A number is a handle with no identity in it

One of the two leads in Pantheon deals in figures for a living. He prices things, he checks other people’s arithmetic, and he trusts a total more than he trusts a face. That is his whole way of being in a room, and it was supposed to stay his.

It did not. Somewhere between his head and mine the numbers got into everything: totals, tallies, the little sums people say out loud without thinking about it. By the time I noticed, they were miles past his own chapters and into the narration of people who are nothing like him. I also learned something about myself that I had not known, which is that I have a soft spot for four and nine.

Pantheon is my romantic conspiracy thriller set in Hong Kong. Sixty-three chapters, close third, past tense, out on 2 October, and the first of three. Reading the back half at the end of August I kept stopping on the word four, five chapters running, and my notes to myself escalate in a way I would find funny if the book belonged to somebody else. First a question: i am wondering with so many 4 — wont the readers be confused? Two chapters later, fourrrrrrr. Then there is many four in chp 50. Then capitals.

Counting was the wrong question

My first thought was that there were simply too many of them, so I went to thin them out.

That turned out to be the wrong question, asked three different ways. Four is the fourth most common number in the book, which is unremarkable. It is not clustered anywhere strange. And the two chapters I had complained loudest about each call one single set of things by lots of different names, so neither of them can confuse anybody on its own.

Three answers, all true, and none of them about what I was actually reading. That is the part worth keeping. Three answers in a row that each say this is fine do not mean the reader is wrong. They mean you have been asking a question the reader was never asking. I had even written the right question down and then failed to hear it: they are being referred across chapters. Then I went and counted how often they appeared.

The number had become the name of the thing

What I was reacting to was not four. It was the four.

The four. Those four. All four. The fourth. A definite four tells a reader they are already holding a particular set of things and know exactly which one you mean. Most of the fifty-four in the book cost nothing, because they answer themselves inside their own sentence: the fourth week, the fourth cabinet. Those were never the problem.

The problem is that across the last ten chapters, the four points at five different things. A set of sheets in one chapter. A set of lines in another, entirely unrelated. A set of documents in a third. The same phrase again in a fourth for a different package of paper. Then the documents again, twice more.

So the book teaches you over ten chapters that the four is a name, and then gives that name to five different objects. If you had lost the thread even slightly, you were not reading. You were doing a small sum in your head to work out which set of four this one was, and the number was doing work the story should have been doing.

A number is a handle with no identity in it. That is the fault in one line, and it is why no amount of counting could find it. Counting tells you how often a word turns up. It has nothing to say about whether the reader knows which one you mean.

The count stays where you meet the set

The rule is one sentence and it is about the reader rather than the total. The count stays in the chapter where the set is introduced, and comes out of every callback after that. Once you have met the set there is only one set in play, so the documents is perfectly clear, and the four documents is arithmetic nobody needs to do.

Twelve places across eight chapters, and the edits are boring on purpose. The four leases became the leases. Those four volumes became those volumes. Any of the four became any of the others. One chapter reached back to the same set four times in a short span and needed real sentences rather than deletions: the first became It, the second He read it a third time, the third turned into a question, and the fourth simply says what the thing says.

One chapter keeps every single one of its fours. Chapter 55 is where you meet the set, and where the counting is the scene rather than a decoration on it, so stripping the numbers out would take away the one place you can learn them. The rule stops at its door. An exemption you write down is a rule; an exemption you make quietly is a leak.

The whole fix cost fourteen words, and nothing in the book now asks you to carry a count from one chapter into another.

There is one edit I am still pleased with. A character says a five-digit serial number out loud, once. It is invented, it appears nowhere else, and it means nothing at all. It read Four, four, zero, seven, one. Two fours in five digits. Of course it changed.

Nine went the other way, twice

I flagged nine the same week, in the same register: nine again????

The first time, in chapter 23, I lost the argument with myself. I had decided the nines were the chapter’s spine and should stand whole, then asked again anyway, twice, and asking twice settles it. The chapter went from ten down to six. What made it safe was a rule I only worked out in order to carry it out: cut the places where the narration is counting them over again, like counting change out loud, and keep every place where the number is the argument. So the nine slips became the slips. But a call and its answer twenty lines apart both keep the figure, because the second half is only an answer if it repeats the count.

The second time, deep in the endgame, the same suspicion was right about the feeling and wrong about the fix. The book averages two nine-words a chapter; chapters 42 to 45 carry eighteen between them, which is the densest run in it. I was reading the exact hot spot, so the sensation was real and it was local. Then I went looking for what to cut and there was nothing loose in it. The invoices are what those chapters are about. One duration is the horror of the scene. One is an idiom rather than a count. One is a child’s age, tied to a school year. Exactly one clause came out, and only because the thing it establishes is already said six lines further down.

A run built entirely out of numbers that are doing work is not a mannerism, and cutting one to lower a count would have cost a fact. The same number gets decided in opposite directions depending on the job it is doing: nineteen times came out of one chapter because the next sentence already said it, and nineteen minutes stayed in another because the paragraph under it is about a man counting, and counting is all he has.

Both flags were the same complaint in the same words in the same week. One had a mechanism under it that fourteen words fixed. The other is what four chapters of load-bearing counting feel like from the inside, and there is no version of that I can fix by measuring it better.