Word: plotting
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Unfortunately, other criteria for engaging a reader's attention also exist: plot, suspense, characterization, dialogue, effective prose. In all these areas, Harlot's Ghost runs into serious difficulties, sometimes intermittently, sometimes over the long haul. No one can deny Mailer's monumental ambition in this novel or his dedication to the hard, slogging work that writing an enormous narrative entails. What can be questioned is whether his fundamental premise -- a fictional history of a real Central Intelligence Agency -- was not misconceived from the beginning...
...AGAIN. Kenneth Branagh, Shakespearean phenom of the London stage, hatched an improbable hit from this no-star film noir. Branagh has fun ransacking Hitchcock's skeleton closet, and his wife Emma Thompson is ravishing as the doomed heroine, but there's not much here to prop up a preposterous plot...
...watching (and laughing at in all the right places) might be characterized as MTV drama. It is told in montage, in short riffs of scenes and crosscuts and simultaneous action instead of symphonic arcs of speechifying. Its characters are impeccably dressed, drop- dead cool and not very happy. The plot, like a music video, features casual nudity, simulated sex and arrestingly etched violence: a man soaked in blood from eye sockets to navel, a woman with a knife at her throat...
...chills, thrills and more sex than one would have thought possible in a few hundred pages. Ken Follett knows the correct formula for a plot-driven suspense novel, and in Night Over Water he inserts all the right elements of an enjoyable yarn. The resulting book is definitely no more than the sum of its parts, but one turns the pages fast enough. As with most of Follett's novels, satisfaction, though not superlative prose, is guaranteed...
Follett makes less convincing explanations for the coincidences which power the plot than, say, John Le Carre. But once he has contrived to get the characters on board the Clipper, the constricted space and contrasting personalities make for some delightful bonding scenes between the passengers...