Make a deal with me or the throughline gets it.
A throughline is a story’s core, the problem that’s introduced at the beginning and resolved at the end. Sometimes throughlines are called “central plot threads” or a story’s “main arc.” But whatever we call it, it is the single most important element of a story. When you tell someone what a story is “about,” you’re usually describing the throughline. In Star Wars: A New Hope, the threat of the Deathstar is the throughline. It is present from the moment Leia tries to escape Vader with the plans and finally concluded when Luke makes his one-in-a-million shot.
When the throughline is weak, readers have less reason to turn the page. The story loses urgency or falls apart into unrelated chapters. Of all the manuscripts I edit, this problem is probably the most common. It’s easy for new authors to lose track of what ties their stories together during the fun of worldbuilding and creating character arcs.
As a cautionary tail, let’s look at six published novels with weak throughlines, and see how each was affected.
Spoilers for: A Stranger in Olondria, The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet, Queen of the Tearling, Pacific Edge, Ninefox Gambit, and Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell.
1. A Stranger in Olondria
Told in the style of a memoir, this is the story of Jevik leaving his remote pepper plantation to see the wide world. That’s not a super interesting premise, but it can still work. Some of fantasy’s most celebrated entries are made up entirely of characters walking from place to place. The problem with Stranger in Olondria is that there’s no point to Jevik’s journey.
The Amazon sales blurb for this book emphasizes how Jevik will be haunted by an illiterate ghost and become a pawn in the power struggle between two powerful cults. One of those could certainly be an interesting throughline. But when you open the book, neither are to be found. Chapter upon chapter of Stranger in Olondira is spent describing Jevik’s backstory in painstaking detail, everything from his abusive father and step-mother to his powerful desire for literacy. Maybe one of those is actually the throughline? Nope. Jevik learns to read without much struggle, and his parents cease to be important after he leaves the plantation.
After that, it’s quite some time until Jevik encounters the illiterate ghost and the two cults. While everything that happened before was unnecessary backstory, things could have picked up from here.
They don’t. The entire ghost storyline consists of the ghost’s demanding Jevik write down her life story, and he refuses because otherwise there’d be no conflict. Just joking, his actual reason is that he doesn’t want to taint his enjoyment of writing by using it to rid himself of an annoying ghost. I won’t say it’s impossible to write a good story about a protagonist being unreasonably stubborn, but Stranger in Olondria isn’t it. The entire conflict feels forced and a little ridiculous.
The cult storyline has a little more going for it. The two sides are well established as stand-ins for order and chaos, so it’s easy to understand what they’re fighting over. The problem is that Jevik doesn’t really care about the fight. He’s marginally allied with one cult because the other one wants to imprison him for being haunted,* but he’s not really interested in who wins. Worse, he has no agency in the conflict. He’s shuttled from one area to the next until nearly the end of the book.
Stranger in Olondria’s weaknesses are twofold. First, it waits way too long to introduce its throughline. The story could have started when Jevik steps off the boat from his farm and nothing else would change. Second, neither potential throughline is compelling. This makes it harder for readers to be invested in the story’s outcome. Readers who don’t care how a story turns out won’t read for long.
2. The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet
This book is a scifi story with many parallels to Firefly. It features a beat-up but lovable spaceship and an eccentric crew of misfits. It also starts with a really strong hook: a mysterious woman in a space capsule on the run from some unknown problem. Clearly that’s the throughline, right? We’ll spend the rest of the novel finding out who this woman is and dealing with whatever problem was bad enough to make her leave her entire life behind.
Unfortunately, that’s not what happens. We soon find out that the mysterious woman is named Rosemary, and then her story quickly takes a back seat to random shenanigans happening on the ship. It’s brought up later, turns out not to be a big deal, and is quickly resolved. Great sadness.
What about this small angry planet and the journey to get there? Maybe that’ll provide a strong throughline. It certainly could have, but the author seems remarkably uninterested in it. Instead of building towards a greater whole, each problem that comes up is unrelated to what came before and what comes later. The ship is raided by pirates, but they eventually leave and insurance pays for the damage. A side character reveals she has difficulty controlling her fear in a crisis, but this problem never hinders her, and she resolves it in a single conversation.
Technically, the book is about the characters and their ship traveling to the desolate world of Hedra Ka, but the journey itself provides very little conflict. Other than the abortive pirate attack, there’s never a moment when it seems like the characters might not complete their journey. It feels more like an exercise in running out the clock than an exciting space voyage. The only element that comes close to being a throughline is the romance between a secondary character and the ship’s AI, but it involves too few of the other characters to qualify.
The book’s lack of a throughline is really disappointing, especially after such a strong opening. Without anything tying it together, Small Angry Planet is left with a handful of low-stakes side stories. The world is still interesting, and the description is charming, but without a throughline, none of it has any substance.
3. The Queen of the Tearling
Like Small Angry Planet, Queen of the Tearling starts with what seems like a strong throughline. Protagonist Kelsea* is the heir to a queendom, raised in hiding to protect her from an evil uncle who wants the throne for himself. Obviously this is going to be a story about Kelsea defeating her uncle and winning her birthright. There’s even talk of an evil sorcerer who rules the queendom’s more powerful neighbor. Defeating her could be a throughline for the rest of the series.
Sadly, it was not to be. The first few chapters are promising enough, with Kelsea and her handful of guards fighting their way past her uncle’s assassins to reach the capital. Granted, she meets an irritatingly over-candied romance interest along the way, but we can forgive that. Now that she’s reached the capital, it’s clearly time to engage in some political intrigue. She’ll have to chip away at her uncle’s power base and rally the people to her side, all without sinking to her uncle’s level.
Or at least that’s what I was hoping for. Instead, after one last attempt to kill Kelsea, the uncle gives up. He is banished shortly afterward. This is less than halfway through the book, and already the main antagonist is gone. As if that weren’t enough, the book spends several scenes showing us just how incompetent the uncle was in the first place. Then he’s killed by the romance interest, so he can’t return to cause trouble.
Well, that’s disappointing. But all is not lost; maybe the evil sorcerer is actually the villain of this book. Things look good when the sorcerer announces her plans to invade, but then she spends the rest of the book gathering her forces like a Dragon Ball Z character. At best, she’ll be a threat next book. We also get some indication that she’s not particularly competent either. So she’s right out.
You might be asking what Kelsea does for the rest of the book without any villain to keep her company. The answer is that she… has long audiences with nobles who waste her time. That’s not completely fair, she also has to deal with a secondary villain causing trouble, but he has little in the way of resources and clearly isn’t a real threat.
Similar to Small Angry Planet, Queen of the Tearling’s second half feels mostly like it’s running out the clock. But at least with Small Angry Planet, the characters eventually get where they’re going. In Tearling, we spend chapter after chapter waiting for the sorcerer to invade, and she never does. It’s all setup for next time. However, if a series’ first installment isn’t exciting, readers aren’t likely to stick around for the second.
4. Pacific Edge
This book is unique among the entries on this list, because it has a throughline that starts at the beginning, is present for the whole story, and is resolved at the end. That sounds like a strong throughline, not a weak one. The weakness comes from the throughline’s being really boring.
Pacific Edge* takes place in a utopian-future California. That’s a red flag right there, since utopias are notoriously difficult to tell good stories in. Bizarrely, half the book is taken up by a side character’s flashbacks, but we’ll focus on the part that takes place in the present. Well, the book’s present. For us it’s the future.
Protagonist Kevin has a problem. A rival of his wants to build on an undeveloped hill in his neighborhood. Kevin likes this hill. That’s the throughline of the novel, and it’s exactly as dull as it sounds. No one else has much investment in this hill. Kevin’s rival doesn’t have an evil plan. He just wants to build a new business on a hill no one else is using.
Believe it or not, Pacific Edge commits to this throughline with tenacity that’s almost admirable. Kevin tries as hard as he can to turn his neighbors against the development. He tries to get the project’s environmental impact statement overturned.* He even tries to pull political strings. The man really doesn’t want his hill built on.
By the end, I ended up sympathizing more with the rival than with Kevin. The man’s just trying to open a business, leave him be! If this story was meant to be about Kevin learning not to be a jerk, it could have worked, but there’s no sign that he’s learned his lesson or that his behavior is meant as unreasonable.
When a story’s material stakes are this low, it’s critical to establish emotional stakes, and Pacific Edge fails to do this. Sure, Kevin likes his hill, but he’s not passionately in love with it or any of the memories he has from there. Since there are no stakes of any kind, it’s hard to get invested in the throughline, and so the entire story bogs down.
5. Ninefox Gambit
We now leave utopian California behind for a space opera where a tyrannical hexarchate rules the galaxy, and technology only works if people believe in the right calendar system. Weird I know, but bear with me.
Ninefox Gambit is frustrating because it comes close to a strong throughline, but doesn’t support it. In the first chapter, protagonist Cheris is disgraced when she uses a banned tactic to win a battle.* It was the only way to save her soldiers, but it was against hexarchate rules, so now she’s in trouble. This opens up two obvious throughlines: either Cheris must redeem herself, or she must realize the hexarchate is evil and she doesn’t want to be redeemed.
The book chooses the second option, which is a good idea. Throughout the rest of the story, Cheris slowly becomes aware of how evil the hexarchate is, until, at the end, she decides to go rogue.* In a vacuum, that sounds like a great throughline, but it wouldn’t be on this list if things turned out so well.
The problem with Ninefox’s throughline is it fails to take the audience along for the ride. This is a third-person limited story in Cheris’s point of view, which means the audience should be experiencing things roughly as she does. Cheris slowly realizing the hexarchate is evil doesn’t hit home because the hexarchate is obviously evil from pretty much the first page.
Normally, a story like this would obscure the hexarchate’s evil by having Cheris justify what she sees. It might seem evil that the hexarchate expected her to sacrifice her soldiers, but that was necessary to win the war against the evil rebels. When she gets orders to fire on her own civilians in order to route the enemy, she’ll interpret it to mean those civilians are traitors.
Ninefox doesn’t bother. Cheris just follows orders without really thinking about what she’s doing. Near the end, she finally decides the hexarchate is evil, and all the reader can think is “no, really?”
6. Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell
More than any other entry on this list, Strange & Norrell is an odd book* because it introduces a strong throughline and then seems to immediately resolve it. The first few chapters are a lot of slow exposition in which we learn that England used to be a land full of magic, but at some point all the magic left. This raises the obvious question: what happened to English magic? Solving that mystery and bringing magic back to England certainly sounds like a strong throughline.
Then we meet Mr. Norrell, and he’s already brought magic back to England. The book never says how he did it, and none of the other characters ever ask. So that’s one throughline completely resolved. Norrell talks a lot about how he wants to “restore English magic,” but it’s never clear what he means by that. Nor is it ever explained why only he, and later his apprentice Strange, can do magic when no one else can.*
After the early chapters, almost none of the book has anything to do with what happened to English magic. Instead, it transitions into a bizarre arc where Norrell can’t figure out how to prove he can do magic, despite his god-like power. Then that arc ends, and the book devolves into chapter upon chapter of backstory and petty social bickering. Strange and Norell argue about the best ways to learn magic, but the book never establishes any real difference between their approaches. Then Strange goes off to war where he faces no significant challenges except a brief struggle to convince Duke Wellington, one of the age’s greatest military minds, that magic might be useful in defeating the French.
The book goes on and on like this. The closest thing to a throughline is an evil fae kidnapping people, but even that is almost entirely unrelated to what the other characters are doing. Then, at the end, there’s a sudden implication that maybe all of this was the master plan of an entirely different character, but that’s never explained either.
Strange & Norrell is long, over 300,000 words. To justify that length, a novel needs a meaty plot indeed. Instead, this book gives us a rambling series of subplots that have very little to do with each other. That’s not the book’s only problem, but it’s a serious one. Without an urgent plot holding the story together, there’s no motivation to keep reading for so long. Fans of the early 1800s can still get enjoyment out of all the historical detail, but anyone else will be badly put off.
I focused on novels in this list for a reason: weak throughlines are a problem endemic to the written word. TV shows and movies just don’t suffer from it to the same degree. I suspect that’s because onscreen mediums adhere to a stricter formula, but I can’t be sure. Whatever the reason, weak throughlines are something writers must always be on the lookout for. Nothing sinks a novel faster than a bunch of loosely related scenes with nothing to connect them.
P.S. Our bills are paid by our wonderful patrons. Could you chip in?
I loved The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series, but I have to admit that the lack of a throughline does hurt.
Any advice on how to make sure your does work? My problem is I run out of story long before I finish.
We’ve actually got an entire post on that! We called them plot threads back then but same thing. https://mythcreants.com/blog/establishing-and-satisfying-plot-threads/
Yes, much better answer than mine.
I think looking at the story and asking yourself ‘what do I promise and what do I deliver’ might be a good idea. The throughline is, essentially, a story you promise the reader. A problem or mystery or situation you make prominent at the beginning gets a satisfying resolution at the end.
I tend to agree with you on _Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell_ but then I’ve only ever seen the TV series, not read the book. It was obvious to me early on that what you call the “throughline” was really only the “MacGuffin”, to demonstrate different types of magic.
Norrell constantly talks about “restoring English magic” and no, he’s never clear about what that means, but to the Prime Minister and others that really doesn’t matter. What matters to most is the ENGLISH part, even if they don’t (at first) believe in magic at all. But while Norrell wants to restore that, after his mistake with The Gentleman he doesn’t want to do any, particularly when its clear that restoring the PM’s wife was only a partial success. Strange – the experimenter – on the other hand breaks with Norrell – the theoretician – over actually practicing that magic. And while Strange has initial success but it exhausts him to do what must be done to help Wellington win the Peninsula campaign, but of course goes too far. So Norrell is afraid to do magic, in case things get worse, and Strange regrets that he used magic.
Contrast this with the dinner club of wannabes who play a game of collecting trivia and information without real intent of practicing, of using that for parlour games. Likewise, Christopher Drawlight sees an opportunity to exploit the fad and interest in magic, but directly has no interest in magic at all.
And lastly we have The Gentleman and The Raven King. Instead of researchers, academics and dilettantes, we have the REAL things. But their magic comes with a price. They can affect (and effect) reality but are bound to the letter (though seldom the spirit) of agreements which give them that power. The gentleman promises Steven that he will be a king, but cannot foresee just how that would come about, and the consequences to himself.
In many ways the story is allegory of many things – a comedy of errors and commentary about the notion of what it means to be “English” (and of course to Norrell “English Magic” is a conservative and respectful thing). Also magic can be seen as a stand-in for science in the age of enlightenment. Norrell’s the academic, prepared to give precedence to theory and practice established by research and dialog. Strange is the experimenter who seems to instinctively know what to do or try and gets results, but only later understands WHY. And the magic club are polite society who see Science as an intellectual game, but distant and safe.
You’re right that the TV series also has some issues, though the book is miles worse in the throughline department. I wouldn’t have finished it except that it was for a book club.
Johnathan Strange… Is in my “to read” pile…
…somewhere.
I tried it once because of the BBC adaptation. (I have not seen that yet). Found it a bit meh.
It’s hiding some where under the sci-fi, Crime fics and a bit of Manga.
I may find it again one day, however, it will probably go back to the charity shop I got it from.
I found angry planet very enjoyable, even if it lacked substance, it was more about the journey than the destination. If you want a bestseller that really lacks core, the “The Esses Serpent”. A long book where nothing interesting at all happens.
Pacific Edge boring? This is presumably because you are not interested in politics. For anyone who is, it is riveting! One of my favourite books; the best modern utopia by far.
With regards to Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, I think you have completely missed the point. Or any of the points. The ‘throughline’ that you are so obsessed with is clearly the defeat of The Gentleman with the Thistledown Hair and the release of the two ladies from Grace Adieu. But even without that, the book is a work of genius which combines Regency and the Gothic – Jane Austen meets Mary Shelley; it plays out a class war with Childermass and the wild North of The Raven King vs the gentlemanly South that Mr Norrell aspires to be a part of, and which the wild North wins; and, has Stephen, a POC, being crowned king at the end. It is eerie and beautiful, and your lack of appreciation of it says much more about you than the book, imho.
As a side note, how do you rate Virginia Woolf and her stream-of-consciousness technique? Did she too produce ‘weak’ novels? Or James Joyce, whose work relied heavily on symbolism and also used stream-of-consciousness?
Woolf and Joyce produced this kind of text as their work. So that is their throughline in a way: there is none and there isn’t even supposed to be one. Which is why they’re usually not widely read, because most people prefer a story which makes sense and has a, you know, story.
If you’re writing a novel to tell your story, you should make your throughline a ) clearly visible among all your plot threads (novels tend to have several, after all) and b ) you should follow through with it and not switch it mid-book. So if you list two throughlines from the novel, it clearly doesn’t realy have a real throughline, because in that case, either freeing the women or the fight would be the throughline, but not both of them.
That isn’t two ‘throughlines’, it is the same one. Seriously wondering if you read the same book as I did, or whether it was just too challenging for you to comprehend. That possibility is indicated by your assertion that Woolf and Joyce are ‘not widely read’…
It’s two different topics to focus on – rescuing two specific people or getting mixed up in a fight.
Personally, I wonder if you’ve understood the principle of throughline as it was explained in the article or are just here to defend a book you love.
Fight in this case meaning the war with Childermass.
Editor’s Note: while we welcome passionate discussion, please refrain from implying that another commentor isn’t intelligent enough to understand the material. I’m not deleting anything for now but the line of appropriate discourse has been approached, so I’ll be keeping a close eye on things.
I apologize, Oren. I didn’t want to doubt Sarz’ intelligence, I more wondered whether they’d read the article or just seen the Strange and Norrell picture and come in to protect a book they love.
While you mention that films tend to not have this problem to the same degree, Luc Besson’s Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets is an example. As one of unfortunately many problems, while there is technically a throughline, far too often that is ignored in favor of random side plots. The problem here is I think one of the more common, in which it is about the travel guide writing the story rather than the other way around. Every idea was going to be included regardless of the story, and while many of the ideas are wonderfully creative, it really harms the overall story to have so many things thrown around without follow through.
The only part worth watching more than once is the first five minutes, which gives a truly fantastic portrayal of space exploration and optimistic diversity. It is too bad the rest of the movie can’t be anywhere near that level.
I’m of two minds about the absolute necessity of throughlines. On one hand, having a strong throughline is never a bad thing. It can make for great, well-crafted stories. And well-crafted stories are always a good thing.
On the other hand I tend to get a bit twitchy if someone implies that they are necessary to make a good story. A number of my favorite books have very weak to no throughlines (throughlines tend to fall a bit short in stories that are slice of life, or in stories that are more about exploration and immersion). Still, I love those stories dearly and regard them as very well crafted.
Like a prior commentor said, there are great books in the more artsy literature genre that are mostly rambly stream-of-consciousness or symbolism, and it just hurts me a bit to imply those are not good and worthwhile books- so why should a genre book like fantasy not be able to pull off the same thing?
Then again, if you are trying to write a non-artsy story, a well thought-out and executed throughline can improve your writing a lot. So maybe insisting on its importance is a good thing.
I just feel like dismissing works with weak throughlines can lead to a restrictive and not very diversifying way of looking at literature. There is no one right way to write a book, because there are many very different people with different preferences that could read the book, and I think my life is happier for having read those rambly books with their weak throughlines.
It does depend on the genre and on the intent of the author, I’d say. A slice of life story will never have such a strong throughline as a long fantasy novel about a gigantic war, but that is alright, because it’s not boring because of it. However, if you want to focus on a topic during a novel, you should stay with it and not meander around or suddenly change your focus without clear reason (clear for the audience, that is, there are stories where you think you know the throughline, but the true one only appears later in the story). If you write something philosophic or a short slice of life piece, it’s perfectly okay not to have a clear throughline. None of the examples above, however, falls in that category.
Then there’s also taste. As you say, you love rambling books which do not have a strong throughline. Yet, a lot of people don’t, so they’ll be annoyed with the book afterwards, because it didn’t deliver on its promise for them. Especially if the book suggests a throughline early.
And there’s the more or less artful way to do it. If an author essentially says ‘this is just a weird writing exercise which turned into a story of sorts’ and writes very well, a rambling book without real throughline can still make a nice read.
What breaks a book for me, is if a throughline is introduced early, but the author just abandons it. It’s fine if the book has no strong premise, not all stories need one to work. But if a book suggests there is a premise to it, a throughline which will keep the story running, and then doesn’t deliver, it’s a deal-breaker for me.
Hi,
A very good example of this is Lois McMaster Bujold’s latest (and possibly last) Vorkosigan book: “Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen”. This has virtually no story – it is simply an account of one of the main characters in the earlier books settling down to a well earned retirement. One of the main plot points is whether a shipment of cement will arrive on time (seriously). in addition, it re-writes a lot of the history of the series by suggesting that a minor character in the previous books was somehow the mastermind behind a lot of what took place. This book was such a disappointment, especially when you consider how carefully plotted all the other books in the series are.
Count me in among those who LOOOOVE “Jonathan Strange and Mr Norell”! The thing is, on reading the arguments as to why the plot(s) is all over the place, I think you’re right. BUT that doesn’t change my love for the book! And I doubt I would have loved it more if it had a “proper” main plot rather than being as sprawling as it is!
The thing about this novel is that it really just sucked me in the way fairly few novels do. It has a really unique and very well-made world, and the way Clarke writes in this nineteenth century style helps a lot too. I think it’s PERFECTLY FINE to be put off by the sprawling plot, people’s taste differ, but I also think it would be tough to argue that Clarke somehow failed here. After all, it was popular AND well-received by critics AND won awards etc.
Still, I can see how 99 % of authors trying to pull something like this off would fail spectacularly, so at the end of the day, I guess this article still seem to have solid advice for writers.
Something else to consider: while you may not have enjoyed the story more with a more focused plot, would you have enjoyed it *less*?
S&N does a great job bringing Georgian England to life, especially its upper crust politics, and if that’s the sort of thing a reader is into then the book works great. However, if the reader isn’t super into that historical era and its worldbuilding, the plot doesn’t do enough to bring them along for the ride.
Chances are that if S&N had a stronger plot, the people who already like it would like it just as much, and a lot of people who find it boring would like it more. From a storyteller’s perspective, this means a benefit without a loss, which we usually want.
Compare S&N to Sorcerer to the Crown, which also does a great job bringing Georgian England to life, and has a strong plot as well. With StC, the reader can get sucked in, even if they aren’t super into the worldbuilding.
I honestly found Sorcerer much harder going that S&N. Maybe I just struggled with the feeling that I was supposed to like Prunella and didn’t, but of the two, that was the one that left me feeling that there was a better book trying to get through.
Prunella’s character is definitely a hindrance to Sorcerer, largely because she has way too much candy, an unsympathetic motivation, and is constantly stealing the show from the much more likable Zacharias.
It’s hard to say…? I read some other post somewhere on this site (don’t remember which one now) where Tolkien was mentioned as a bad example of someone who always goes off on a tanget about this or that, long songs, retold myths etc that do little to advance the plot. But I think in the case of Tolkien, they do help to create the feeling that this is an ENTIRE WORLD rather than just a series of novels, and that’s amazing! I think that’s one very important reason (besides the obvious one, that the stuff he did was new when he did it, although lots of it later became cliché) why he’s so extremely famous and beloved.
I feel Clarke accomplished a bit of that too (although not to the same extent as Tolkien because NO ONE manages this to the same extent as Tolkien), with all those long footnotes and stuff. With Clarke, the fact that we get so many characters and so many plots might also have had a positive impact on the feeling of “this is an entire WORLD”. Maybe? I’m not 100 % certain! I’m just speculating away now.
If we, for the sake of discussion at least, assume that I’m onto something here, then there are authors who go off on a tangent all the time and/or have very sprawling plots, but for them it’s a reasonable trade-off – some people are bored and put off by it, whereas others get the “wow this isn’t just a novel, it’s an entire WORLD!” feeling.
But even if we assume for the sake of argument that I’m right in this, I also think that like 9 out of 10 (or maybe even 99 out of 100) authors who try this fail to get the latter effect, so they end up boring some people whereas others just tolerate it.
I don’t know … Tolkien’s meandering is why I never finished reading LotR, although I liked the Hobbit very much (less meandering and more to the point). I’m in no way afraid of long stories or stories which span several books, but LotR was meandering so much and talking about so many things which had nothing whatsoever to do with the Ring and the plot around it, I just couldn’t get through it.
It’s always difficult to say how much world-building is necessary, though. Fantasy and Sci-Fi can do with a lot more world-building (since the worlds are often alien to us), but there is a point when it really starts to turn people off completely. It also depends on how good a writer is at building their worlds and making them feel real and interesting. There are writers who (that’s my impression) try to talk a world into being, but what they really do is talk the reader to sleep – or into dropping the book and reading something else.
I defended JS&MN, but I read a novel where your throughline concept really helped me pinpoint what bothered me with it. It’s “the light of other days” by Arthur C Clarke and Stephen Baxter.
There’s a plot about inventing new wormhole tech that gets used to do more and more things, and eventually it leads to young people turning into an enlightened hivemind, like always happens at the end of Clarke’s novels.
There’s a family drama with an abusive capitalist dad and his two sons; the youngest son in particular gets a pretty interesting arch with some surprises as to how it plays out.
There’s a romance plot between the youngest son and a journalist (in the first chapter, the journalist looks like she’s gonna be the main character, but then the guy becomes more central). I think the romance between them was fine.
There’s a bit about the oldest son doubting his faith, but it’s fine too, it doesn’t get atheist preachy (which I initially feared).
There’s a woman who schemes to, and eventually succeeds in killing abusive capitalist dad, but she hates him for reasons completely unrelated to his abuse of his sons.
There’s an asteroid on its way to Earth, threatening to exterminate all of mankind.
Overall… I’m pretty tired of Clarke’s enlightened hiveminds, but the novel had a lot of characters and plots and parts that I felt were good on their own, and the wormhole technology is really interesting the way it’s described and what it can do. It just that it doesn’t really HANG TOGETHER, and that’s why the novel ended up being “pretty good… pretty interesting” rather than “wow, great!”, which I think would have been possible if everything had been properly woven together.
About Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell: I’ve read that the book was originally intended to be three volumes. Would this explain some of the problems with the throughline?
Possibly, but I don’t think so. The published version doesn’t read like a story with three sequential throughlines, which is what I’d expect if you put three functional throughlines together as one book. It’s just incredibly meandering.
A Long Way to a Small Angry Planet has a loosely-connected sequel, A Close and Common Orbit, which has a much stronger throughline, and that’s the reason why it’s my favorite in the Wayfarer series.
I consider myself lucky that Common Orbit was the first book in it that I read, because it made me enthusiastic enough to get and read the first and third books. If Long Way was entry point, there’s a good chance I’d have found it a pleasant enough emotional investment, but then procrastinated on reading the other books for who knows how long.
All I know is that I immediately loved Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. It was thoroughly (har har) entertaining.