Click for a better jpeg.In 1986, I read William Sloane's THE CRAFT OF WRITING, a small book that made a big change in how I thought about fiction. My own stories improved substantially afterwards, and for this reason, I owe a debt to William Sloane that I could never repay.
For this reason, I wanted to love THE EDGE OF RUNNING WATER. I wanted to find echoes and reflections of the good advice he had offered in THE CRAFT OF WRITING. I wanted to find a book that I could praise.
What I found, instead, was a tediously padded waste of time that made me want to bash my head against the wall.
This book begins with a hint of cosmic horror:
"A year ago it would have seemed to me ridiculous to assume that there are some facts it is better not to know, and even today I do not believe in the bliss of ignorance or the folly of knowledge. But this one thing is best left untouched. It rips the fabric of human existence from throat to hem and leaves us naked to a wind as cold as the space between the stars."
Yet the book also hints right away that it will find no reason to tell its tale with urgency or energy. The protagonist arrives by train. He takes a long taxi trip to a distant house. He talks at length with one person. He talks at length with a second person. He talks at length with a third. Then he takes a swim. Then he has lunch. Then he talks at length again, and again, and again.
Every now and then, Sloane reveals a skill with prose:
"I watched the flash and lift of her arm as it came out of the water, and the arc of ripples that pushed along in front of her bathing cap. The sun caught the wet rubber and made a point of fire on it. I found myself matching my strokes to hers, so that we were swimming beside each other in the same rhythm, sliding through the water like parts of a single entity. The patch of fire on her cap held my eyes until I was half hypnotized without knowing it, and only the grating of my fingers on the beach sand snapped the spell.
"We stood up then and looked at each other. Drops of water fell from her body like fragments of light, and for an instant it seemed to me that there had been nothing whatever prior to this moment, that we had swum up out of some infinite reservoir of being until we stranded on the shore of the world. It is impossible to describe such an experience in the vocabulary of psychology, or any other, for that matter. It simply was. We stood there looking at each other, half smiling, not conscious of things but of everything fused into one universal sensation which vibrated in me to the tune of our swimming."
But for the most part, he relies on endless passages of dialogue, on delaying tactics of introspection. The protagonist never does anything until he has thought and thought and thought about the appropriate actions.
"It should have occurred to me that, even in despair, Julian would be a hard man to fool and that Mrs. Walters must have shown him evidence of something more important than occasional flashes of telepathy. If I had thought about that for a while, tried to imagine what she had been able to do which would interest him, I might have caught a glimpse of what was likely to happen. Instead, the problem presented itself to me in a completely irrelevant light -- the question of what I ought to do about Julian.
"The answer was certainly not obvious. I mulled it over in my mind for a good while, but in the end came back to the only real idea I had, which was to wait a while, see more plainly what was going on, and try to persuade Julian to let me examine his work. Once I reached that point I counted on being able to see the flaw in it -- the reason why it wouldn't do what he claimed. I never doubted that such a flaw existed. Perhaps I might be able to break him of this delusion at once, but if not, the entering wedge would have been driven. He had suggested that he'd achieved some partial success. (How partial they both were, I thought -- Julian with his invention, Mrs. Walters with her contact in the 'other' world.) Very well, then. I would persuade Julian to demonstrate to me how far he had got. He would have to talk to me as one scientist to another. That in itself would help. He would be reminded of his own innate standards and see that he was being false to them.
"The plan was naïve, of course. I see that now. But it might have worked. Even now I can't say positively that it wouldn't have done what I hoped. But there was never an opportunity to test it. And when Julian unwittingly gave us a demonstration what he had accomplished, I did not know it for what it was."
Not since my last broken attempt to read something by Stephen King have I suffered through a book so tediously determined to pad things out, to repeat information needlessly, to delay gratification, to dispel urgency, and to break any mood of tension with pointless digressions. As the book neared its climax, I hoped that its pacing and focus would improve, but no such luck.
Endless introspection!
"In the end I had to give up the effort to discover what I thought was wrong. There were too many possibilities and nothing probable. The accident, when I thought about it, did not seem to explain the feeling wholly, though I admitted to myself that when I had seen Mrs. Marcy lying in that unnatural way at the foot of the stairs I had thought for one instant, 'Now it's happened.' But that was obviously meaningless. As it turned out, nothing had happened. And equally, if the accident had been important in some way, I could not see why or to whom -- except Mrs. Marcy -- it was important. What the 'it' was that had happened I did not understand, though I assigned it to the feeling of imminence which had come over me earlier in the afternoon. That, in turn, was unquestionably caused by the approach of the thunderstorm. Still, the lightning and thunder, and most of the rain, had long ago swept away to the northeast and it seemed to me that the air was as charged with suspense as ever. Suspense, I reminded myself, is a purely subjective matter. There was no way of telling whether the way I felt had any external foundation or not."
Endless irrelevance!
"The rain was still falling, but not in gusts and torrents. It looked as though it might stop in half an hour or so, but it was still coming down fast enough to make me sprint for the battered Ford sedan in which Anne was sitting. Maine mud and dust were plastered all over it, but the motor sounded smooth under the hood. Even before my door was closed Anne was wrenching the car around and stepping it up from gear to gear. As we straightened out into the road the machine slewed sickeningly and I perceived that this was going to be quite a ride. The storm had soaked the loose top dirt of the track and turned it into a slimy lubricant between our wheels and the underlying hardpan. We skidded at every rut.
"'How about chains?'
"Anne didn't take her eyes off the road, but she grinned. 'Haven’t any, Dick. Don't worry.' We struck a pothole. When the car was back on an even keel she said, 'Do you think we ought to stop off at Marcy's anyhow? It'll be a mile, and ten minutes out of our way if the phone isn’t working.'
"'No,' I answered. 'I guess Mrs. Walters is right about that. We won't save much time even if the phone is working and it seems to me like a poor gamble.'
"'Probably.' She avoided a crater full of brown water and wrestled the car back across the slimy surface of the road. 'Seth Marcy's nobody's pet, anyhow. I've only seen him a couple or times, but he's the kind of man who doesn't open his mouth unless he has something unpleasant to say. I feel sorry for Elora.'
"'We'll forget him, then, till we get a doctor. After that we can go to his house and tell him.'
"We went on, not exactly racing but making incredible speed for the condition of the road. Anne handled the car with a magnificent blend of daring and judgment; I thought we weren't going to make the bridge at the turn by the creek, but we got across it by a hair, and when we hit the road along the far bank of the bay the going was better. Even with the chances Anne took, I did not feel nervous about her driving. There was competence in the way her hands were resting on the wheel, in the way she sat behind it, alert but not tense. It was, indeed, strangely pleasant, that ride. We were in a private world of our own, with rain on our roof and streaking down the windows, shutting us in together. I liked it. For a mile or so I forgot our errand, forgot the bleak house behind us, and thought of nothing except that this fortuitous intimacy was different from anything that had ever happened to me before.
"After twenty minutes or perhaps a little longer, the unlovely center of Barsham Harbor was flashing past our windows. I have often wished since that I had looked at my watch more frequently that day, but it was still in the side pocket of my coat, where I had put it when we went swimming, and I remembered it only as we pulled into town. It was ten minutes after four then and the light was already beginning to fade, thanks to the clouds and the rain.
"Our luck seemed to be out from the moment we hit the town. There were, it appeared, three doctors in Barsham Harbor. Dr. Peters was out on a call. Dr. Solomon, whom we tried next, had gone to Bath and was not expected back for several hours. The third and last was Dr. Rambouillet. His house was beyond the Catholic church on the other side of the railroad tracks and his small shingle looked inauspiciously new. But he was at home.
"'Dr. Peters is the Marcy family doctor,' he said to us when we told him our errand. 'I think you'd better get him. The people here...' he shrugged with the Latinity of the French Canadian.
"'He's out on a call,' I said. 'This is an emergency.'
"With no more demur he picked up his bag and got into the car. 'All right, but don't say I didn't warn you.' The teeth under his narrow black mustache were startling when he smiled. He couldn't have been over twenty-eight. 'I'll do what I can,' he declared, 'and then turn the case over to Dr. Peters. You see,' and he smiled again disarmingly, 'the people of Barsham Harbor either do want a French Canadian doctor or they don't. We keep to our own sides of the fence. Or perhaps I ought to say, of the tracks. You understand?'
"'Yes,' I said, 'and sympathize... What was your school, Doctor?'
"'McGill. And the ink is quite dry on the diploma.'
"I laughed. Anne was too busy driving to pay much attention to what we were saying. The day was drawing in and she switched on the lights when we turned right at the bridge. I watched the road slither and dance under our wheels. The thought went through my head that it was impossible I had got off the State of Maine express only that morning. This day had been going on for half a lifetime already. I was tired and sleepy. The thing to do would be to get to bed as soon after supper as was decently possible."
I quote at length to give you some idea of just how painfully dull this book turned out to be.
As for the concept behind the story: so what? Who cares? The idea had potential, but Sloane was too determined to keep it out of sight and at arm's length, too hell-bent on padding his idea with pounds of irrelevancy, until I wanted nothing more than for the book to die.
Only one thing forced me to read to the end: my debt to William Sloane for THE CRAFT OF WRITING. Anyone else would have driven me out of this book within twenty pages.
Oddly enough, in 1941, THE EDGE OF RUNNING WATER was filmed. Like the book that inspired it, THE DEVIL COMMANDS is dull, with an abrupt and unremarkable ending, but unlike the book, it shows hints of competence. The acting is not bad. The cinematography and lighting are often atmospheric, with darkness and shadows that could easily compare with Hollywood "noir" films from later that decade.
Yet on the whole, the film is remembered for two good reasons: for the performance of Boris Karloff, who moves convincingly from likeable scientific genius to sullen, broken widower, and for the machine that he builds in a secret laboratory.
This machine appears in the book, but the film adds a few macabre details that take it far beyond Sloane's conception. It becomes bizarre enough, and unsettling enough, to stick in the mind long after the film has ended. I will most likely never watch the film again from start to finish, but I will certainly go back to that eerie machine.
Can I recommend the book? No. Can I recommend the film? With certain reservations, yes. At the very least, the film will chew up less of your time, and cause less cranial damage to your walls.
