Fate’s Acquittal is a blog written by the fictional character Tom Evans. It has had daily postings for more than a year already and just ended this past weekend. Very recently I finally took the time to read the entire blog from start to finish. I was very entertained by the story and am very impressed by the talent of the author.

Plot Summary

On the surface, the plot of Fate’s Acquittal is deceptively simple. Tom Evans, a mild mannered barrister (To my American readers, The best comparison to a barrister would be a trial lawyer) on the road to the perfect upper-middle class life, gets dumped by his long time girl friend, Annabell Steele. In his desperation and depression he ends up turning to his free-spirited friend, Ed Donavon, for solace. Together they form a "plan" to have adventures inspired by the lyrics of songs that they hear. Each adventure brings either humor or drama and sometimes both.

On the surface, that is what is going on, but like any good piece of literature there is a lot more going on once you scratch away the surface. There is the constant back and forth of the absurdly conforming Tom against the equally absurd non-confirming Ed. Love triangles abound between the characters. Although an infrequent character, the relationship between Tom and his mother is also full of conflict.

An underlying theme of the story is the concept of "free will". What is the role of free will in a society that demands conformity? Is there such a thing as fate, and if so can it coexist with free will? Tom, as the main character, is constantly dealing with these questions. Sometimes consciously and sometimes unconsciously. Tom is on a constant character arc deciding between conformity and nonconformity.

Format

The story is presented as a standard blog fiction, that is, a single fictional character writing a blog. No multimedia, this is a text only blog. The story progresses in real time and the posting schedule is daily – including weekends! As far as interaction, at first the author interacts with commenters, however, as the story slowly progresses it is the character that responds to the blog’s commenters.

There is some limited use of graphic language sexual content. So while the majority of the writing is PG-13 there is an occasional R-rated scene. So this is not for children or adolescents.

Pros

The story and prose are both well written and make it a joy to read. The overall story line is tried and true. Someone recovering from a devastating breakup. The hook provides enough of a twist to make the story interesting – they do adventures inspired by song lyrics. However, if that’s all that was going on it wouldn’t be the gripping read that it is. There is a lot more going on. The conflict between the characters, as with most great reads, is what makes it a great story.

All the character’s have their flaws and insecurities that drives the tension to exciting conclusions. In spite of their friendship Ed and Tom have their tension. More than once, Ed’s craziness drives Tom to the breaking point. While Tom’s indecisiveness and natch for conformity irk Ed’s desire for adventure. The girls that come in and out of their lives all have their flaws even while the men fall heads over heals for them. The flaws always drive to a climax so great you can hardly wait for your browser to finish loading the next day’s entry.

The pacing is also perfect. The author is extremely good at slowly building up tension and then having everything explode in Tom’s face. Then right after a climax the author skillfully let’s the tension draw down, but still keeping some it unresolved. This is done by having shorter posts where not much happens. This is in contrast to the longer posts that are used when building towards a climax.

After the initial novelty of zany song inspired adventures wares on, you might think that the story would begins to drag. Not so. New twists abound as the story goes on. The story never "drags on". Just when you think it might, suddenly Tom has to deal with a blackmailer, a fraudster, and eventually, his own sanity.

As great as a story it is, it wouldn’t matter if it was near impossible to read the text of the site. Fortunately, that is not the case for this blog. The formatting of the site makes the text pretty easy to read: Black text on mostly white background. The paragraphs are broken up just like you would expect in a fiction book. New Dialogue is always it’s own paragraph. Also for your reading pleasure the paragraphs are double spaced.

The writer also takes some limited advantage of his publishing format. Not only is there the primary blog for you to follow, but many of the characters also have a facebook and\or mySpace page.

Cons

There are a few minor squabbles I have that I’d like to have seen differently. The background used is not solid and the colors will strain your eyes when the text is on top of a picture instead of the plain white background.

The writer doesn’t do a lot with his available medium. Sure, the characters have their own facebook and myspace pages, but they are never updated. Also, it is a text only story. Never a picture or video to liven things up.

Catching up can be daunting. References to other characters and previous plot points are almost never backlinked. Instead, there is a ‘CatchUp’ label for posts that have important information. While the CatchUp label is a good idea, after a years worth of daily posting nearly 30% of the posts are needed to "Catch Up". That’s a lot of reading to do just to "catch up".

Also having to do with the blog format is that the date of with each post is shown but not the time. Unless mentioned in the text you can never be sure when Tom is "posting". Granted it’s a very minor point, but I like the idea of knowing what time a character "wrote" something.

All of the previous points have to do with format. My only criticism of the story is that a couple of the characters seem a little "over the top". For instance, the villainy of Tom’s Mother and Annabelle seem too straight forward. You would think women of their social standing would show more finesse – even in private matters. Characters that say exactly what they mean with absolutely no subtext just aren’t very believable to me.

Conclusion

To anyone who questions the quality of online writing, Fate’s Acquittal is the best rebuttal I could ever hope for. The writing is professional. The story is entertaining. Despite some minor squabbles, this is a story I would recommend to any avid reader.

This review is cross-posted on blog-fiction, where you can learn more about this and other blog fiction:

http://blog.blogfiction.org/2009/01/fates-acquittal-review.html

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