suggests that memory is at work here. In other words, we aren’t getting direct access to the woman about to be renamed ‘Alison North’ in 1994; we are getting access to a remembered version of this person, filtered by whoever she is in the “now” time of the inquiry. And who that person is remains a mystery until quite late in the novel.

As we learned in my post on the chronology of Black Sun, your choice about how to open your novel should be based on the experience you want your reader to have, not on the chronology of your plot or your desire as a writer to showcase a favorite character or moment. Consider which moment will pull readers into the story and figure out a way to start there. The Secret Hours shows us that each new part break offers a moment to begin your story again from a different moment in time with the focus on a new set of characters or a new strand of the plot.

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