Five Voices That Never Meet

On Writing a Novel Whose Characters Can Never Find Each Other

27 September ~ 4 min read

Most novels are machines for bringing people together. Plots are engines of collision: the lovers meet, the enemies clash, the stranger arrives and the household is never the same again. Take the collisions away and, usually, you have no novel.

Melisma has five main characters. None of them ever meets another. They cannot. They are separated by as much as five centuries and by every border a map can draw — a Sephardic boy in 1492 Toledo, a Morisca woman in 1570 Granada, a keener in Famine Ireland, a Sicilian vintner bound for Ellis Island in 1913, and a woman in suburban California, alive right now, who is the reader’s way in. They will never share a room, a language, or a year. For a long time, that looked less like a premise than like a problem.

The problem has a name in the trade. Agents and editors talk about braided novels whose strands never cohere — books that cut between timelines and hope proximity will feel like meaning. Put five unconnected stories between two covers and you have not written a novel. You have written an anthology and misfiled it.

So the question that ran under every draft was simple: if these people cannot meet, what holds them together?

Not blood. I made a point of that. This is not a bloodline saga where the locket passes from grandmother to granddaughter and the family resemblance does the work. My five are strangers to one another in every literal sense. Some of their lines die out entirely. The thread does not run down a family tree.

What holds them together is a sound. A single wordless phrase — a scrap of melody with no words to anchor it to any one tongue — surfaces in each of them at the moment of leaving. It is not taught. It is rarely even noticed. A woman sings it over a body; a man hums it on his last night at home; and someone nearby catches it without understanding that they have caught anything at all. Then that person carries it, unknowing, until their own moment comes. The connective tissue of the book is not a plot and not a pedigree. It is the passing itself — the thing handed on, not the people it passes through.

That turned out to be a mythological idea more than a novelistic one.

Every tradition I have studied has some version of it: the belief that a thing can be handed on without anyone deciding to hand it on — that grief, or memory, or music can live in the body below the level of the conscious mind and surface generations later in someone who has no idea where it came from. Folklore is full of the motif. And research keeps circling the same intuition — that a pattern can persist in a body long after the reason for it is lost, that a wound can echo down a line that no longer remembers being wounded. The old myths were describing something we are only now learning to name.

Once I understood that the passing was the protagonist — not any one of the five, but the sound moving between them — the novel cohered. The strands do not need to meet, any more than the notes of a melody need to be played at once. A melody is precisely a set of separate sounds, a melisma, that become one thing by being carried, in order, through time.

That is the shape of the book. Five voices that never meet, made a single story by the one thing that passes between them and outlives them all.

The characters never find each other. The sound finds all of them. That was always the point.

~ Liam