knotme
September 1 2006, 02:19 AM
What a great story! I'll disagree gently with an earlier post or two: This story is not a great foundation for a sequel. If Camy wrote it with that in mind, he fooled me completely. I see it as a self-contained short story from start to finish. The characters are defined as needed for the story, no more, no less. I'll echo several others: the pace is perfect. The decision (if Camy even had to think about it), to skip over Davey and Jack's get-acquainted evening, was obviously correct. Even so, there's a lot going on in this story, more than I would have been able to juggle in this short space. Camy pulled it off beautifully, and I cannot think of a thread or character that I would drop. A great illustration of pace is
QUOTE
Gerald Butcher was having a row with John Post when Suzzie timorously entered his office.
“I said I wasn’t to be disturbed,” he spat, squeezing frantically on his stress ball, still appalled that John, for all their bickering one of his oldest and dearest friends, would be arguing on behalf of his pansy son. Didn’t he know anything?
We learn so much with so little here. No time for the reader to boggle at this scene; the plot races on!
A quibble: I think Camy might have gone a tad overboard vilifying Sid. My favorite illustration of this is (emphasis mine)
QUOTE
Then, as he [Ant] started to wade across the half submerged bridge that crossed the top of the weir to try and catch them, he caught a glimpse of Sid’s greasy locks appear just yards behind Jack.
Surely, in the midst of this emergency, Ant does not stop to notice that Sid's locks, soaked with water, are in addition greasy. Surely, Camy means that Ant's image of Sid is a slimy character, whose locks would of course be greasy. This passage brought to mind Snidely Whiplash.
Among the minor benefits, several words were new to me. I'll have to file the verb "hawk" away for reuse.