After the chats over @Flaviosky's crit piece in present tense, I thought I'd post up my own, as using the present tense seems to be (in some instances) contentious, or at least off-putting to some readers. @Stuart Suffel posted a link to a nice article outlining the problems with present tense, but one of the points (that it puts the focus on the omniscient "narrator" rather than the events) made me think. I am trying to do just that in (part of) my WIP, but I don't want to do this to the detriment of the actual comings-and-goings of the plotlines. This section is an opening, of sorts. Not all of the WIP is in present tense - some is in close 3rd past.
~
London fog is like a nightshift worker – it goes to bed in the morning. It fashions pillows from itself before settling upon the miasmic growths of stone, soot, and sweat that accompanies the rising of the Sun. The fog is thick and lazy, like a lung filled with the black clouds that emanate from the tobacco products being unloaded by Caribbean tars in the web of spinnakers at St. Katherine’s Docks. The fog settles over these swarthy men, their muscles already slick with sweat at this early March hour. With rolling creole brogues they josh and banter with their rough white-skinned counterparts, the worshipful watermen and lightermen of London, who swear and grunt unintelligible communicados even as they balance crooked black cigarillos between partially-tothed smiles. Bill Rogers, all six feet and three inches of him, stands upon his barge resting his hamlike forearms upon his punt. With eyes keened to the quick he watches over his domain like an ancient sentinel warrior, preserved in aspic from the days of Odysseus. Later this day, after depositing the tobacco to the rollers in Deptford Creek to be manufactured into cigarettes, he’ll return home to open his Limehouse pub, The Bricklayers Arms, to receive the lunchtime trade. This evening he may engage in a bareknuckle boxing match to raise funds for the local destitute and dispossessed, and will even hand out soup to those same souls as dusk descends. Rogers’s routine of brawn and heart will define not just today but tomorrow and most other days hence.
The March sun bears sufficient sinew to gently burn away the chilly fog as we creep northwards a few hundred yards to Cable Street, where Victor Brychta, the poorly-compensated correspondent for the se’nnightly socialist newspaper Worker! is taking breakfast at one of the coffee houses. He views his surroundings of the common man with a mixture of romantic admiration and deeply-felt disgust. Atrociously rancid butter sits on slices of toast (which the waitress calls gravestones), and his fellow diners - dockers, carmen, navvies, cleaners and the like - sit with unwashed sleeves rolled up the grimy elbow. However, he has to concede, the tea is irrefutably good. He wonders with a degree of profundity at the constitution of the poor that they can not only subsist on such worrisome fare, but oftimes thrive. It passes through his mind that despite their inevitable distaste, the wealthy would be able to subsist on such fare as well - and that maybe they ought to. At the dilatory pace in which Brychta consumes his appalling breakfast it will not do for us to linger, and so we should relent to the keen pull of the City. A quick swoop away from the rising sun and we can sneak unseen into the tightly-woven courtyards behind Fleet Street’s northern strip. Tucked away with inconspicuous diffidence in an overgrown corner of Johnson Court we can see the jumbled-up bookshop Strange Books. Through the window is Leviathan Strangeways, the gnomic owner of that emporium with its assortment of literary curios and artefacts. Even at this hour Leviathan is busy, tying up a collection of pamphlets in brown paper and string with anxious fastidiousness, occasionally glancing though cataract windows lest anyone should see him. He does not know whether his paranoia is founded on solid reason or not; he has not been caught yet, but the folks with which he consorts are becoming ever more brazen, and their use of his basement more frequent. Moreover, some of the books he currently handles are not for general consumption; these are for the special projects for the eyes of very select folks, when the time is right. His face may be partially obscured by his aggressively tumescent Nietzschean moustache and jam-jar spectacles, but we can still detect the beads of sweat collecting on his forehead!
From here our eyes can scuttle at haste towards the decadent grandiloquence of the Royal Parks, the pale dawn sun irrigating their stale odour of empyreal pageantry with lively colour. It is in this vicinity one can witness a near-catatonic Richard Essex being hauled with scant ceremony down the stairs of a crumbling St.James townhouse by two apes costumed in greatcoats. Upon their opening of the front door, he finds himself hurled into the gutter and narrowly avoided by a slaloming hamsom cab, whose driver elicits some finely chosen Saxon epithets to the fallen gentleman. It is doubtful Essex even acknowledges the curses, as his head swoons violently from the expensive liquor he has imbibed and the blows to the face he has received from the gammon-jowled enforcers who have evicted him. They utter something about paying debts, but Essex can only groan in response, and he momentarily experiences a vision of his father in the road, standing erect and impassive, berating him for his negligent spendthriftery. Essex will have retribution of more than one kind to deal with, but first he must nurse his faculties back to some semblance of clarity. For his part, Richard Essex’s father, Westleigh Lord Essex, is not standing in the middle of the road. Indeed, he is not standing at all but seated at a breakfast meeting at the Marylebone house of Ethel Thackeray, the UK manager of his spice business in India. It is a good job that he is seated as well, for his countenance is ravaged and ashen; Ethel has just informed him that his entire shipment of spicy drugs being transported from India is lost. The SS Maliri has been sunk in Hawke’s Bay, having barely made it out of Karachi harbour before thunderstorms arrived like cloud-borne djinns and sundered it into the brine. Two hundred souls lost, British and Indians alike, its goods sunk, his investments in tatters, and Essex can barely even look at his bacon and eggs without forcing down the need to blench.
~
London fog is like a nightshift worker – it goes to bed in the morning. It fashions pillows from itself before settling upon the miasmic growths of stone, soot, and sweat that accompanies the rising of the Sun. The fog is thick and lazy, like a lung filled with the black clouds that emanate from the tobacco products being unloaded by Caribbean tars in the web of spinnakers at St. Katherine’s Docks. The fog settles over these swarthy men, their muscles already slick with sweat at this early March hour. With rolling creole brogues they josh and banter with their rough white-skinned counterparts, the worshipful watermen and lightermen of London, who swear and grunt unintelligible communicados even as they balance crooked black cigarillos between partially-tothed smiles. Bill Rogers, all six feet and three inches of him, stands upon his barge resting his hamlike forearms upon his punt. With eyes keened to the quick he watches over his domain like an ancient sentinel warrior, preserved in aspic from the days of Odysseus. Later this day, after depositing the tobacco to the rollers in Deptford Creek to be manufactured into cigarettes, he’ll return home to open his Limehouse pub, The Bricklayers Arms, to receive the lunchtime trade. This evening he may engage in a bareknuckle boxing match to raise funds for the local destitute and dispossessed, and will even hand out soup to those same souls as dusk descends. Rogers’s routine of brawn and heart will define not just today but tomorrow and most other days hence.
The March sun bears sufficient sinew to gently burn away the chilly fog as we creep northwards a few hundred yards to Cable Street, where Victor Brychta, the poorly-compensated correspondent for the se’nnightly socialist newspaper Worker! is taking breakfast at one of the coffee houses. He views his surroundings of the common man with a mixture of romantic admiration and deeply-felt disgust. Atrociously rancid butter sits on slices of toast (which the waitress calls gravestones), and his fellow diners - dockers, carmen, navvies, cleaners and the like - sit with unwashed sleeves rolled up the grimy elbow. However, he has to concede, the tea is irrefutably good. He wonders with a degree of profundity at the constitution of the poor that they can not only subsist on such worrisome fare, but oftimes thrive. It passes through his mind that despite their inevitable distaste, the wealthy would be able to subsist on such fare as well - and that maybe they ought to. At the dilatory pace in which Brychta consumes his appalling breakfast it will not do for us to linger, and so we should relent to the keen pull of the City. A quick swoop away from the rising sun and we can sneak unseen into the tightly-woven courtyards behind Fleet Street’s northern strip. Tucked away with inconspicuous diffidence in an overgrown corner of Johnson Court we can see the jumbled-up bookshop Strange Books. Through the window is Leviathan Strangeways, the gnomic owner of that emporium with its assortment of literary curios and artefacts. Even at this hour Leviathan is busy, tying up a collection of pamphlets in brown paper and string with anxious fastidiousness, occasionally glancing though cataract windows lest anyone should see him. He does not know whether his paranoia is founded on solid reason or not; he has not been caught yet, but the folks with which he consorts are becoming ever more brazen, and their use of his basement more frequent. Moreover, some of the books he currently handles are not for general consumption; these are for the special projects for the eyes of very select folks, when the time is right. His face may be partially obscured by his aggressively tumescent Nietzschean moustache and jam-jar spectacles, but we can still detect the beads of sweat collecting on his forehead!
From here our eyes can scuttle at haste towards the decadent grandiloquence of the Royal Parks, the pale dawn sun irrigating their stale odour of empyreal pageantry with lively colour. It is in this vicinity one can witness a near-catatonic Richard Essex being hauled with scant ceremony down the stairs of a crumbling St.James townhouse by two apes costumed in greatcoats. Upon their opening of the front door, he finds himself hurled into the gutter and narrowly avoided by a slaloming hamsom cab, whose driver elicits some finely chosen Saxon epithets to the fallen gentleman. It is doubtful Essex even acknowledges the curses, as his head swoons violently from the expensive liquor he has imbibed and the blows to the face he has received from the gammon-jowled enforcers who have evicted him. They utter something about paying debts, but Essex can only groan in response, and he momentarily experiences a vision of his father in the road, standing erect and impassive, berating him for his negligent spendthriftery. Essex will have retribution of more than one kind to deal with, but first he must nurse his faculties back to some semblance of clarity. For his part, Richard Essex’s father, Westleigh Lord Essex, is not standing in the middle of the road. Indeed, he is not standing at all but seated at a breakfast meeting at the Marylebone house of Ethel Thackeray, the UK manager of his spice business in India. It is a good job that he is seated as well, for his countenance is ravaged and ashen; Ethel has just informed him that his entire shipment of spicy drugs being transported from India is lost. The SS Maliri has been sunk in Hawke’s Bay, having barely made it out of Karachi harbour before thunderstorms arrived like cloud-borne djinns and sundered it into the brine. Two hundred souls lost, British and Indians alike, its goods sunk, his investments in tatters, and Essex can barely even look at his bacon and eggs without forcing down the need to blench.
