caper_est | Prelude to Revision: The Unity of the Tale

"Little book, what are you?"

Three Katherines of Allingdale is my book - a single work, a unity, one made thing in itself. But, looking at and listening to it, my first question is: what kind of single thing is that?

In the simplest possible sense, the answer would be: this is a story, and there is nothing outside the story, and now the story is done, a glorious solitaire. William Morris's The Well at the World's End - a tale to which I shall return later - is such a story.

Way over towards the other end of the scale, we have: this is a story, and it is a segment of a greater story, though it may be complete in itself and for now. Diane Duane's The Door into Fire is an example on the self-contained end - it would still have been a good story if none of the rest of The Tale of the Five had been written. Its two sequels are less self-contained, in that each depends for effect on familiarity with what has gone previously - but each has an ending of its own, and an ending of a greater arc that includes its predecessors. Since the concluding story has now been on ice for thirty years or so, we see that this level of unity is sometimes a very good thing for the reader, indeed.

Going out beyond that point, we reach works which have less unity yet. First, the pure instalments of a larger story, in which each book is only one chunk of a serial which has certain convenient stopping-points. The three volumes of The Lord of the Rings are an example (and the six books could each have been). Lastly in the most degenerate case, we see a few things on the shelves which are not even serials, but only manageable slicings of one single tale or serial instalment. Tad Williams's To Green Angel Tower, vols 1 and 2, will serve us here.

What sort of unity has Three Katherines?

It created its setting and all the tales in it - it depends on no other work. It closes, with one important reservation which I shall call the Kitty Clause, all the narrative arcs I wanted to close - it demands, and probably ought to have, no direct sequel. So it must stand as a book, and a tale unto itself.

Is it a true solitaire? No, and for two reasons. Firstly, it's a story with an expansive setting, like Middle-Earth or Earthsea. The 'Kateverse' (which its people call simply 'Earth' or 'the world') deliberately has lots of implications and characters spilling over the edges of the tale, and strongly invites the telling of associated stories which share a setting and a timeline with Three Katherines. Whether these get written or not is largely beside the point: the point is that the world is not hermetically sealed off for the book's use. I'll explore the direct implications of this anon.

Secondly, it's a composite of two sequentially told stories, and bears a peculiar relation to an untold one. This strongly constrains what I can do with the structure, and points to one major potential pitfall - the Kitty Clause again. To this highest level of structure, and what it means for the telling, I shall turn next.

Any other insights how books can be more or less self-complete, that I seem to have missed here?