Help Please! I’m Looking For Great Examples Of The Writer’s Voice…

[AgentPete]

I’m midway through preparing the next major Litopia seminar, and it’s the most challenging – and probably the most important – topic I’ve ever addressed.

And I really need your help.

“The Writer’s Voice” is a cornerstone subject. Yet very widely misunderstood. The most common confusion (and I’ve found this on a great many writing advice websites) is that “voice = style”. It doesn’t.

What I’d like from you, please, are specimens of what you consider to be outstanding examples of the writer’s voice in action.

No more than 500 words or so. With attribution and links (e.g. Amazon) if possible.

How to do this?

Well, I suggest you start by reflecting on those writers who come to mind when you think about authors who have touched your life in some way. The books you may have first encountered years, or even decades, ago and which still stay with you.

The author’s voice that still speaks clearly and directly to you. Person to person communication; across the gulf of years, continents, race, class or gender.

Then narrow it down by choosing a few hundred words that seem, to you, to typify how that author speaks to you… and post below.

Thank you

 

[Jake E]

YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET—Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME...SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.

Terry Pratchett - Hogfather.

This speaks to me on a deep level.

 

[RK Wallis]

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters.

Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice

 

[Hannah F]

All our Hidden Gifts by Caroline O’Donoghue (YA, publ 2021, Walker Books) [First page]



The story of how I ended up with the Chokey Card Tarot Consultancy can be told in four detentions, three notes sent home, two bad report cards and one Tuesday afternoon that ended with me being locked in the cupboard.

I’ll give you the short version.

Miss Harris gave me in-school suspension after I threw a shoe at Mr Bernard. It was payback for him calling me stupid for not knowing my Italian verbs. To this, I responded that Italian is a ridiculous language to learn anyway and that we should all be learning Spanish because, globally, more people speak Spanish. Mr Bernard said that if I really thought I was going to learn Spanish quicker than I am currently learning Italian, I was deluded. He turned back to the whiteboard.

Then I threw my shoe.

It didn’t hit him. I’d like to stress that. It merely hit the board next to him. But no one seems to care about that, except me. Maybe if I had a best friend – or really, any close friend at all – I’d have someone to vouch for me. To tell them that it was a joke, and that I would never knowingly hurt a teacher. Someone who could explain how it is with me: that sometimes frustration and rage surge through me, sparking out in ways I can’t predict or control.

But that friend doesn’t exist, and I’m not sure I would deserve them if they did.

In-school suspension starts on Tuesday morning, and Miss Harris meets me at her office and leads me to the basement.

Amazon product ASIN 1406393096

 

[Hannah F]

Ship of Magic by Robin Hobb (Fantasy, publ 1998, Harper Voyager) [First paragraph of first page, after prologue]

Kennit walked the tideline, heedless of the salt waves that washed around his boots as it licked the sandy beach clean of its tracks. He kept his eyes on the struggling line of seaweed, shells and snags of driftwood that marked the water's highest reach. The tide was just turning now, the waves falling ever shorter in their pleading grasp upon the land. As the saltwater retreated along the black sand, kt would bare the worn molars of shale and tangles of kelp that now hid beneath the waves.

Amazon product ASIN B00943C9YE

 

[Vagabond Heart]

1​

On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the las wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadnt ben none for a long time befor him nor I aint looking to see none agen. He dint make the groun shake nor nothing like that when he come on to my spear he wernt all that big plus he lookit poorly. He done the reqwyrt he ternt and stood and clattert his teef and made his rush and there we wer then. Him on 1 end of the spear kicking his life out and me on the other end watching him dy. I said, "Your tern now my tern later." The other spears gone in then and he wer dead and the steam coming up off him in the rain and we all yelt, "Offert!"

The woal thing fealt jus that littl bit stupid. Us running that boar thru that las littl scrump of woodling with the forms all roun. Cows mooing sheap baaing cocks crowing and us foraging our las boar in a thin grey girzel on the day I come a man.

RIDDLEY WALKER by Russell Hoban

 

[Hannah F]

This Must Be The Place by Maggie O'Farrell (contemporary fiction, publ. 2016, by Tinder Press.) [First Page]

There is a man.
He's standing on the back step, rolling a cigarette. The day is typically unstable, the garden lush and shining, the branches weighty with still-falling rain.
There is a man and the man is me.
I am at the back door, tobacco tin in hand, and I am watching something in the trees, a figure, standing at the perimeter of the garden, where the aspens crowd in at the fence. Another man.
He's carrying a pair of binoculars and a camera.
A birdwatcher, I am telling myself as I pull the frail paper along my tongue, you get them in these parts. But at the same time I'm thinking, really? Birdwatching this far up the valley? I'm also thinking, where is my daughter, the baby, my wife? How quickly could I reach them if I needed to?

This Must Be the Place by Maggie O'Farrell

A top-ten bestseller 2016, shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award, THIS MUST BE THE PLACE by Maggie O'Farrell crosses time zones and continents to reveal an extraordinary portrait of a marriage. 'A complex, riveting novel of love and hope that grips at the heart' The Sunday TimesA reclusive...

www.books2door.com

 

[Hannah F]

I can give you more if you want more

 

[Claire G]

I’m midway through preparing the next major Litopia seminar, and it’s the most challenging – and probably the most important – topic I’ve ever addressed.

And I really need your help.

“The Writer’s Voice” is a cornerstone subject. Yet very widely misunderstood. The most common confusion (and I’ve found this on a great many writing advice websites) is that “voice = style”. It doesn’t.

What I’d like from you, please, are specimens of what you consider to be outstanding examples of the writer’s voice in action.

No more than 500 words or so. With attribution and links (e.g. Amazon) if possible.

How to do this?

Well, I suggest you start by reflecting on those writers who come to mind when you think about authors who have touched your life in some way. The books you may have first encountered years, or even decades, ago and which still stay with you.

The author’s voice that still speaks clearly and directly to you. Person to person communication; across the gulf of years, continents, race, class or gender.

Then narrow it down by choosing a few hundred words that seem, to you, to typify how that author speaks to you… and post below.

Thank you

Last night I dreamed I went to Manderley again. It seemed to me that I was passing through the iron gates that led to the driveway. The drive was just a narrow track now, its stony surface covered with grass and weeds. Sometimes, when I thought I had lost it, it would appear again, beneath a fallen tree or beyond a muddy pool formed by the winter rains. The trees had thrown out new low branches which stretched across my way. I came to the house suddenly, and stood there with my heart beating fast and tears filling my eyes.

There was Manderley, our Manderley, secret and silent as it had always been, the grey stone shining in the moonlight of my dream. Time could not spoil the beauty of those walls, nor of the place itself, as it lay like a jewel in the hollow of a hand. The grass sloped down towards the sea, which was a sheet of silver lying calm under the moon, like a lake undisturbed by wind or storm. I turned again to the house, and I saw that the garden had run wild, just as the woods had done. Weeds were everywhere. But moonlight can play strange tricks with the imagination, even with a dreamer’s imagination. As I stood there, I could swear that the house was not an empty shell, but lived and breathed as it had lived before. Light came from the windows, the curtains blew softly in the night air, and there, in the library, the door stood half open as we had left it, with my handkerchief on the table beside the bowl of autumn flowers.

Then a cloud came over the moon, like a dark hand across a face. The memories left me. I looked again at an empty shell, with no whisper of the past about its staring walls. Our fear and suffering were gone now. When I thought about Manderley in my waking hours I would not be bitter; I would think of it as it might have been, if I could have lived there without fear. I would remember the rose garden in summer, and the birds that sang there; tea under the trees, and the sound of the sea coming up to us from the shore below. I would think of the flowers blown from the bushes, and the Happy Valley. These things could never lose their freshness.

Rebecca: Daphne du Maurier

 

[Eva Ulian]

I don't think a voice is a voice unless I recognize it if it were not labelled. And apart from Jane Austen's - I don't think I would recognize any of the others.

 

[Eva Ulian]

Maybe people should define why they consider the piece they have posted as having "VOICE", that way we can understand better.

 

[MattScho]

The opening of Jeeves and Wooster, Jeeves Gives Notice:

I was a shade perturbed. Nothing to signify, really, but still just a spot concerned. As i sat in the old flat, idly touching the strings of my banjolele, and instrument to which I had become greatly addicted of late, you couldn't have stated absolutely that the brow was actually furrowed, and yet, on the other hand, you coudln't have stated absolutely that it wasn't. Perhaps the word pensive about covers it. It seemed to me that a situation fraught with embarassing potentialities had arisen.
"Jeeves," I said. "do you know what?"
"no, sir."
"Do you know whom I saw last night?"
"No, sir."
J.Washburn Stoker and his daughter, Pauline."
"Indeed, sir."
"They must be over here."
"It would seem so, sir."
"Awkward, what?"


And so, 150 words, the author here has let us know, well, the entire story that is to come, in a voice that came through as his, and his alone in English literature, in a short opening sentence, or it not, certainly by the bit about a banjo.

 

[MattScho]

Maybe people should define why they consider the piece they have posted as having "VOICE", that way we can understand better.

I think by voice here we mean a writing style that immediately leaps out as the authors, and not a generic, even if professionally, done work. As with a singer's voice, we're not talking about their ability to pull off a piece, but how that piece seems to be their's and their's alone. It's literally reading a piece and sensing that "Je ne c'est quoi"

 

[Jan L]

Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley:

Tom glanced behind him and saw the man coming out of the Green Cage, heading his way. Tom walked faster. There was no doubt the man was after him. Tom had noticed him five minutes ago, eyeing him carefully from a table, as if he weren't quite sure, but almost. He had looked sure enough for Tom to down his drink in a hurry, pay and get out.

At the corner Tom leaned forward and trotted across Fifth Avenue. There was Raoul's. Should he take a chance and go in for another drink? Tempt fate and all that? Or should he beat it over to Park Avenue and try losing him in a few dark doorways? He went into Raoul's.

Automatically, as he strolled to an empty space at the bar, he looked around to see if there was anyone he knew. There was the big man with red hair, whose name he always forgot, sitting at a table with a blonde girl. The red-haired man waved a hand, and Tom's hand went up limply in response. He slid one leg over a stool and faced the door challengingly, yet with a flagrant casualness.

'Gin and tonic, please,' he said to the barman.

Was this the kind of man they would send after him? Was he, wasn't he, was he? He didn't look like a policeman or a detective at all. He looked like a businessman, somebody's father, well-dressed, well-fed, greying at the temples an air of uncertainty about him. Was that the kind they sent on a job like this, maybe to start chatting with you in a bar, and then bang! -- the hand on the shoulder, the other hand displaying a policeman's badge. Torn Ripley, you're under arrest. Tom watched the door.

Here he came. The man looked around, saw him and immediately looked away. He removed his straw hat, and took a place around the curve of the bar.

 

[MattScho]

My second offering, and I find it interesting that when I read this my mind immediately went to two pieces of humor:

On Wednesday night it had rained very heavily, the lane was wet and muddy, but the Thursday morning sun was bright and clear as it shone on Arthur Dent's house for what was to be the last time.

It hadn't properly registered yet with Arthur that the counsel wanted to knock it down and build a bypass, instead.

At eight o'clock on Thursday morning Arthur didn't feel very good. He work up blearily, got up, wandered blearily round his room, opened a window, saw a bulldozer, found his slippers, and stomped off to the bathroom to wash.

Opps, forgot to tag it: D. Adams, Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, though probably no tag was needed.

 

[Claire G]

I’m midway through preparing the next major Litopia seminar, and it’s the most challenging – and probably the most important – topic I’ve ever addressed.

And I really need your help.

“The Writer’s Voice” is a cornerstone subject. Yet very widely misunderstood. The most common confusion (and I’ve found this on a great many writing advice websites) is that “voice = style”. It doesn’t.

What I’d like from you, please, are specimens of what you consider to be outstanding examples of the writer’s voice in action.

No more than 500 words or so. With attribution and links (e.g. Amazon) if possible.

How to do this?

Well, I suggest you start by reflecting on those writers who come to mind when you think about authors who have touched your life in some way. The books you may have first encountered years, or even decades, ago and which still stay with you.

The author’s voice that still speaks clearly and directly to you. Person to person communication; across the gulf of years, continents, race, class or gender.

Then narrow it down by choosing a few hundred words that seem, to you, to typify how that author speaks to you… and post below.

Thank you

You better not never tell nobody but God. It’d kill your mammy.

DEAR GOD,

I am fourteen years old. I am I have always been a good girl. Maybe you can give me a sign letting me know what is
happening to me.

Last spring after little Lucious come I heard them fussing. He was pulling on her arm. She say It too soon, Fonso, I ain’t
well. Finally he leave her alone. A week go by, he pulling on her arm again. She say Naw, I ain’t gonna. Can’t you see I’m
already half dead, an all of these children.

She went to visit her sister doctor over Macon. Left me to see after the others. He never had a kine word to say to me.
Just say You gonna do what your mammy wouldn’t. First he put his thing up gainst my hip and sort of wiggle it around.
Then he grab hold my titties. Then he push his thing inside my pussy. When that hurt, I cry. He start to choke me, saying
You better shut up and git used to it.
But I don’t never git used to it. And now I feels sick every time I be the one to cook. My mama she fuss at me an look at
me. She happy, cause he good to her now. But too sick to last long.

The Color Purple - Alice Walker

 

[AgentPete]

Maybe people should define why they consider the piece they have posted as having "VOICE", that way we can understand better.

Actually, I'd prefer not at this stage, please Just lots and lots of examples. There will be ample time to discuss further down the line...

 

[David McGuire]

I still can't believe that these are the first words of Frances Hardinge's first book:

‘But names are important!’ the nursemaid protested.
‘Yes,’ said Quillam Mye. ‘So is accuracy.’
‘What’s half an hour, though? No one will know she wasn’t born until after sunset. Just think, born on the day of Goodman Boniface, a child of the Sun. You could call her Aurora, or Solina, or Beamabeth. Lots of lovely names for a daughter of the Sun.’
‘That is true, but irrelevant. After dusk, that calendar day is sacred to Goodman Palpitattle, He Who Keeps Flies out of Jams and Butterchurns.’ Quillam Mye looked up from his desk and met the nursemaid’s gaze. ‘My child is a bluebottle,’ he said firmly.
The nursemaid’s name was Celery Dunnock. She was born on a day sacred to Cramflick, She Who Keeps the Vegetables of the Garden Crisp. Celery had every reason to feel strongly on the matter of names. Her eyes were pale, soft and moist, like skinned grapes, but at the moment they were stubborn, resolute grapes.
Quillam Mye had a most meticulous brain. His thoughts were laid out like the strands of a feather, and a single frond out of place he felt like a tear in his mind. His eyes were dark and vague, like smoked glass.
The twin grapes looked into the smoked glass and saw a mind full of nothing they could understand.
‘Call it Mosca and have done with it,’ Mye said. Mosca was rather an old-fashioned name for a fly-born, but better than Buzzletrice or Caddis. He returned his attention to the task of writing his treatise. It was a history of the times in which he, and now his infant daughter, lived. It was entitled ‘The Shattered Realm: A Full and Clear Account of Our Kingdom of Rags and Tatters’.
The door closed behind Celery, and Mye was dimly aware that the level of annoyance in the room had diminished. He was alone. But no, he was not alone.
From the wall a pair of eyes watched him. At the moment they were blue, but one of them already showed a peppery speckle which told Mye that one day they would be as black as his own.
The nursemaid had bound the baby in swaddling clothes as tight as an acorn in its cup, so that it could not learn to be wrigglesome. When the baby was nothing but a linen cocoon with a surprised little head peeking out, she had strapped it to a board to give it a nice straight back. The board was hung from a hook on the wall to keep it out of the way.
For the last month, for all the attention Mye had paid to it, the suspended baby might have been a picture hung upon the wall, albeit a picture whose eyes followed one around the room rather more convincingly than one might like. Now, however, it had a Name, and Names were important.
She had a name.

(From Fly By Night)

I'm lucky enough to know Frances from university. The thing I love most about her writing voice is that it's exactly the same as talking to her. She sounds exactly like this in real life.

 

[Emily]

From Fly By Night)

I'm lucky enough to know Frances from university. The thing I love most about her writing voice is that it's exactly the same as talking to her. She sounds exactly like this in real life.

She sounds like an extraordinary character

 

[Eva Ulian]

There will be ample time to discuss further down the line...

I do hope so Pete, because up to now, as far as I am aware, no-one has ever explained what voice is. The closest offering is "I know it when I see it". To me that is not enough. I'd like the explanation to go a step further, if that is at all possible.

 

[Rich.]

John le Carré, A Legacy of Spies, end of chapter 13, [Amazon link].


*Spoiler Alert! This is from near the end of the book!*


[Retired spy Peter Guillam meets his old and extremely aged mentor, George Smiley.]

An ancient coaching inn close to the cathedral. Hunting trophies on black panelling. The place has been here for ever, or it was bombed flat and reassembled with the help of old prints. Today’s house speciality is jugged venison. George recommends it, and a Baden wine to match. Yes, I still live in France, George. He is pleased with me. Has he made his home in Freiburg? I ask. He hesitates. Temporarily, yes, Peter, he has. How temporary remained to be seen. Then, as if the thought has only now come to him, though I suspect it has been between us all this while:

‘I believe you came to accuse me of something, Peter. Am I right?’ And while it is my turn to hesitate: ‘Was it for the things we did, would you say? Or why we did them at all?’ he enquired in the kindliest of tones. ‘Why did I do them, which is more to the point. You were a loyal foot soldier. It wasn’t your job to ask why the sun rose every morning.’

I might have questioned this, but I feared to interrupt the flow.

‘For world peace, whatever that is? Yes, yes, of course. There will be no war, but in the struggle for peace not a stone will be left standing, as our Russian friends used to say.’ He fell quiet, only to rally more vigorously: ‘Or was it all in the great name of capitalism? God forbid. Christendom? God forbid again.’

A sip of wine, a smile of puzzlement, directed not at me, but at himself.

‘So was it all for England, then?’ he resumed. ‘There was a time, of course there was. But whose England? Which England? England all alone, a citizen of nowhere? I’m a European, Peter. If I had a mission – if I was ever aware of one beyond our business with the enemy, it was to Europe. If I was heartless, I was heartless for Europe. If I had an unattainable ideal, it was of leading Europe out of her darkness towards a new age of reason. I have it still.’

A silence, deeper, longer than any I remembered, even from the worst times. The fluid contours of the face frozen, the brow tipped forward, shadowy eyelids lowered. A forefinger rises absently to the bridge of his spectacles, checking that they are still in place. Until, with a shake of the head as if to rid it of a bad dream, he smiled.

‘Forgive me, Peter. I am pontificating. We have a ten-minute walk to the station. You will allow me to escort you?’

 

[Katie-Ellen]

“Happiness we can only find in ourselves, it is a waste of time to seek for it from others, few have any to spare. Sorrow we have to bear alone as best we can, it is not fair to try to shift it on others, be they men or women. We have to fight our own battles and strike as hard as we can, born fighters as we are.”


― Axel Munthe, The Story of San Michele

 

[Katie-Ellen]

“It is wise to conceal the past even if there is nothing to conceal. A man’s power is in the half-light, in the half-seen movements of his hand and the unguessed-at expression of his face. It is the absence of facts that frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires.”


― Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall

 

[Katie-Ellen]

“She discovers that it is possible to cry all day and all night. That there are many different ways to cry: the sudden outpouring of tears, the deep, racking sobs, the soundless and endless leaking of water from the eyes. That sore skin around the eyes may be treated with oil infused with a tincture of eyebright and chamomile. That it is possible to comfort your daughters with assurances about places in Heaven and eternal joy and how they may all be reunited after death and how he will be waiting for them, while not believing any of it. That people don’t always know what to say to a woman whose child has died. That some will cross the street to avoid her merely because of this. That people not considered to be good friends will come, without warning, to the fore, will leave bread and cakes on your sill, will say a kind and apt word to you after church, will ruffle Judith’s hair and pinch her wan cheek.”


― Maggie O'Farrell, Hamnet

 

[Katie-Ellen]

“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there

....If my twelve-year-old self, of whom I had grown rather fond, thinking about him, were to reproach me: 'Why have you grown up such a dull dog, when I gave you such a good start? Why have you spent your time in dusty libraries, cataloguing other people's books instead of writing your own? What had become of the Ram, the Bull and the Lion, the example I gave you to emulate? Where above all is the Virgin, with her shining face and curling tresses, whom I entrusted to you'- what should I say?

I should have an answer ready. 'Well, it was you who let me down, and I will tell you how. You flew too near to the sun, and you were scorched. This cindery creature is what you made me.'

To which he might reply: 'But you have had half a century to get over it! Half a century, half the twentieth century, that glorious epoch, that golden age that I bequeathed to you!'

'Has the twentieth century,' I should ask, 'done so much better than I have? When you leave this room, which I admit is dull and cheerless, and take the last bus to your home in the past, if you haven't missed it - ask yourself whether you found everything so radiant as you imagined it. Ask yourself whether it has fulfilled your hopes. You were vanquished, Colston, you were vanquished, and so was your century, your precious century that you hoped so much of.”


― L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between

 

[James Charles]

Wow. There are so many great examples here so I'll not add any. But I came across this definition:

A writer's voice is the way his or her personality comes through on the page, via everything from word choice and sentence structure to tone and punctuation.

 

[Hannah F]

The girl does not move, does not fidget in her seat. She stays perfectly still with her hands folded on her lap. Her gaze is fixed downward, focussed on her boots that do not quite touch the floor. There is a small scuff on one toe, but the laces are knotted in perfect bows.
The sealed envelope hangs from the second topmost button of her coat, until Prospero arrives.
She hears him before the door opens, his footsteps heavy and echoing in the hall, unlike the measured pace of the manager who has come and gone several times, quiet as a cat.

The NIght Circus by Erin Morgenstern (urban fantasy, publ 2011, Vintage Books)

Amazon product ASIN 0099554798

 

[ChandlerJules]

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.


The Haunting of Hill House — Shirley Jackson This one is so perfectly shuddersome, so ominously creepy, so indubitably Jackson's voice.

 

[Hannah F]

When I was eighteen, my father fell off a cliff. It was a stupid way to die. There was a good moon. There was no wind. There was no excuse. He was pissing into the chine at Brock Tor on his way home from the pub and fell headlong drunk into the spring tide with his flies open.
I spemt that night on the beach with Corwin, watching the moon silver the sea, and later an image lodged in my mind of our father in slow descent, turnung within a glittering arc of his own urine. When I confided this to Corwin, he was angrier than I had ever seen him. I had fixed the image, and now he must share it with me, as if it were a memory. He hit me, which was fair, I thought - a back-hand swipe across the mouth that drew blood.

The House at the Edge of the World by Julia Rochester (commercial fiction, publ. 2015, Viking)
Amazon product ASIN 0241181984

 

[Serra K]

The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett

The small boys came early to the hanging.

It was still dark when the first three or four of them sidled out of the hovels, quiet as cats in their felt boots. A thin layer of fresh snow covered the little town like a new coat of paint, and there’s were the first footprints to blemish its perfect surface. They picked their way through the huddled wooden huts and along the streets of frozen mud to the silent market-place, where the gallows stood waiting.

The boys despised everything their elders valued. They scorned beauty and mocked goodness. They would hoot with laughter at the sight of a cripple, and if they saw a wounded animal they would stone it to death. They boasted of injuries and wore their scars with pride, and they reserved their special admiration for mutilation: a boy with a finger missing could be their king. They loved violence; they would run miles to see bloodshed; and they never missed a hanging.

One of the boys piddled on the base of the scaffold. Another mounted the steps, put his thumbs to his throat and slumped, twisting his face in a grisly parody of strangulation; the others whooped in admiration, and two dogs came running into the market-place, barking. A very young boy recklessly began to eat an apple, and one of the older ones punched his nose and took his apple. The young boy relieved his feelings by throwing a sharp stone at the dog, sending the animal howling home. Then there was nothing else to do, so they all squatted on the dry pavement in the porch of the big church, waiting for something to happen.

The The Pillars of the Earth : Follett, Ken: Amazon.com.au: Books