Non-linear books are classified here by what governs their order of telling, because that decides what a reader must hold and what the order can do for her. Five architectures recur. Two rulings follow, on proposals that Backstory and Flashback (Chapter 7) and The Subplot (Chapter 14) left to this chapter.
Five architectures
The braid alternates two or more strands, each told in its own chronological order, set in different times. It is the form most writers mean by a dual-timeline novel. Its variants are named by what happens to the interval. In a converging braid the earlier strand advances faster than the later one until the two meet in time: Delia Owens’s Where the Crawdads Sing (2018) runs a strand from 1952, when Kya is six, towards a strand that begins with a body found in 1969, and the strands merge for the trial (Worked Analyses). In a parallel braid the interval stays fixed and the strands meet by cause or identity instead: Kate Morton’s The Forgotten Garden (2008) keeps 1913, 1975 and 2005 apart to the end and joins them through a child left on a wharf, the woman she became and that woman’s granddaughter. The braid’s work is to set two times side by side so that each comments on the other, and its risks are the ones the failure patterns record: a strand the reader skims, and strands that move at one pace.
The anchored order shows or announces one event early, usually its end or its crisis, and then tells the book towards it, so that the reader reads every scene as a step to a known point. Gabriel García Márquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1981; translated by Gregory Rabassa, 1982) names the killing in its first sentence, On the day they were going to kill him, and spends the book on how a town let it happen. The anchored order converts curiosity about what into curiosity about how and why, and its successor to suspense is dread. Its risk is that the anchor answers the book’s question; it works only when the book’s question was never the event.
The reverse order tells events backwards, unit by unit, so that each scene explains the one before it in the text. Harold Pinter’s Betrayal (1978) runs from the end of an affair in 1977 to its beginning in 1968, and its last scene, the first moment of the affair, is played under everything the audience knows of its end. The form makes every scene a disclosure of cause and every ending a beginning, which is why it is rare at novel length: Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow (1991) runs a life backwards to make the Holocaust’s logic legible inverted. Memento (Worked Analyses) combines it with a forward strand.
The mosaic orders its units by association, theme or a character’s memory rather than by time, so that story order can be reconstructed, often only partly, but does not govern the reading. Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), whose hero has come unstuck in time, is the familiar case; Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010), which The Transition (Chapter 5) reads for its joins, is a mosaic of thirteen chapters across about fifty years. The mosaic’s work is to make the reader assemble, and its condition is that the assembly mean something. Its risk is achrony without purpose.
The nested order opens one time inside another, so that the reader goes in through frames and comes out through them in reverse. Wuthering Heights (1847) goes from Lockwood’s 1801 into Nelly Dean’s account of thirty years and comes back. David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004) breaks off five stories, from a nineteenth-century Pacific journal to a twenty-second-century testimony, tells a sixth whole at the centre, and then closes the five in reverse, each narrator having read or watched the one before. The nested order’s work is containment: the inner time is held, and judged, by the outer one.
Most books mix the forms. The household novel, as Worked Analyses charts it, is an anchored order whose anchor is a prologue, with a second time in two instalments: a braid at its smallest. The classification is used to say what the arrangement is for, not to file the book.
The threshold of a strand: a ruling on the structural domain
Backstory and Flashback (Chapter 7) proposed a structural domain for the cutaway: a cutaway serves it when its main function is architectural, establishing, maintaining or completing a pattern in the book’s design, as in a braided timeline, a returning frame or a recurring approach to a withheld event. It adopted the domain for diagnosis on two conditions, that the pattern be declared before the domain is claimed and that the claim be checked, and conceded that it might be texture or reader knowledge seen at book scale, and that it mixed what does this deliver here? with what does this do for the book? It named The Forgotten Garden and Where the Crawdads Sing as test cases.
This chapter rejects the structural domain as a domain of the cutaway, and keeps what it named as a threshold. A past unit that recurs in a declared pattern, advances in its own time and runs on its own question is no longer a cutaway; it is a strand, and the question what does this do for the book? is asked of the strand, by this chapter’s tests, not of each departure. The two test cases show it. Each 1913 chapter of The Forgotten Garden advances a question of its own, who left the child and why, and each 1952 chapter of Where the Crawdads Sing another, whether Kya will survive alone and what she will become; neither is justified by its architecture, and both would fail if it were. The threshold of a strand is therefore the point at which recurring material acquires a question of its own. Below it, material from another time is a cutaway, judged by Backstory and Flashback’s five domains (Chapter 7). Above it, a strand is judged by test 2 (Strand question) of Diagnostic Tests. Material that recurs in a pattern without a question of its own sits at the threshold and fails both, and the failure patterns call it the explaining strand. Backstory and Flashback’s two conditions (Chapter 7) survive in that test and in the rule of The Mechanism that a strand be declared early.
Temporal counterpoint at the scale of a book: a ruling
The Subplot (Chapter 14) proposed temporal counterpoint, a subplot on a different clock from the main plot’s, whose function is to make the main plot’s pace visible by contrast and let a book hold a duration it could not otherwise contain. It adopted the domain on condition that a thread claiming it also show a chain, conceding that it might be a property of the telling, that it rarely appears without thematic counterpoint, and, as unanswered, that it gives every slow, inert thread a defence.
This chapter adopts temporal counterpoint at the scale of a book, as a property of the arrangement rather than of a thread, which accepts the first objection and answers the third. A difference of rate between strands is something the arrangement makes, and it does work only where a crossing sets one strand’s time against another’s, so that the reader feels the difference. The claim is therefore checked at the crossings, not asserted of a thread: a slow strand that never meets a fast one at a moment where the difference shows has no counterpoint to plead. Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk (2017) is the test case on screen. Its three strands cover a week on the mole, a day at sea and an hour in the air, intercut as if simultaneous, and they cross at the rescues, where an event the viewer has seen from the hour-long strand is seen again from the day-long one. Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet (2020) sets the day of a child’s illness in 1596 against about fifteen years of his parents’ lives, and the counterpoint is felt each time the long strand reaches a decision the short one is paying for. For threads in one time, The Subplot’s condition (Chapter 14) stands. The second objection stands as well: in both cases the counterpoint carries the theme, and the chapter does not claim the two can be separated.
See also: the full treatment, section 3, with three further architectures (the reset, the retold and the single day in several lives), a summary table, and the rulings in full.