Stories, by their design, are meant to inspire emotion.  They are art, which communicates a feeling or an idea to the audience through its structure.

The most common structure in narrative is beginning-middle-end, with rising action, climax, and denoument.  That way the audience gets introduced to characters and the conflict they face, the pertinent details. action ensues, and is resolved.  They walk away with some emotional catharsis, whether enjoyment, tranquility, or reflective tragedy.  Or, so the theories go, in short form.

Real life and biography are a lot messier.  Lives very rarely have the structure inherent to stories.  There’s not always unifying themes or underlying messages, and that’s why sometimes biographical stories and films aren’t very entertaining.  They’re just events with little purpose. 

The best biographies have a narrative arc.  Sports films succeed because there’s training, development, and the "big game"—structure is almost handed to you.  Some lives have narrative arcs, too—or at least, when the movie versions are well written.  Think "Ray" with Jamie Fox, Ray’s drug use is connected to his blindness and the death of his brother in childhood, which then is the key to what motivates him going clean and becoming more inspiring to the black and music communities.  There’s a narrative focus that creates a story that’s more than just the events of a life.

Well, "When Angels Travel" is more like the mess of real life than it is a story.  A real life travelogue, it’s the recounting of a journey that has very little to suggest meaning, theme or purpose, other than the thoughts of one man as he travels. 

Sometimes rambling narrative can be enough, sometimes a person’s character is the story.  However, this is not one of those times.  We aren’t shown the narrator doing much, but we’re told a lot of things in summary.  The website itself is a bit of a mess, with photographs of the foreign locales bursting through and around and over the text.  It reminds me of messy sites from ten or fifteen years ago, all of which detracts from the reading.

However, perhaps the distraction is a good thing, as the writing leaves much to be desired.  The sentences in this memoire never meet a comma they didn’t like, as thought is layered atop thought in almost every one.  And the layering is interrupting, as clauses are cut off abruptly and then resumed after the interjection.  Once in awhile such cuts can be stylistic, but when they dominate the style it gets a little much.

Here’s an example:

"With the Deputy-Chairman of Machino-import and his assistants, I spent several hours clarifying technical points. We broke off at one point to stand in silence for a few moments while a funeral procession passed, with solemn music, along the street below us. It was, explained the Deputy-Chairman, the funeral of his former chief. We adjourned until the next-but-one day. There had been no mention of price and the real battle was still to come."

v

"And then – it was all over and I was enjoying an Aeroflot breakfast (which started with caviar) on my way back to Amsterdam, and buying gift pots of caviar, miniature bottles of vodka, bracelets and other souvenirs from the attractive hostesses."

The section has all kinds of problems—passive voice for one:  "I spent several hours clarifying technical points with the Deputy-Chariman and his assistants"—that’s cleaner and active voice and a better way to phrase the first sentence.  "The Deputy Chairman explained the procession was for his former chief" would be another stylistic improvement.  As for the "battle" over negotiations, those eight days are skipped over and suddenly the narrator is in Amsterdam—telling us about events instead of rooting us in the narrative.

The only thing I learn about Moscow is that it has good caviar and lots of con-artists, but I don’t see those things in action, I’m told about them.  Unfortunately, while this travelogue moves from place to place, it’s not particularly emotionally moving.  Without concrete images, actions or scenes to illustrate the locales and the narrator’s character, it’s just kind of a dry play-by-play connect the dots of how some guy got from Point A to Point B, without a meaning to really grab my attention.

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