“Good description is a learned skill, one of the prime reasons why you cannot succeed unless you read a lot and write a lot. It’s not just a question of how-to, you see; it’s also a question of how much to. Reading will help you answer how much, and only reams of writing will help you with the how. You can learn only by doing.”
Stephen King’s advice was one Cold Mountain author Charles Fraizer may have thought of while putting the incredibly vivid, albeit perhaps excessive, detail into his aforementioned novel. Though sometimes tedious to read through, Fraizer does give a revival to the dying art of description in modern day literature to expose the world the novel’s protagonist, Inman, lives and struggles in. Fraizer’s imagined world allows us, the readers, to journey on with Inman in his world and get lost in with Inman as if we were traveling with him ourselves.
Fraizer guides readers seamlessly into the world and mind of Inman and we are able to feel and see what Inman does. A reader essentially becomes the protagonist themselves as the descriptions into love, being lost, being found, and everything in-between gives one these emotions that would only be conjured if the reader themselves were torn away from home by the war. Fortunately, readers do not have to wander into the seemingly endless journey and can instead take in the details of the novel to experience the hardships, both physically and mentally, through the safety of their own home.
“She fit her head under his chin, and he could feel her weight settle into him. He held her tight and words spilled out of him without prior composition. And this time he made no effort to clamp them off. He told her about the first time he had looked on the back of her neck as she sat in the church pew. Of the feeling that had never let go of him since. He talked to her of the great waste of years between then and now. A long time gone. And it was pointless, he said, to think how those years could have been put to better use, for he could hardly have put them to worse. There was no recovering them now. You could grieve endlessly for the loss of time and the damage done therein. For the dead, and for your own lost self. But what the wisdom of the ages says is that we do well not to grieve on and on. And those old ones knew a thing or two and had some truth to tell, Inman said, for you can grieve your heart out and in the end you are still where you are. All your grief hasn’t changed a thing. What you have lost will not be returned to you. It will always be lost. You’re left with only your scars to mark the void. All you can choose to do is go on or not. But if you go on, it’s knowing you carry your scars with you. Nevertheless, over all those wasted years, he had held in his mind the wish to kiss her on the back of her neck, and now he had done it. There was a redemption of some kind, he believed, in such complete fulfillment of a desire so long deferred.”
One does not have to have experienced love and all its beautiful, wonderous, oh-so-worth-it, joys and pain to feel what is in Inman’s heart as he laments on the time had and lost with his heart, Ada. The connection between these two characters is so powerful and intense one may being to feel for the fictional Ada themselves before realizing the spell they’ve been put under with Fraizer’s description of love. The longing described to simply kiss Ada’s neck, the grief felt from their separation, the arrow of Cupid’s that hit Inman when he saw the simple girl in the pew, all swoon worthy stories and emotions of the passion and ties that bonded Inman and Ada together. Fraizer crafts a love story that not even Romeo and Juliet, Lancelot and Guinevere, or Odysseus and Penelope’s writers could match.
“Bleak as the scene was, though, there was growing joy in Inman’s heart. He was nearing home; he could feel it in the touch of thin air on skin, in his longing to see the lead of hearth smoke from the houses of people he had known all his life. People he would not be called upon to hate or fear. He rose and took a wide stance on the rock and stood and pinched down his eyes to sharpen the view across the vast propect to one far mountain. It stood apart from the sky only as the stroke of a poorly inked pen, a line thin and quick and gestural. But the shape slowly grew plain and unmistakable. It was to Cold Mountain he looked. He had achieved a vista of what for him was homeland.”
Inman has done it. He has found his way to his lost home. In his accomplishment, the reader themselves have been found. One is transported to the rock Inman stands upon and stares out at the long sought after Cold Mountain. Inman’s pride in realizing his journey home was well worth the trial and tribulations allows the reader to also feel a sense of accomplishment for completing the daunting, nearly impossible, walk with Inman as the invisible companion. Fraizer leaves the reader with the happiness and returned joy Inman has been given, ultimately validating both Inman and the reader’s fight to be found.
Fraizer has a way with words. He invigorates an adjective to be more than just a filler. Instead, giving life and purpose to each word lifting the novel to heights higher than that of the Cold Mountain itself. While stories can offer an escape from the reality, it cannot be fully viewed as a life never led unless given descriptions as real as reality itself. Description in literature creates a craving, a need, for more and more to explore a world created by pencil and paper. Fraizer feeds that craving in a reader by offering Inman’s world and immersing a reader fully, so they will keep reading and exploring, instead of being left out in the “cold” that is of an empty, description-less world.