Sequel Examples

Hello again from Sequel Country, where we’re beginning our journey by surveying the territory within view. Last week I scanned the forest of ‘what is a novel’ and this week I’m going to peer into the river of sequels trickling down the valley out of Sequel Country to join the mainstream. I hope that by thinking about some sequels that got published, we might learn something about how to go about writing one.

Probably the first sequels I got to know were those to Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons, simply because my dad had hung on to his own copies of them, wartime editions with plain covers. Children’s literature is full of sequels but these are particularly well written. The second book continues with the same characters and setting, but later books change the formula: the third is a fantasy set on the high seas, and the fourth, Winter Holiday, is told from the point of view of two newcomers who meet the original characters. Unlike the original children, who are all (perhaps implausibly) very much aligned in their needs and wants, the new brother and sister are different from each other: one wants to be a scientist and the other, a writer. Of course, I identified strongly with both, but it was also very interesting to meet the original characters through the fresh eyes of someone who doesn’t know them well. I’ve tried a bit of this while trying to write the sequel to my first novel, Parallel Lines, but so far haven’t made the magic work.

Speaking of magic, I previously mentioned The Lord of the Rings as being a single novel made of six books – but as some may have spotted, it is itself a sequel, coming as it does after The Hobbit. The sequel makes no attempt to reproduce the successful format of the earlier book, and is entirely its own story, while continuing the story of beloved characters Bilbo and Gandalf, though they give way to younger characters in the first chapter.

I also mentioned Mrs Dalloway, and that too is a sequel, kind of; Mr. and Mrs. Dalloway had a cameo in Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out as well as in several short stories. My Parallel Lines evolved in the same way: it started life as a short story of six chapters, focussing on the interesting time after school but before university, a pause full of possibilities. A year later, I was still thinking about the two main characters, and how their relationship might develop, so I just wrote a chapter 7 to see what would happen. It came very easily, and I could see all sorts of paths that they could take, so I started to see how the story could carry a whole novel.

For much the same reasons, Tales of the City is a novel that slowly accrued sequels until it became a nine-part series, but I consider them proper sequels because each one is self-contained and there isn’t an overarching structure that they play a part in. It’s close to my heart not just because I read the first instalments around the time I came out myself, but it also has many of the same goals as my own fiction writing, presenting likeable gay and bi characters in a feel-good but realistic way (though it’s a shame that only the female bi characters are presented as positive). The first two novels were pieced together (literally, I’ve read, with pieces of paper spread across a floor) from Armistead Maupin’s newspaper serial; and although this shows in the very short chapters and frequent punchlines, he had the sense to turn them into proper novels, with the kind of structure I discussed last week. For example the first novel ends with two important characters dying, both on Christmas Eve, bringing their stories to a definite close (and in cleverly contrasting ways). In each sequel, the returning characters are reintroduced, for the benefit of new readers starting with that book, though with a lighter and lighter touch each time, making the reader work a little harder. (There’s nothing wrong with that, readers like being able to figure things out, and pitching this right, not too easy or too hard, is part of the art of storytelling.)

In contrast, in Dance Dance Dance, Haruki Murakami’s sequel to A Wild Sheep Chase, Murakami makes no such concessions. The narrator never gets a name, and neither does the girlfriend he lost, and most of the first chapter is spent describing a dismal hotel they spent a week in four years earlier. Other characters often go unnamed too, or they are given cryptic names like J, Bookish and Sheep Professor. Murakami makes his readers work much harder. But while Dance Dance Dance continues the themes of loss and abandonment central to the first book, the pendulum swings the other way, and the narrator learns to have his own agency in his own story, being rewarded in the end with a girlfriend who has a name and doesn’t disappear into the dark. So the sequel complements the first novel beautifully, continuing the story in the same style but with an opposite emotional current, as it were.

wild sheep chase, or a metaphor for sequels?

I talked last week about each novel reinventing itself, and that’s very much the approach of David Lodge, a professor of English Lit whose novels often knowingly echo older styles of novel. For me, his funniest book is Changing Places, which has my second-favourite opening line of a novel ever: “High, high above the North Pole, on the first day of 1969, two professors of English Literature approached each other at a combined velocity of 1200 miles per hour.” As well as being hilarious, this book opened up my eyes to the possibility of what a novel can be. Some chapters are traditional close third person narrative, but there are chapters made up of letters and telegrams (echoing the epistolatory novel, as I now understand), and one takes the form of a screenplay.

Its two sequels, set in the same ‘world’ of the University of Rummidge, are interesting: Small World (which came a decade later) adds a new protagonist and many more minor characters, though the stories of the main characters Professors Swallow and Zapp are developed further, and in Nice Work (another half decade on) they are reduced to minor cameos, aging academics whose stories are largely over, moving the plot on for the new heroine rather than being given development of their own. This strikes me as a much more interesting progression (worthy of being called a trilogy) than the kind of sequence of novels that focuses on something else, in which time passes and characters’ lives progress, but with the focus on something else. Certain genres such as SF, historical novels and detective stories are often structured this way, but as sequels they seem often to be “more of the same” than real progression, though that could be bias due to my own preferences.

What makes all these examples good sequels? A common feature is that they all enable the reader who just picked up the book because they liked the cover or the blurb to easily enter the story. It sounds easy, but having tried it, it’s not trivial: you need enough information about what’s gone before to let the reader follow what’s going on, but not so much that it’s tedious for the returning reader. I will go into some of these sequels and others in a bit more depth to examine what I like about them later in the year, probably around June.

In the meantime, we’ve been looking around the borderlands of Sequel Country for a while now, and next week it will be time to look at the possible paths forward into unknown territory. See you then, I hope!