The divide-and-rule narrative has worked, rather as the "Labour spent all the money" one has worked.
That he is able to do so, daringly abolishing normal narrative rules, is proof of a precocious imagination and technical facility.
From that point on, the campaign of a first lady against two dizzyingly different men -- the famous, irascible mayor of the nation's most chaotic city and a little-known congressman from a tidy corner of Long Island -- defied all the normal narrative rules of a political campaign.
There is a single, constant, correct way of life that cannot be expressed or presented in practices, rules, narratives, maps, examples, songs or any other human or social form of communication and advocacy.
Oksanen hasn't written a tidy novel; to convey the confusion of foreign rule, the narrative jumps around, and story lines are completed by innuendo.
The book is a very big challenge to adapt because it doesn't follow any of the normal rules of narrative.
Claire Denis's film is a mesmeric, masculine ballet whose beauty and confident power, manifested in lugubrious scenes which suspend the normal rules of narrative procedure, simply go beyond conventional ideas of transgression or homoeroticism.
In a novel about the barriers of racial prejudice, where mutual incomprehension seems the rule, the narrative method is appropriate.
It isn't much of an advert for direct action, but it is a powerful reminder of that most fundamental rule of narrative cinema: that actions have consequences.
As an anecdote that illustrates a bigger story about what's wrong with Wall Street the classic "show, don't tell" rule of narrative writing the book works.
Crouching Tiger adopts the convention of the wu xia martial arts stories: in formal combat, the rules of gravity are suspended, and with them the rules of narrative and ordinary human possibility - bringing into the action genre a delirious new sort of magic realism.
