I'm currently reading a book, called
Ireland, and have been advised, that there is a plot twist near the end. "Ooh, I didn't see that twist coming." was the warning.
Which may mean that no twist was expected,
or there was a twist expected, just not the one that was delivered.
So, as I'm reading, naturally, I'm keeping my eyes peeled for clues. Passages that may foreshadow later events, stand-alone sentences describing glances between major characters that are never acknowledged or explained. The abscence of exposition about a seeming innocuous point. "Aha, I think, the significance of that look will by the BIG REVEAL," or, "In a twist, that innocent explanation will actually be insidious and demented!"
I doubt I'll be surprised, is what I'm saying.
Which is ok, if it's done well I can still appreciate the architecture of the reveal, even if it substance has already been realized.
It occurred to me, though, that there could conceivably be a twist I don't suspect. Something that hasn't been hinted at ever, not once, in the book. That the author purposefully left meaningless clues, totally unrelated, hinting at a banal, ordinary, fully expectable twist, and then, instead of delivering, say, a curveball, delivers a freshly baked loaf of bread THAT IS ALSO A RADIOACTIVE ALIEN SUPERCOMPUTER!
You'd look pretty stupid standing there in the batter's box then, wouldn't you?
(That was rhetorical. You would look pretty stupid. It's a radioactive supercomputer from some distant planet. You thought it was going to be a baseball.)
There's no secondary reveal, either. No explanation. None of this "Oh, by the way, remember in the first inning when you got that hit I and the announcer said it was a "moon shot" that was an allusion to your former career as an astronaut, and the chapter about your best bud, the catcher, who rooms with you on the road, being an illegal immigrant from Cuba, that actually was symbolic, because he's actually an
extra-terrestrial and instead of Cuba, he's from
Alpha-Centauri - but he's still a heck of a catcher."
None of that. It's just you, an ordinary baseball player, and then an alien supercomputer that you could, if you chose, turn into a grilled cheese sandwich.
Or, imagine an Agatha Christie mystery (this is a particularly good illustration of my point, since AC is notorious for leaving out the necessary clues that figure into her big reveal, hated, by some, for cheating the readers) set on a train, where somebody dies, and all the passengers, who have never seen each other before, ever, and no one has any motive, and the lone detective is still plugging away, and then, at the crucial moment, he reveals, not that, by the way, all the other passengers had all starred in the same soap opera together back in the day, then served in the same military unit as spies, then settled down in the south of England and opened a bed and breakfast all together, and they in fact
do have a motive, and you'd have known that and figured out the whole thing if only the history lesson had taken place in the prologue and not the penultimate chapter, no,
instead, the lone detective reveals that the train is actually, ON THE MOON! And Moon Men storm the train and devour everyone on board the end.
How's
that for a twist!?
Anyway, I'm now hoping for something like that. A twist so crazy it's almost as if the last two chapters of the book were replaced, accidentally, in the printing process with the last two chapters of some crazy science-fiction story set in the Star Wars universe, or where time-travel is possible. And hey, while you spent two-hundred pages learning about Irish history through the eyes of this young Dublin school child and his charming father, a history professor, often illustrated by small glimpses into early 20th century life, and clever observations about the Irish geography, you learn in the final chapter that the boy and his father ARE ACTUALLY THE SAME PERSON SEPARATED BY THIRTY YEARS As THE RESULT OF A FREAK TIME MACHINE EXPERIMENT AND WHEN THE BOY REACHES HIS THIRTEENTH BIRTHDAY THEY BOTH DIE INSTANTANEOUSLY!
Nothing at all to do with Irish history. What a twist!
-t
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