Wanted! Novel critique

AzureAuto

Please find the first part of a novel I have been working on. I would REALLY appreciate some feedback as im having a case of writer's block at the moment over some sections.

The British head office of United Arable Futures sprawls like a cubist growth on the outskirts of New London, remembered as the town of Horsham by spinster Emily Mills the elderly landlady of the Bucking Astra inn. It is a great mass of smoked glass and grey plastics; laboratories, clerical offices, hangar-like workshops, accommodations for the imported scientists; fitness yards, health hubs and churches of Islam for the indigenous workforce. An extension of the motorway and the airport was quickly commissioned by the (then) Red Democrat government to facilitate traffic to and from the site. It is an enormous entity, both in size and (Emily Mills would add matter-of-factly) also political influence.
Indeed many men came to believe in the prosperity that Arable Futures envisioned for England. The day they announced to a salivating conference of councilmen, farmers and trade unionists plans to expand the British food synthesis operation was generally agreed to be the turning point for the ailing rural economy of England.
Ideal environmental climate... Regeneration... Potential for mass employment...Fantastic opportunities for local businesses...import market turning hungry eyes on England...wealth...Regeneration.
Lamp-lit wood-panelled snugs in government houses, air heavy with smoke from expensive Scotch cigars. Blustering politicians, flushed from whiskey. The coffers are empty, so much damned unrest over taxes. Don’t they realise we can’t run the country without money? Did you hear? The Americans have lost interest now; “...no longer the rebellious teenaged son doggedly trying to prove himself, the United States of America has blossomed into an erudite young man and has simply outgrown his father...” The Independent crowed; oh for a couple of juicy military contracts! It’d be like the good old days after the war. I’d still have the mistress.
Expansion of the site upstream of the Thames from a single factory and ten small plantations at Henley began in the spring of Rajab al Murajab in 1589 and was complete within two years. It attracted world-wide acclaim as a centre for biologically engineered food production. Great swathes of green-belt land incongruously became fodder for cattle and the halal meat markets overnight. Small holdings were paid off handsomely by smartly tailored civil servants, landing by helicopter the same day as the electronic mail box pinged with overdue LandRent notices. The net was cast globally for the finest worker bees to nurture the suffocating growth of the United Arable Futures plant.
Kettering Forbes was considering his first pint of Kentish ale as a newly unemployed farm engineer when he was approached by his former employer. It was a typically sultry midwinter’s night, November by the old calendar, Forbes reckoned. The windows of the Bucking Astra inn were opened wide out onto the empty beer garden and the drapes hung lifeless in the still air. From his seat at the bar he saw stout Mr. Fairleigh shuffling up the path outside. The sweating pate of his grey head was covered by a cap pulled hard down, his red face drawn into his collar, hands stuffed in the shallow pockets of his tweed huntsman coat. He entered, raised his head only long enough to locate Forbes and crossed the inn floor, populated only by Emily Mills and her Newfoundland dog who registered Fairleigh with a flinch of his brow before resuming his forlorn gaze at the unlit hearth. Emily followed Fairleigh with a hard judging stare then continued to shine her shining silverware.
Fairleigh stopped before Forbes and removed his hat. ‘I was told this is where I might find you Kettering, I’m glad I did’. Forbes eyed him cooly while taking a long draught from his glass. Fairleigh’s hands fidgeted in his pockets and a sheen of sweat broke out across his face. He dabbed at it with his hat before pulling a stool out from the bar and seating himself. Forbes lightly placed his half drained glass onto the bar.
‘Damned terrible business the whole lot of it’, Fairleigh began after a moment’s uneasy silence. He avoided Forbes’ curious, level blue gaze, ‘I felt sick when they came around, Kettering, physically sick. I had it out with them for a good hour, I can assure you. I wasn’t as easy as Waites to deal with. He let all his lads go a fortnight before his farm was roved! None of them saw a penny of his last harvest, he only kept those idiot twins who slept in his hayloft, working them day and night and without a wage either...’
Like a worm perhaps. His act of coming in here is laughable. Stooped and beaten looking as though he were the trodden victim. His eyes catch mine and I see no sincerity in them. He wears guilt like a pair of his brushed brogues to be pulled from a dark corner when the occasion demands it. He sweats like the pigs I once bled for him.
‘Raj and Amrit’ rasped Forbes through his broken sunburnt lips.
Fairleigh’s mouth hung open, bottom lip working like a fish as his rehearsed speech was interrupted.
‘Sorry?’
‘The brothers that worked at the Waites plantation. Raj and Amrit Hussain. Amrit was bitten last week’.
The blank stare. He doesn’t understand what it is to be bitten. The spiders in the crops in daytime slumber in the boughs of bananas, and the ungloved hands that tentatively work them loose, fingers probing the black crevices and the sudden sharp bite from the unseen. The throbbing pulse as the poison works its way up the arm. Run! Run to the medical shed, get the injection. If you’re on the other side of the plantation you might not make it. Never pick further than you can sprint in a minute that was the rule. The raw red pricked skin like being flailed with fire. I heard a boy cry; saw him fall and break his neck across his barrow just out of fright. It wasn’t a spider bite on his hand. It was the graze of a pine thorn. I told his mother he died from a bite whilst valiantly harvesting the land, and she wept with pride.
‘...let’s face it, no one of us is strong enough to compete with the U A F, Kettering. You look at me with that accusing look as though there were something I could have done!’ He sat back in his stool and sighed heavily. ‘Letting your lads go, letting you go Kettering, was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do’.
Forbes leant into Fairleigh’s face. He recoiled. ‘We all knew this was coming. I told you if you didn’t make some big changes, some investment, you’d get swallowed up. That day is here now. And there is nothing now for the boys but poverty and death’.
Fairleigh’s face changed from feigned concern to one of offence, wide fish eyes, his splodge of a nose grew redder. He harrumphed and withdrew his palm organiser from where he had been fidgeting with it in his pocket. He opened it up with clumsy pudgy hands and neat manicured nails and typed something into the touch-screen. Forbes motioned to the landlady who had been craning her ear toward them, and she dutifully rose with a crack of arthritic bones and made her way to the pump.
‘The reason I wanted to speak with you Kettering is that there is work out there. The men from the UAF mailed me this morning. They are hiring. Mechanics, technicians, bioengineers. It’s the biggest recruitment drive this country has ever seen. I’ve already approached Gillis and he’s glad for the consideration’.
Forbes smiled. Gillis. Never one to let an opportunity slide.
‘They’re importing the work for want of good men. It would be a shame to see your talents go to waste’, he extended the sleek silver palm organiser to Forbes, who seemed to eye it with curiosity. ‘It’d be the best chance for you Forbes. A chance for a fresh start’. He paused trying to catch his former employee’s eye, maybe the chance of a home?’
Forbes heard only the tone of the words, and ignored them because of the thoughts they stirred in him. He didn’t see the glowing application file with the UAF motif of the tree in the open palm, proffered as an olive branch.
His eyes were fixed on the original Casio timepiece on Fairleigh’s wrist, a priceless antique at least a hundred years old. The hand at his side began to tremble with rage.
That was seven years ago and the last he had seen of Mr. Adam Fairleigh. He heard that Fairleigh had relocated with thousands of other planters to the ReGen programme on the baking African sub-continent. Duped by promises of incredible returns for hundred percent investments, holo-pix of laughing pink faced Caucasian children playing in wheat fields six feet high. He died whimpering at the hands of a Kenyan militiaman; defending the twenty acres of un-toilable steel hard earth the UAF sourced him. Forbes had taken no pleasure in this news.

dawvee

Your descriptions are very good, first of all. Phrases like "cubist growth" really stick with me and give the narrative voice some flavour, sort of a erudite and slightly cynical tone that fits well with the material.

While I can tell there are a lot of details you need to establish early on, reading it over I couldn't help but feel you're front-loading a lot of background exposition into the first few paragraphs. Generally it's better to introduce your characters and start into the action right away - all the background can be filled in later as it becomes relevant.

Another stylistic point, which you can feel free to ignore, is that parenthetical statements and ellipses can be disruptive to the flow of a text. Personally, I try to avoid them except for the occasional ellipsis within dialogue when needed. Better to phrase things concisely and directly if possible, I figure.

Black Swan

The background details at the beginning made me sleepy. I would begin here:

AzureAuto wrote: »

Kettering Forbes was considering his first pint of Kentish ale as a newly unemployed farm engineer when he was approached by his former employer...

AzureAuto

I did have a feeling that there was a bit too much background preamble; that I was trying to set the historical and hinting at the cultural setting before I introduced the protagonist. I will rejig these paragraphs. Thanks for the swift replies.

pickarooney

First up, I know it's because the formatting got messed up when you copied and paste, but I would encourage you to reinsert the paragraph breaks and mayeb use a smaller font to make it more readable.

I think one of the major problems can be summed up in this line:

The British head office of United Arable Futures sprawls like a cubist growth on the outskirts of New London, remembered as the town of Horsham by spinster Emily Mills the elderly landlady of the Bucking Astra inn.

Nobody would ever throw in an adjective in this manner anywhere except in a newspaper article. The reader can tell immediately that he's going to be hit with descriptions that have no immediate relevance. Dump the bit after 'New London' as it breaks the flow. If you need to, let the character info seep in gradually later.

This bit is confusing:

An extension of the motorway and the airport was quickly commissioned by the (then) Red Democrat government to facilitate traffic to and from the site.

The two temporal references are out of place. First off you're describing the city as it is now, then you tell us that something happened at a point relative to some time or event which you haven't yet told us about. Stick to describing the scene, then at some point allow us to discover the history behind it. And don't overdo the description because nobody will care about New London if there's nobody interesting living there.

The next paragraphs are muddled. I understand that you're trying to convey a cacophony of ideas from various sources, but it's just too much hassle trying to figure out who's saying what and why. We've been dumped into this futuristic landscape and now we've to make sense not only of where we are and what's happening but also of:

Lamp-lit wood-panelled snugs in government houses, air heavy with smoke from expensive Scotch cigars. Blustering politicians, flushed from whiskey. The coffers are empty, so much damned unrest over taxes. Don’t they realise we can’t run the country without money? Did you hear? The Americans have lost interest now; “...no longer the rebellious teenaged son doggedly trying to prove himself, the United States of America has blossomed into an erudite young man and has simply outgrown his father...” The Independent crowed; oh for a couple of juicy military contracts! It’d be like the good old days after the war. I’d still have the mistress.

The words themselves are well put together, but I'm damned if I know what's going on there.

Expansion...plant

This bit is very good. It reinforces the notion that Islam has 'conquered' the UK and links nicely back to the opening - United Arab... le Futures - the mind does an about-face and then realises those first syllables were no coincidence.

stout Mr. Fairleigh shuffling up the path outside. The sweating pate of his grey head was covered by a cap pulled hard down

I don't much care for the use of 'stout' used this way; it's a very poetic construct. The next sentence is confusing - he has grey hair and is bald, the sweaty top of his head is visible though covered by a cap?

Like a worm perhaps. His act of coming in here is laughable. Stooped and beaten looking as though he were the trodden victim. His eyes catch mine and I see no sincerity in them. He wears guilt like a pair of his brushed brogues to be pulled from a dark corner when the occasion demands it. He sweats like the pigs I once bled for him.

I presume this is Forbes' inner monologue, but it needs to be set apart, even if its just by using italics.

The 'spiders' bit is excellent.

The Palm organiser seems to be presented as though it was someting state of the art, a hundred years after Casio watches went out of style. When you consider how fast technology becomes obsolete now, you should probably reconsider and use a more futuristic device.

dcmu

AzureAuto wrote: »

I did have a feeling that there was a bit too much background preamble; that I was trying to set the historical and hinting at the cultural setting before I introduced the protagonist. I will rejig these paragraphs. Thanks for the swift replies.

At least you spotted it. Fair play.

AzureAuto

Thanks again. I have a bad habit of engaging in almost a stream of consciousness when writing, and out of fear of over-editing, not thoroughly asssing what I have written. I am trying to convey far too much to the reader, and I can understand its probably a bit boring to read what is trying to burst from my head!
Pickarooney, your critique is spot on, makes a lot of sense.
thanks again