Among the many ways to tell a story, what makes books/novels still one of the most effective and useful mediums for delivering a story?
For whatever reason, this question came to me and lingered in my head as I recently read the novel Barometer Rising. The historical nature of the story had me comparing the events of the novel to a news report, documentary, and even to more modern movies that I’ve seen. I can’t imagine any of these, or even other forms of digital story telling would be as effective as communicating this particular story as the technology of a book.
Book stories are slow, they simmer, even the fast paced ones release an aroma that permeates the minds of characters and objects in the novel. BR is filled with the city of Halifax’s presence, until the final explosion. This is significant to the story itself. Messages have rich weight in novels. Many modern digital story telling platforms are fragmented.
Despite this permeation, books are a medium that requires readers to complete the connection between information sender and receiver. Unlike more visual media, the black and white pages force the reader to be active in creating the story in their minds. This activity, this closure, engages readers with the same lure of a black and white photo, enticing a reader into it signal, to fill in the color.
Language alone is a limited technology. However, words strung together can form metaphors that reveal what descriptions cannot. More words combined in paragraphs and scenes, act like cells that form organs and organisms, creating bodies and worlds. In BR each chapter uniquely covers one day in the span of the story – readers are drawn into a world filled with time and duration.
Understanding the people and the place in BR was key to confronting complex messages about the war and the impact it had on North American soil. The character Geoffery Wain made me see that the bored generation of wealthy new world aristocrats, born at the top with nowhere to go, backed and extended the war because it provided them with a hierarchy to climb. Their impact on North American society was as devastating as a bomb on Canadian soil, not only for fanning the flames of war but also for neglecting the promise of a new world, and for neglecting the new type of man and woman born of this continent.
The experience of the Halifax explosion, the significance of the events would be lost on me, were it not sent via book, sliced out of time.
A Point of Contact 
I have often thought about this too. Two things I have noted recently for my own reading of novels is that 1. Sometimes I read in black and white – by this I mean that even if the author is describing a scene in colour, I might in my mind be seeing it in black and white. It is then a surprise to later see a colour photo of the place described. 2. If I have read the book before seeing the film, it is so obvious how very much a film just cannot do – or perhaps doesn’t try to do, such as give us the character’s thoughts.
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This is funny, Jenny, a while ago I realized that I tend to imagine a story in animation/cartoon. It takes a concentrated effort for me to imagine a realistic scene. I wonder if that or your B&W imagining means anything about our psyche?
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