Observations on the Ringwood Publishing Writing Competition 2023

 

For the past three years I’ve been lucky enough to be a judge in the Ringwood Publishing short story competition. I’ve written about the stories in the first two years before but this year we had a bumper entry and a few common themes emerged. The following comments are not intended to be critical – the standard this year was very high – but hopefully I can offer some pointers to help authors in future years.

The biggest issue that struck me this year – in terms of the sheer number of stories which fell into this category – is that so many of them feel oddly distanced. A lot of action is relayed to us second-hand, in retrospect, all described through omniscient narration, rather than the point of view of a main character. It’s like most of the action takes place outside the story. In extreme cases, the story actually reads like a summary of the story. This happened. That happened. Then this. That means the reader can’t get involved. There is a lack of immediacy, of connection, of drama. And, ultimately, of interest.

Books on writing craft talk about starting in medias res, in the middle of events. This is the problem with the stories I’m talking about here. We’re never in the moment, living the scene as it unfolds. We’re hearing about it afterwards, or from the margins, from a distance. We’re never with the characters as their lives unfold.

In medias res is vital for the opening of your story and, again, a lot of stories this year suffered from weak openings. Looking through my notes, in story after story I’ve written “first paragraph could be removed” or even “first page is redundant”. In maybe a dozen stories, there was actually a brilliant first line, except it wasn’t in the first line, it was buried at the bottom of paragraph three or four. If everything up to that point was cut, we would have a very powerful opening. So read your stories again. Is there a stand-out sentence, something like the famous Iain Banks line, “It was the day my grandmother exploded”? There were genuinely a few examples of equally striking lines in this year’s stories, and if they’d been the opening lines the stories would have been immeasurably improved.

Too often, though, the introduction was devoted to a description of a scene, or backstory (which the reader isn’t going to care about because we aren’t invested in any characters yet) or explanations of who the characters are or, worst of all, a character preparing to do something – getting dressed, walking to a destination or the like. The story needs to start where the drama starts. Character and plot then flow from there.

In many stories, the main character was well-described and felt like a real person, but the characters around them were little more than names (and, in some cases, not even that). A lot of characters seemed to be there purely to move the plot forward, without contributing anything themselves. Every character should have a purpose, and the reader should have a sense of what all the principal players are like as individuals.

A lot of this can be done through dialogue and some stories missed opportunities here. This is linked to the point I made about stories feeling distanced. If we found things out through dialogue, rather than an omniscient narrator telling us, that pulls us into the story and makes it feel real. It is much better for a reader to gradually understand the thematic point the writer is looking to make from the characters talking to one another than to have it explained through omnisicient narration.

However, read your dialogue out loud. Does it sound like something a real person would actually say? If all you’re doing is taking a lump of omniscient narration and putting it in quote marks, that doesn’t make it dialogue.

A bald truth is that a lot of stories weren’t ready for submission. It was frustrating that quite a few stories which had the potential to be excellent were submitted before they’d been adequately edited. Let me tell you a giveaway. Whatever the word limit is for a competition – ours was 3000 – there will always be a high percentage of stories that come in ten words or fewer below that limit. I always check the word count before I start reading and this is an immediate red flag. It isn’t always the case, of course, but often it does mean that a writer has edited their story just enough to get it under the limit. That usually means there’s a lot more editing still to be done. Redundancy, cliché, repetition. They will all be in your early drafts and that’s fine. No one has ever written a superb first draft. But you should be refining and reworking your words over and over until only the most precise and perfect ones remain. There are several stories this year that I would like to see again, after proper editing.

I got the impression that half a dozen or so entries were excerpts from novels. There is nothing wrong with that. I’ve won a few competitions with stories that were taken from my first novel Cloudland and, indeed, our winning story last year was adapted from a novel which Ringwood Publishing liked so much it will be publishing this year.

But, if you do this, the short story you write is a completely different entity from the novel from which it’s been adapted, and you must read it with completely fresh eyes. Things you know from the novel are unknown to the reader of the story. Either explain them or, if they don’t add anything to the smaller scale of the plot, remove them. In one story, a character called Mary utters one line and never appears again. In the novel, she is probably a clear and important character, but in the short story she is an inexplicable presence. Who is she and why is she there? The story has to work in its own right, so you will have to change some things.

I hope I’ve managed to indicate some technical points which could help tighten your writing. But the final point I want to make is this: take risks. Don’t play safe. Don’t write something that’s already been written. If you want to write a Saki-esque story that’s fine, but make it your Saki-esque story, not a parody of the real thing. If you want to write a gritty Scots-dialogue drama, great but leave the Irvine Welshisms to Irvine Welsh. If you want to be experimental, experiment. You only have 3000 words to make your story stand out. That means every one of them has to do something important.

Good luck to everyone who ever writes a story and submits it to a competition. If you didn’t succeed this time, don’t give up. Every time you sit down and write you’re learning and improving. Your words matter. Let the world read them.

 

Sadie, Call The Polis by Kirkland Ciccone

Occasionally, you come across a character who, from the first page, feels like an old friend. Louise Welsh’s Rilke is one such, as is Janet in Elspeth Barker’s O Caledonia (albeit she’s almost completely insufferable). There’s an effortlessness about the characterisation and a vividness to the voice, a sense that these people are real, that their weaknesses (and they really, really need to have weaknesses) are just as important as their strengths, that their stories are the only thing you want to be concerned with at this very moment.

I’ve been writing long enough to know that the apparent effortlessness in such portrayals is actually the product of an enormous amount of effort, so I commend Kirkland Ciccone for the creation of the absolutely splendid Sadie Relish.

We first meet Sadie in primary school in the long, hot summer of 1976 when she responds to a teacher’s question in class by saying: “When I grow up, I want to be a prostitute just like my mither.” Sadie, then, is a naïve and guileless young girl, a loner in search of magic in the world, unpopular at school and unhappy at home. She is also a wonderful and witty observer of daily life and the blackness of the comedy rings wonderfully true coming through the voice of this honest, decent, caring, sometimes broken young girl.

She is surrounded by a supporting cast that is equally strong and diverse. Her mother, the aforementioned prostitute, is hard-as-nails, exactly the sort of woman you wouldn’t want to have move in next door to you, but someone who, in her own way, loves and cares for her family deeply. Her sister is older, thinks she is wiser, is probably far less so, and the siblings have an authentically troubled relationship through the years. Troubles subsist with her best friend, Gregor, too, and he slides out of the story early only to return, much transformed later on.  

And transformation is an important element in Sadie, Call the Polis. Time, as it does, changes everything. We follow Sadie’s progression from gauche schoolgirl to a mother with her own, definitely troubled children and a welter of cares of her own. Some are life-threatening, some life-changing, and gradually, you come to realise that the familiar and seductive voice of this best friend Sadie has been fooling you (and herself) all along, and the novel has a much darker underbelly than you realised. 

Sadie, Call the Polis is a terrific black comedy, in which serious issues are explored in a highly original way. The humour and the dialogue are classically Scottish, dry as toast, the characters and their outlooks seemingly hard and tough but displaying, if you choose to see it, a warmth and tenderness they won’t admit they crave but do all the same. This is very assured writing and a very fine novel of growing up. 

Liberties by Peter Bennett

Peter Bennett’s motivation for writing Liberties, he tells the Big Bearded Bookseller in a recent interview, was to be able to tell a story set in the east end of Glasgow with characters with working class voices. These are a rarity in literature, he says, and he’s not wrong, sadly, although there may be tentative signs of an upswing, with a new generation of writers like Emma Grae, Colin Burnett and Kirkland Ciccione taking up the mantle of Irvine Welsh and James Kelman and unapologetically exploring working class heritage (and humour). 

Liberties, then, is set in Shettleston in the late nineties, at the start of the New Labour government, when it was already becoming obvious that, whatever it said on the political tin, it was the same old shite inside. Poverty is a constant, as are the options for escaping it, as are the consequences of those options. 

What appears, at first, to be a series of picaresque adventures featuring a disparate set of characters, gradually coalesces into a single narrative structure pulled together by those powerful working class themes of poverty, family ties and an unerring ability to make desperately poor life decisions. 

Arthur Coyle is a pensioner, friend of Tam and grandfather of Danny. All three, in different ways, are heavily involved with a local loan shark and villain, Harry Mullin. Also in thrall to Mullin is Stevie, a clever and capable young musician in danger of being sucked into a spiral of drugs and petty crime and trouble. This being Scotland in the 1990s, the future looks bleak for all of them but Peter Bennett’s exciting, funny and ultimately moving novel charts a steady path, avoiding clichés and stereotypes, maintaining a sense of realism but leavening it with humour, and creating a cast of characters who are realistic and well drawn, about whom the reader comes to care, and whose stories are genuinely stirring. 

Liberties is highly recommended.

Blasted Things by Lesley Glaister

 

I remember buying and reading Lesley Glaister’s early works when I was a stock librarian in the nineties. As is often the case, I was initially attracted by the covers (Digging to Australia, I think, had a Paula Rego painting and that was my introduction to her) and  I found Glaister’s writing immersive and intriguing. When I stopped being a librarian I read less and lost touch with Lesley Glaister until Blasted Things, published by Sandstone Press. I’m delighted to have re-made her acquaintance.

The first section of the novel is set in a field station on the Western Front during World War One in 1917. Clementina Armstrong – Clem – is an auxiliary volunteer nurse and we begin to understand that an interesting back story has led this young woman to such a difficult and dangerous assignment. She is engaged to be married to a doctor but already has doubts – not so much about her fiance Dennis but about marriage itself, the institution, the life that awaits a young woman in Edwardian England. Her experiences in the casualty station, the young men who pass through her care – some surviving, many not – reinforce her doubts.

And then she meets Powell Bonneville, a Canadian doctor, and those doubts, doubts which she has tried to hide deep in her psyche erupt into the open.

Life turns. War over, we rejoin Clem in 1920, now married to Dennis, with a son and a new life and the bright future that everyone in Britain, fatigued by war and death, aspires to have. This was a peculiar time, euphoria and relief and hope in the immediate aftermath of the war not yet eclipsed by the inevitable recession and social crises that would follow later in the decade.

For Clem, this transition from hope to gloom comes early and bites hard. Those doubts she harboured have never gone away, and a combination of post-natal depression, (obviously undiagnosed) PTSD from her experiences at the front and the growing realisation that her life was, indeed, to be girdled by convention leave her morose and marooned, her life circumscribed: more children would follow, the doctor and his little lady becoming pillars of the community, she on his hand, smiling, projecting radiance through her slow descent into middle age and on, the inevitable arrival of grandchildren, infirmity, decline. 

Only Dennis’s sister, the free spirit Harri, seems to offer any escape from the stultification of Edwardian society. Harri’s husband died in the war and, despite Dennis’s attempts to have her return to the family bosom, she steadfastly retains her own household and, through that, her own identity. Returning from Harri’s to the family home is a stinging experience for Clem, a reminder of what she had hoped her life might encompass.

In this state of mental turmoil she meets Vincent, a man badly disfigured during the war, with a tin plate hiding the damage to his face. A brittle relationship develops, and here the novel twists into remarkable new territory, these damaged and yearning characters, in most regards utterly mis-matched but each recognising in the other some deep-rooted need, coming to life before us on the page. As a character study it is remarkable, beautifully handled, the pair’s arguments and misconceptions and overreactions rendered all too human through the realism of their depiction.

This section of the novel reminded me strongly of Patrick Hamilton’s Hangover Square, set in 1939, immediately before the war. Like Blasted Things, it is an intriguing character study based around unhappy and needy and disconnected people. There is in it an underlying sense of decay – social and moral – which is only hinted at in Blasted Things. The trajectory is clear, then: from 1920s Blasted Things to Hangover Square in 1939, this is how British society is going to develop, this is where we are headed. Hamilton had the advantage of writing his novel almost contemporaneously, of course, reflecting the zeitgeist around him. Glaister’s ability to enter the psyche of the fractured 1920s is impressive indeed.

In an interview, Glaister said of her work: “It doesn’t really fit into any genre. Is it historical? Is it a romance? Is it a psychological thriller?’ 

She wondered if this might somehow be a problem but for me the opposite is true: it is a strength. The novel twists the way it chooses and Glaister, the author, follows. It could have gone in a particular direction during and after the first section, in the field hospital. It didn’t. It defied convention and became something different. Difference continues throughout the novel. Nothing is predictable. Nothing is straightforward. The novel becomes more than the sum of its parts, a vivid evocation of time and period, emotion and character.

Man at Sea by Liam Bell

Man at Sea is told in two time frames, in 1941 in Malta, with the citizens enduring a Nazi and Italian bombardment, and in 1961, when Stuart, a pilot shot down and badly burned in the war returns to settle business – of his own and of his travelling partner, Beth, the nurse who cared for him while his horrific burns were tended in the aftermath of the downing. This is a beautifully paced book where the action feels steady and unforced but where, all the same, we are drawn relentlessly to a satisfying climax. 

What is most impressive about the book is the way that it gradually reveals the intimate relations of the protagonists, allowing a gentle love story to unfold, while at the same time generating the intrigue and excitement of a thriller. It’s something William Boyd does particularly well, and Sebastian Faulks. Liam Bell is clearly a gifted writer. 

In the wartime passages we have eleven-year-old Joe Zarb, living with his nanna while his father is on active duty in the Royal Navy. Joe is a bright lad, but he has a vivid imagination and he is naïve. This is drawn out delightfully with a series of word definitions that begin each chapter. Joe’s papa, Victor, did this and Joe treasures the notebooks in which his father carefully transcribed new words. Naturally, Joe tries to do the same thing but his definitions are wittily skewed, such as: 

Encrypt (verb): to hide information or important messages from enemy spies, using the locked room underneath the parish church. 

At one point, the Zarbs receive a telegram and, although Joe doesn’t get to read it, he becomes convinced it brings news of his father’s death. When he searches his nanna’s room and finds it, he discovers that his father has remarried, to an English woman called Elizabeth Blanch. This feels almost like a mini-bereavement to Joe: will his father return or will he stay with his new wife? What will their relationship be? For Joe, eleven and too young to understand, the news is difficult to assimilate. 

Meanwhile, the Sultanas, a family of refugees from Sliema, come to live with the Zarbs. In the second strand of the novel, set twenty years later, Joe has married the youngest of the Sultana children, Rosaria, little more than an infant in 1941. 

The second strand focuses on Stuart Mallinson, the disfigured pilot. He agrees to accompany his former nurse Elizabeth (Beth) Blanch to Malta. It is Beth, of course, who married Joe’s father, and although Victor later died in service, she decides finally she wishes to see her stepson. Stuart, too, has his reasons for returning to Malta: he is convinced that the accident which downed his Hurricane was not what is seemed, but an act of sabotage, and he is determined to find and kill the perpetrator. Stuart, though, has strong feelings for Elizabeth, and the urge to love and the urge for revenge set up a duality in him that he struggles to resolve. 

The story is told plainly, in fine and unflowery prose, creating a dolorous mood which suits the plot and the characters very well. It’s an impressively restrained novel, a hymn to resilience and love.

The Knitting Station by Kirsti Wishart

This is the basic plot of Kirsti Wishart’s The Knitting Station: at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, a woman who worked at Bletchley Park as a code breaker during the war has suffered a breakdown and is in care. Along with a group of other patients she is taken to a remote Scottish island as a rest cure. There, she becomes convinced the Russians are about to invade the island as a prelude to a full-scale invasion of the UK. Is this just another delusion created by her troubled mind or has she stumbled on a genuine plot? Can she believe the evidence of her own eyes? And, more importantly, will anyone believe what she says? 

All very interesting, you’re probably thinking, although perhaps a little Hitchcockian, formulaic. You can imagine the film version, Sigourney Weaver in the title role, the CGI, the fast cuts, tension ratcheting notch by notch until at the end Sigourney smashes through a window to confront the baddies and save the day. Job done. 

So, you might imagine, you can pretty much guess how this book is going to pan out. But, if that’s what you think, I can tell you that you’re very wrong. How do you explain the psychotic sheep? The secret plans hidden in cunning knitting patterns? The soldiers dressed as models? The magic mushroom stovies? Paramilitary knitters packing pistols? Point to any of those ideas in Hitchcock or Jason Bourne. 

Or anything for that matter. 

In an interview with Alistair Braidwood Kirsti Wishart comments on the shadow of John Buchan which hangs over the book: her central character, Hannah Richards, is, after all, an inversion of Buchan’s most famous creation, Richard Hannay, while the plot and location of the novel – a herd of mysterious sheep on an equally mysterious island – is a clear reference to Buchan’s The Island of Sheep. Buchan, of course, is a problematic character these days, with his imperialist views and casual racism and sexism. 

“I can completely understand,” Wishart says, “why people might object to Buchan’s work and they’d be right to do so! He worked for the Ministry of Information and his novels are imbued with an imperial, hierarchical view of the world we’re still in the slow process of dismantling.” 

She goes on to say she tried to re-read The Thirty-Nine Steps a few years ago but couldn’t get beyond the views expressed. All the same, she argues, Buchan “is a hugely influential figure” and it’s hard to argue with that. 

The Knitting Station is Kirsti Wishart’s response, a feminist and lesbian take on that gnarled old standard, the thriller, in which she subverts all the old tropes of the genre with joyous abandon. 

The plot is a mash-up of Ealing Comedy and James Bond, so I’ll leave it to Kirsti to describe it herself, in an interview with the Portobello Book Blog: 

It’s set in the early 1960s and features lesbians, knitting, lots of sheep and some hallucinogenic stovies (what more could you want!). Hannah Richards, a former Bletchley Park code-breaker recovering from a nervous breakdown is sent with a group of patients to the remote island of Tharn, famed for its knitwear, to undergo a form of knitting therapy. She begins to suspect the island is being invaded by Russian agents but can’t be sure if this is a symptom of her condition or a dangerous reality. It’s been described variously as ‘John Buchan on mushrooms’ and ‘Nancy Drew meets One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.’ My own description is ‘Scooby Doo on too much Irn Bru’, a daft novel for daft times. 

Well, I don’t know how can you better that, so I won’t try. This is tremendous fun, the lightness of touch and whimsy concealing a very deft authorial touch: Kirsti Wishart is a terrific writer, confident and original, happy to plough her own furrow (if that’s not a poor metaphor for a book about sheep) and write something which truly defies categorisation. 

Great stuff.

The Second Cut by Louise Welsh

In my review of the first Rilke novel, The Cutting Room, I observed how refreshing it was to have a main character who happened to be gay without this having to be, in some way, the point of the story. And I maintain that’s true. However, in her Afterword to the long-awaited sequel, The Second Cut, author Louise Welsh explains: 

I wrote [The Cutting Room] in a white-hot rage, during the Keep the Clause campaign. The campaign objected to the repeal of Section 28… which made it an offence for schools and local authorities to “promote homosexuality”. The clause contributed towards intensifying an already hostile environment for LGBTQ+ people. 

There are twenty years between the writing of these two novels, and that gap is reflected in the narratives’ timeframes, too, with the second novel set in 2022. Welsh notes that things have changed for the better in the intervening period: people can be open about their sexuality and gays on TV are no longer only there to provide the laughs. Section 28 is history and, indeed, many schools now happily debate LGBTQ+ issues. In The Second Cut we see progress, too. It begins with Rilke attending a gay wedding and while, before, he could be arrested for a late night assignation, it can now be arranged through Grindr, no fuss, little danger. 

That’s not to say we’re living in a rainbow paradise, however, in either Welsh’s Glasgow or Rilke’s. In the novel we have a clash in George Square over trans rights after a TERF is engaged to speak at the City Chambers. A van full of police officers is on scene and you suspect violence is likely. Informed debate goes out the window. Prejudices remain. Don’t set aside your rage just yet. 

And, although the Glasgow of The Second Cut is, in some respects, more enlightened than that of The Cutting Room, it is still a noir hinterland, peopled by (mostly) men with no scruples and a penchant for violence. The gothic menace that fuelled The Cutting Room remains, the idea that Rilke, very much an individualist with a healthy contempt for convention, is skating once more too close to danger. For all he can at times make himself unlikeable, you can’t help liking Rilke, and you wish he’d be a bit kinder to himself sometimes. But that would never do. Rilke isn’t going to soften any time soon. 

In his second run-out, he is given a tip from friend JoJo about a house clearance in Galloway that could be lucrative and Rilke decides to take it on. Before he can, though, JoJo is dead, found on the streets of Glasgow and presumed to be a junkie dead of either an overdose or hypothermia. Both are common, neither provoke much interest from the authorities. But Rilke is suspicious. And a suspicious Rilke is incapable of keeping his nose out. 

So begins a story which grows ever darker, taking in people smuggling, orgies, drug manufacture, organised crime. Rilke’s sense of honour forces him to do what he knows is reckless, and with every move he comes closer and closer to danger. 

As you would expect, the story rattles along at a satisfying pace as we approach an inevitable denouement. It doesn’t disappoint. 

Rilke remains one of the best creations in contemporary crime fiction, a man who is complex and uncompromising, utterly real. It’s a joy to make his acquaintance again, and I hope it’s not another twenty years before he’s back. 

The Pharmacist by Rachelle Atalla

I remember when I read 1984, and talked about it to people afterwards, being surprised when they declared it was science-fiction. I’d already read quite a bit of Orwell at that time – I was obsessed with Down and Out in Paris and London – and Orwell was very obviously a social realist, so I read 1984 in that vein. It genuinely didn’t dawn on me that it was, clearly, science-fiction. 

Much the same thing happened when I read Rachelle Atalla’s The Pharmacist and then read some online reviews, which talked of it as speculative fiction. Well, of course it is. It’s a dystopian novel set in a future society following a nuclear devastation, with the last few humans living out a tedious, seemingly pointless existence in a nuclear bunker. If that’s not speculative fiction, what is? And yet, like 1984, I read it as a straight narrative. That’s a testament to the skill of the novelist Rachelle Atalla. She has created a world that is alien but immediately and entirely believable. Virtually every review I’ve read of The Pharmacist uses the word “claustrophobic” and it is certainly the case that Atalla has created a work that immerses the reader in its very restricted environment. 

The bunker is populated by the few survivors of some unexplained nuclear catastrophe. These are presumably people of worth or value, men and women with particular skills or attributes considered useful, no doubt taken from the upper strata of the previous society. We are told that anyone outside this and any other nuclear bunkers will be dead, including close family of many of the bunker’s residents. 

This is no idyll the survivors have arrived at, however. They sleep in huge dormitories in bunk beds four high, subsisting on pouches of puréed food and wearing uncomfortable boiler suits. At one point a wall descends, splitting the bunker in two, arbitrarily separating families. No one knows why. Rumours abound, but no one makes any serious attempt to find out. This, then, is a wholly passive society, institutionalised and acquiescent. 

The story is told by Wolfe (her first name is Alison, but first names are little used in the bunker as they are “considered a cast-off from a life that no longer existed”). Wolfe is the eponymous pharmacist who dispenses drugs to the residents, all of whom appear to be on some form of medicine. Her dull existence is shaken, firstly by the arrival of a young woman, Levitt, as her assistant, and secondly by becoming caught up in the circle of ND, the populist Leader of the bunker society. Like all populists – think Trump, Clown Johnson, Viktor Orbán – he cares not a jot for the populace who have afforded him his privileged position. Corruption rules. This is a brutal society where ND’s word is enforced by organised violence, and Wolfe is drawn into a world of lies and deception, setting in motion a chilling and all too credible series of events. 

What makes the world of The Pharmacist so real is the way Atalla weaves together the micro and the macro. The claustrophobia reviewers have highlighted comes from the detail that Atalla lays over the narrative, the recording of minutiae, the way the most trivial detail gains – because of the tedium of the bunker people’s existence – a heightened sense of importance. 

But alongside this, the human element of the story, is the macro, or political level. And this is the core of the novel: what is society? How does it operate? How is it corrupted and how complicit are we – every single one of us – in that corruption? It seems particularly apposite to be discussing these questions at this juncture in Britain’s story: daily we are witnessing our own society rotting from the head down, our political class comprising the corrupt and the complacent, our media craven and complicit and the general population seemingly content to allow our ethics and sense of decency to wither and die. What happens in The Pharmacist is what is happening to us today. Give us a few years and that bunker will be our reality. 

Kirstin Innes, reviewing the novel in the Press and Journal, noted that Atalla revealed Donald Trump and Boris Johnson had both informed the development of the character of ND. It is the cult of personality that such populists create which is so dangerous and Atalla explores this in a compelling and chilling way. The insidiousness of these tyrants’ assaults on decent society is deeply troubling. This is how the law is transformed into a plaything, there to do the bidding of the leader. Don’t like an election result? Change it. In danger of falling foul of the ministerial code? Dilute the code. Don’t like the look of that young man? Send him to Rwanda. Drip, drip, drip, society is corroded, compromised, sullied. 

I suppose, then, the big fear is that The Pharmacist could be all too prophetic. This is what Wolfe is confronted with and what, ultimately, she fights against. She represents what we all hope we might be, when the time comes, when decisions have to be made, fights fought. She is decency, the love that must prevail. The society that holds. 

The Pharmacist is a novel that works on different levels, a thrilling story which at the same time projects a powerful message about the dangers of corruption. We would do well to heed it.