The number of historical romances featuring young women in low cut dress/nightgown roaming about the place carrying candelabra. Nobody ever explores spooky Gothic mansions with warm clothes, sensible shoes and a lamp.
By the way, @TurquoiseTastic, may I ask what Knowledge of Angels is about, and what the hackneyed messages were?
It's a long time since I read it but the premise was "visitor from enlightened planet visits religious society, produces stunningly novel objections to theism such as 'what about suffering'..."
It's interesting that some find Austen verbose and Tolkein straightforward whilst I find it the other way round. Austen's prose is crystal-clear in comparison with Tolkein's muddy murk.
Interesting also that some like both.
Just shows how diverse we all are in how we are wired.
Hemingway takes concision to an extreme. It gets tiresome after a while.
As for Joyce, I love his short stories and am glad somebody wrote 'Ulysses' and 'Finnegan's Wake' but am equally glad not to have to plough through them again.
On the issue of plots and characterisation ... Bernard Cornwell is 'all plot' and limited characterisation. Some literary fiction is all characterisation and no plot.
It's interesting that some find Austen verbose and Tolkein straightforward whilst I find it the other way round. Austen's prose is crystal-clear in comparison with Tolkein's muddy murk.
Interesting also that some like both.
Just shows how diverse we all are in how we are wired.
Hemingway takes concision to an extreme. It gets tiresome after a while.
As for Joyce, I love his short stories and am glad somebody wrote 'Ulysses' and 'Finnegan's Wake' but am equally glad not to have to plough through them again.
On the issue of plots and characterisation ... Bernard Cornwell is 'all plot' and limited characterisation. Some literary fiction is all characterisation and no plot.
Perhaps the reason I find Austen verbose and Tolkien clear is because I want to hear about Tolkien's imaginarium and couldn't give a flying one about Austen's world. I know hers was much closer to the real one than Tolkien's, but perhaps that's the point - fiction at base is Making Stuff Up and if you're doing that, why not *Really* Make Stuff Up, from the place and time upwards than just make stuff up that looks rather like stuff that actually happens anyway?
It's really much the same reason that I can read a detailed account of a new dinosaur discovery but not take in a newspaper story about a football match.
@Gamma Gamaliel 's rejection of Tolkien (not Tolkein) and all his works is proof that Satan is indeed roaming the world, devouring souls...
BTW, as regards the long novels of some 19thC writers (Hardy for one), remember that they were writing for serial publication in magazines, and needed to come up with a certain number of words for each monthly issue.
Tess of the d'Urbervilles is, in the opinion of many, Hardy's finest novel, and Tess herself is one of the greatest female characters in English fiction...
Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone and The Woman in White are both quite long, but saved from tedium IMNSHO by featuring the points of view of several different (and wonderfully portrayed) characters, each writing (as it were) his or her own version of events as personally experienced.
Books when I can spot the inaccuracies drive me nuts for this reason. Particularly when someone has the credentials to know better.
Yes. I read a murder mystery, set in the 1940s, where the crimes were committed by the driver of a double-decker bus, who hid the body in the cubby-hole under the stairs.
No mention of a conductor ...
Another story, set in Edwardian London, with characters hopping on and off trams at Oxford Circus. There never were any trams (apart from the Kingsway Underpass) in central London.
It's interesting that some find Austen verbose and Tolkein straightforward whilst I find it the other way round. Austen's prose is crystal-clear in comparison with Tolkein's muddy murk.
Interesting also that some like both.
Just shows how diverse we all are in how we are wired.
Hemingway takes concision to an extreme. It gets tiresome after a while.
As for Joyce, I love his short stories and am glad somebody wrote 'Ulysses' and 'Finnegan's Wake' but am equally glad not to have to plough through them again.
On the issue of plots and characterisation ... Bernard Cornwell is 'all plot' and limited characterisation. Some literary fiction is all characterisation and no plot.
Perhaps the reason I find Austen verbose and Tolkien clear is because I want to hear about Tolkien's imaginarium and couldn't give a flying one about Austen's world. I know hers was much closer to the real one than Tolkien's, but perhaps that's the point - fiction at base is Making Stuff Up and if you're doing that, why not *Really* Make Stuff Up, from the place and time upwards than just make stuff up that looks rather like stuff that actually happens anyway?
It's really much the same reason that I can read a detailed account of a new dinosaur discovery but not take in a newspaper story about a football match.
Sure, but this is a comment on the content not the writing style.
It's not that I'm saying that I prefer reading social comedy from Regency England over very realised descriptions of fantasy worlds. Far from it.
What I am saying is that stylistically, I find Austen's pin-sharp prose more digestible than Tolkien's turgid and over-written style.
I'd also be more interested in reading the account of a discovery of a new dinosaur (or, rather, an old one newly discovered 😉) than an account of a football match. But the football account could well be better written than the paleontology one.
We are talking about writing styles here, not subject matter.
However, the current stylistic trend in literary fiction to write dialogue without quotation marks really irks me. There are books I've enjoyed that do this, but it is a hurdle for me to overcome. First, because it removes a useful tool for understanding what's written -- without quotation marks it's hard to tell whether a character is saying something aloud, or just thinking it. Second, because I feel like it's something writers do to make their writing seem more "literary" (and thus more likely to be nominated for awards) -- a kind of style marker that not only adds nothing to the quality of the writing, but actually takes something away.
I think the only book that eschews quotation marks I can recall reading is Cry, the Beloved Country. As I recall, Paton uses em-dashes to indicate dialogue. It was odd, but I got used to it, and thought it was worth it for the story. But I wouldn’t want a steady diet of it.
And @Gamma Gamaliel, it’s okay to feel the way you do about Tolkien. Everyone is entitled to be wrong about something.
I vaguely recall that Tolkein was all too aware that he could write very stodgy stuff, I read somewhere that he described his own translation of Beowulf as "a rivulet of text running through a forest of marginal notes".
If someone makes a case that Tolkien crafted highly detailed fantasy worlds then I'd applaud.
Tolkien certainly did that.
It's when people try to make out that his writing style is clear and a model of lucidity that I take my stand.
There's no definition of clarity or lucidity that I am aware of that can be applied to his novels. None.whatsover.
His prose is dense, over-written and turgid in the extreme. That's not to say he didn't invent entertaining plots and memorable characters. Far from it. But stylistically his writing sucks.
On the quotation marks thing. Joyce used em-dashes and I've seen plenty of them in recent Irish short stories.
The short story is bigger in the US and in Ireland than here in the UK.
Contemporary Irish fiction is well worth checking out.
If we were to talk about exemplary writing styles rather than execrable and loathsome ones then we'd be well advised to read Claire Keegan.
Now that's prose writing!
If Tolkien had taken lessons from her he'd have got straight to the point and cut the crap out of his novels. They'd be the slimmer but the better for it.
I can't for the life of me understand how people can criticise Dickens, Hardy or Austen for 'longeurs' and opacity when Tolkien out-opaques them all.
Sure, elves and hobbits and fantasy worlds are compelling. But that's down to the subject matter not the prose style.
I think the point I'm making is that the clarity or turgidity of prose can be much more subjective than we are admitting here, and our assessment of it can be very much coloured by how engaging we find the subject matter.
As far as Tolkien is concerned, I'm really not seeing it myself. The level of detail seems normal for the genre. I wonder if you might give some examples of passages you think overlong, and how you'd rewrite them?
I think the point I'm making is that the clarity or turgidity of prose can be much more subjective than we are admitting here, and our assessment of it can be very much coloured by how engaging we find the subject matter.
As far as Tolkien is concerned, I'm really not seeing it myself. The level of detail seems normal for the genre. I wonder if you might give some examples of passages you think overlong, and how you'd rewrite them?
I like Alan Garner's books. They are sparsely written. He doesn't do lengthy descriptions of the landscape or of characters. The beauty of this is it lets you visualize it for yourself, form your own mental images. Sometimes his writing is hard to understand: multilayered, with associations and double meanings that make it a kind of prose poem. I hated Boneland when I first read it, but came to like it and appreciate it on subsequent readings. Treacle Walker is another one you need to read more than once, as well. But each time I re-read them I see things I hadn't noticed previously.
It's a style that definitely doesn't appeal to everybody; if you want a book to be immediately accessible, you'd do better to look elsewhere. I think Garner handles it very well. Sparseness is a difficult thing to bring off.
By the way, @TurquoiseTastic, may I ask what Knowledge of Angels is about, and what the hackneyed messages were?
It's a long time since I read it but the premise was "visitor from enlightened planet visits religious society, produces stunningly novel objections to theism such as 'what about suffering'..."
I thought Paton Walsh was a Catholic? (I haven't read the book but I thought it was in the vein of Golding's The Spire or some of Spark's books which are about the failures of Roman Catholics to live up to their religion.)
I think the point I'm making is that the clarity or turgidity of prose can be much more subjective than we are admitting here, and our assessment of it can be very much coloured by how engaging we find the subject matter.
As far as Tolkien is concerned, I'm really not seeing it myself. The level of detail seems normal for the genre. I wonder if you might give some examples of passages you think overlong, and how you'd rewrite them?
By the way, @TurquoiseTastic, may I ask what Knowledge of Angels is about, and what the hackneyed messages were?
It's a long time since I read it but the premise was "visitor from enlightened planet visits religious society, produces stunningly novel objections to theism such as 'what about suffering'..."
Sounds kinda like some of Kurt Vonnegut. The Tralfamadorians are space aliens with a sort of nietzschean philosophy of space, time, death, and hence morality, that's presumably meant to be shocking to Middle Americans.
I think the point I'm making is that the clarity or turgidity of prose can be much more subjective than we are admitting here, and our assessment of it can be very much coloured by how engaging we find the subject matter.
As far as Tolkien is concerned, I'm really not seeing it myself. The level of detail seems normal for the genre. I wonder if you might give some examples of passages you think overlong, and how you'd rewrite them?
Agreed as to both paragraphs.
Seconded.
And I could add to @KarlLB’s “turgidity of prose can be much more subjective than we are admitting here, and our assessment of it can be very much coloured by how engaging we find the subject matter,” it can also be colored by, for lack of a better way to put it, timing. I can think of a number of books I tried multiple times. The first however many times I found the writing style impenetrable, but with at least some—Look Homeward, Angel comes to mind—I tried yet again and found the style captivating. I can only chalk that up to being in a place in life or mood where the style resonated rather than repelled. It was the right time for the book.
It hasn’t happened with all books. I did finally just accept that the time was never going to be right for Huckleberry Finn.
I wonder where we put the blame (or praise) in relation to translations? I wonder if differences in translators could render some books from an author rather flabby, while others from the same author are wonderfully crisp.
For example, translations of Herman Hesse’s books into English seem to be quite varied in style. It is beyond me to know if that reflects the originals, but German friends tell me that Hesse “writes beautifully” in general terms. Nevertheless I find (e.g.) Siddhartha eminently readable (several times over) but Steppenwolf tedious, and the versions I have read do have different translators.
In general though, one stylistic device I can’t stand is to read a really potent opening chapter of a book, then you turn to chapter 2, subtitled something like “2 weeks earlier” to find that the rest of the book (or most of it) is going to lead up to the opening scene. Maddening.
Thing is I love those. I do often look forward to the endings of books and drama series alike because I find it easier to follow how they get to that ending if I know what it is from the start.
Often when I do it the conventional way I find the ending disappointing. This way I'm not anticipating an exciting ending that doesn't happen.
Of course subjectivity comes into it and whilst I'd be more than happy to find examples of turgid and convoluted prose in 'The Silmirrilion' in particular and LoTR more generally - as well as atmospheric passages that work well - I'm not sure I'm going to convince die-hard Tolkien fans.
When I get more time I'll see if I can reference some passages to illustrate what I mean. The point I'm making isn't that Tolkien is crap but that I can't for the life of me understand why people find him any more lucid than Dickens or Austen say when his writing is hardly known for its crispness and poise.
I don't think you'd find many critics/commentators who'd claim that Tolkien's prose style was anything to write home about, but he has his defenders in that respect as well as his detractors.
We pays our money, we makes our choice.
Please don't misunderstand me. I'm not saying he couldn't write nor that there aren't stand-out passages. There definitely are. He was also a consummate story teller.
I think that's the key here. People find stories about hobbies and elves and battles with orcs more exciting than marriages and social mores in Regency England or Dickensian characters with funny names in Victorian London.
But to say that Austen's prose style is more verbose or less engaging than his is a pretty big stretch.
Hence my contention that it's an issue of subject matter preferences rather than the style itself. Hence the preference for reading about a fossil discovery rather than a football match report. That's got bugger all to do with prose style and everything to do with content.
I'm not a huge Dickens fan but 'A Christmas Carol' and 'Great Expectations' are excellent I think.
Back in the day I much preferred big bustling Russian novels like 'Crime and Punishment' and 'The Brothers Karamazov' to stories about tinkling tea-spoons in Regency drawing rooms. But as I don't know Russian I can't comment on Dostoyevsky's prose style but only on the English translations.
I loved 'Huckleberry Finn' when I was a kid. I had my Dad's illustrated 1948 edition.
If we are talking terrific prose style allied to a cracking adventure story, there's 'Treasure Island' of course.
I think the point I'm making is that the clarity or turgidity of prose can be much more subjective than we are admitting here, and our assessment of it can be very much coloured by how engaging we find the subject matter.
As far as Tolkien is concerned, I'm really not seeing it myself. The level of detail seems normal for the genre. I wonder if you might give some examples of passages you think overlong, and how you'd rewrite them?
My chief complaint about Tolkien is the first half of the Fellowship of the Ring, where we spend whole chapters describing bucolic country paths, and very little happens. I think he probably did it on purpose, to contrast the hobbits' expectations and prior experience of life with what came next, but my pre-teen self almost gave up on it, because it was just so dull.
Unlike @Ariel, I enjoyed the Silmarillion though, although I'll agree that it's hard-going in patches in the middle.
Has anyone else read Janny Wurts's "Wars of Light and Shadow" series? I picked up the first book of the series from the bookstall at school when I was 16. The 11th and final book is due to be published next month. Her language in these books is deliberately ornate - this is a deliberate stylistic choice: whenever she's describing what she calls "the mysteries", the ornate multi-layered and multi-faceted language comes out, in a deliberate choice to hint at the complexities that exist beyond human perception. I find it quite effective (and I'm a big fan of all her work, but this series in particular).
In general though, one stylistic device I can’t stand is to read a really potent opening chapter of a book, then you turn to chapter 2, subtitled something like “2 weeks earlier” to find that the rest of the book (or most of it) is going to lead up to the opening scene. Maddening.
With you there. I read the sample opening chapter of a medieval crime novel, which was a rather too graphic description of hanging, drawing and quartering. You trust the main character will be rescued from the scaffold, but don't really want the business of finding out how he got there. I like endings to come as a surprise.
I think the point I'm making is that the clarity or turgidity of prose can be much more subjective than we are admitting here, and our assessment of it can be very much coloured by how engaging we find the subject matter.
As far as Tolkien is concerned, I'm really not seeing it myself. The level of detail seems normal for the genre. I wonder if you might give some examples of passages you think overlong, and how you'd rewrite them?
My chief complaint about Tolkien is the first half of the Fellowship of the Ring, where we spend whole chapters describing bucolic country paths, and very little happens.
I'm not sure that's true. I've just checked the chapters of Book I and I can't find one that's just about country paths, let alone a plurality. A great deal happens in Book I - not least the setting of the Ring in history.
Of course subjectivity comes into it and whilst I'd be more than happy to find examples of turgid and convoluted prose in 'The Silmirrilion' in particular and LoTR more generally - as well as atmospheric passages that work well - I'm not sure I'm going to convince die-hard Tolkien fans.
When I get more time I'll see if I can reference some passages to illustrate what I mean. The point I'm making isn't that Tolkien is crap but that I can't for the life of me understand why people find him any more lucid than Dickens or Austen say when his writing is hardly known for its crispness and poise.
I don't think you'd find many critics/commentators who'd claim that Tolkien's prose style was anything to write home about, but he has his defenders in that respect as well as his detractors.
We pays our money, we makes our choice.
Please don't misunderstand me. I'm not saying he couldn't write nor that there aren't stand-out passages. There definitely are. He was also a consummate story teller.
I think that's the key here. People find stories about hobbies and elves and battles with orcs more exciting than marriages and social mores in Regency England or Dickensian characters with funny names in Victorian London.
But to say that Austen's prose style is more verbose or less engaging than his is a pretty big stretch.
Hence my contention that it's an issue of subject matter preferences rather than the style itself. Hence the preference for reading about a fossil discovery rather than a football match report. That's got bugger all to do with prose style and everything to do with content.
I'm not a huge Dickens fan but 'A Christmas Carol' and 'Great Expectations' are excellent I think.
Back in the day I much preferred big bustling Russian novels like 'Crime and Punishment' and 'The Brothers Karamazov' to stories about tinkling tea-spoons in Regency drawing rooms. But as I don't know Russian I can't comment on Dostoyevsky's prose style but only on the English translations.
I loved 'Huckleberry Finn' when I was a kid. I had my Dad's illustrated 1948 edition.
If we are talking terrific prose style allied to a cracking adventure story, there's 'Treasure Island' of course.
I think you're trying to find an objectivity in these different writers' styles that is much less evident than you are implying. Content is vital to maintaining a reader's interest, which is why a 20 minute sermon can seem far longer and harder to maintain attention to than a two hour Marvel movie.
In general though, one stylistic device I can’t stand is to read a really potent opening chapter of a book, then you turn to chapter 2, subtitled something like “2 weeks earlier” to find that the rest of the book (or most of it) is going to lead up to the opening scene. Maddening.
Yes. I've just read one like that and it is quite an irritating technique.
My chief complaint about Tolkien is the first half of the Fellowship of the Ring, where we spend whole chapters describing bucolic country paths, and very little happens. I think he probably did it on purpose, to contrast the hobbits' expectations and prior experience of life with what came next, but my pre-teen self almost gave up on it, because it was just so dull.
I actually didn't mind that too much - you mean the party and all the chat, then the move from Bag End, the journey through the forest where they encounter (sort of) the first Black Rider, then the tramp through the rest of the scenery until they get lost and rescued by Bombadil. There's a lot of that. But I preferred it to the boring battle scenes later against the orcs, with Helm's Deep and the forces of Rohan and all that.
Translations can sometimes be obviously translations, but others are great - I think a lot of us probably enjoyed Tove Jansson's "Moomin" books as children without ever thinking about how they might have read in Finnish or seeing anything that suggested the books might not have been written in English originally.
Then again, I read Hans Fallada's "Alone in Berlin" a couple of years ago which simply didn't come across like the work of a native English speaker. The characters seemed quite suddenly excitable throughout the book (they'd be having conversations and one would suddenly start yelling or jumping to his feet and shouting). I haven't read any other German books in translation other than Emil and the Detectives so I can't judge, but it did remind me of The Good Soldier Švejk, which is a Czech book I read in translation.
@Gamma Gamaliel, I do trust that you can appreciate the amusing irony that you’ve written 800+ words over six posts to criticize Tolkien’s writing style as “[f]latulent prose that goes on and on and on and then on and on some more” and “dense, over-written and turgid in the extreme.”
In fairness to Tolkien he has undergone recent critical re-evaluation which defends his prose style against the snooty dismissiveness of earlier critics.
I've got to be honest. I find my visceral reaction against certain aspects of Tolkien's work lies in its sheer popularity. Or the way some fans seem to treat it with the reverence given to holy writ.
I think it was Auden who said he'd never argued so much over any other book. It certainly divides opinion. It's very 'Marmite' that way.
There is a swing and cadence to some passages which fits the mythic subject matter. He's also very clever in how he devises suitable dialogue for different types of characters.
I think it's only right that there has been recent critical re-evaluation and that has certainly redressed a dismissive imbalance from earlier critics.
What I still don't see is that he is any 'easier' to read than 19th century novelists. But then his prose is doing a different job to theirs. Within its own genre and frame of reference it fits the subject matter. I won't deny that.
I'm still not a fan but can certainly see the craft and skill in passages like that. Also how steeped Tolkien was in the rhythms and cadences of scripture and of epic poetry.
I was amused by this reaction from Tolkien. There are some awesome aspects to the creation of his fantasy world - but plot holes abound somewhat, or rather characters making very odd choices. Aragorn dismisses his ghost army rather prematurely as well.
I have not read any Tolkien since my first year at high school. Our teacher was a fan, so The Hobbit was our class reading. I didn't enjoy it. However, perhaps I'll go back and give it another try, it seems unfair to judge and write him off based on my 12 year old self.
I have not read any Tolkien since my first year at high school. Our teacher was a fan, so The Hobbit was our class reading. I didn't enjoy it. However, perhaps I'll go back and give it another try, it seems unfair to judge and write him off based on my 12 year old self.
Well, give it a go (again), but I don't think The Hobbit is by any means Tolkien's finest work. Some of his attempts to speak to a juvenile audience are excruciating...
Lord of the Rings is a long read, but worth the effort.
I have not read any Tolkien since my first year at high school. Our teacher was a fan, so The Hobbit was our class reading. I didn't enjoy it. However, perhaps I'll go back and give it another try, it seems unfair to judge and write him off based on my 12 year old self.
Well, give it a go (again), but I don't think The Hobbit is by any means Tolkien's finest work. Some of his attempts to speak to a juvenile audience are excruciating...
As a Friday treat, one of the nuns at our primary school used to read us a chapter of The Hobbit . I loved it, and asked my mother for a copy. It was my introduction to Tolkien.
I do hate that so many fantasy books seem to have reviewers to carelessly throw out comments like "comparable to Tolkien" - well yes, the book is comparable to Tolkien, but more by contrast than similarity.
However, the current stylistic trend in literary fiction to write dialogue without quotation marks really irks me. There are books I've enjoyed that do this, but it is a hurdle for me to overcome. First, because it removes a useful tool for understanding what's written -- without quotation marks it's hard to tell whether a character is saying something aloud, or just thinking it. Second, because I feel like it's something writers do to make their writing seem more "literary" (and thus more likely to be nominated for awards) -- a kind of style marker that not only adds nothing to the quality of the writing, but actually takes something away.
I think the only book that eschews quotation marks I can recall reading is Cry, the Beloved Country. As I recall, Paton uses em-dashes to indicate dialogue. It was odd, but I got used to it, and thought it was worth it for the story. But I wouldn’t want a steady diet of it.
And @Gamma Gamaliel, it’s okay to feel the way you do about Tolkien. Everyone is entitled to be wrong about something.
Roddy Doyle uses hyphens to open the spoken words. I like it, finding it easy to read, and adopted it for some short stories a long time ago. Perhaps it makes the writer feel closer to the fictional characters than doing it the proper way? I think that's how it worked for me.
I have not read any Tolkien since my first year at high school. Our teacher was a fan, so The Hobbit was our class reading. I didn't enjoy it. However, perhaps I'll go back and give it another try, it seems unfair to judge and write him off based on my 12 year old self.
Well, give it a go (again), but I don't think The Hobbit is by any means Tolkien's finest work. Some of his attempts to speak to a juvenile audience are excruciating...
As a Friday treat, one of the nuns at our primary school used to read us a chapter of The Hobbit . I loved it, and asked my mother for a copy. It was my introduction to Tolkien.
I do hate that so many fantasy books seem to have reviewers to carelessly throw out comments like "comparable to Tolkien" - well yes, the book is comparable to Tolkien, but more by contrast than similarity.
I think the only book that eschews quotation marks I can recall reading is Cry, the Beloved Country. As I recall, Paton uses em-dashes to indicate dialogue. It was odd, but I got used to it, and thought it was worth it for the story. But I wouldn’t want a steady diet of it.
Roddy Doyle uses hyphens to open the spoken words. I like it, finding it easy to read, and adopted it for some short stories a long time ago. Perhaps it makes the writer feel closer to the fictional characters than doing it the proper way? I think that's how it worked for me.
Re those examples from @Nick Tamen and @Stercus Tauri: I don't so much mind the use of dashes instead of quotation marks -- at least then you're still doing something to indicate the words that are spoken aloud. Neither Roddy Doyle nor Alan Paton are typical of the kind of thing I'm thinking of.
Just to give an example of what irks me with the lack of quotation marks, here's a short excerpt chosen at random from massive literary fiction blockbuster Sally Rooney's novel Normal People (as per @Gamma Gamaliel's comment above that "contemporary Irish fiction is worth checking out" -- but even if Gamma hadn't said that, Rooney is the first writer I think of for this, not because she started the trend by any means but because she so perfectly exemplifies what annoys me about it):
Lorraine got home that afternoon. Before she'd even put her keys on the table she said: Is that the washing machine? Connell nodded. She crouched down and looked through the round glass window into the drum, where his sheets were tossing around in the froth.
I'm not going to ask, she said.
What?
She started to fill the kettle, while he leaned against the countertop.
Why your bedclothes are in the wash, she said. I'm not asking.
He rolled his eyes just for something to do with his face. You think the worst of everything, he said.
There are speech tags and paragraph breaks, so most of the time you actually can tell when someone's speaking aloud, but I just don't see what it adds to the writing, to write like this instead of using quotation marks.
I have heard the case made that taking out the quotation marks makes the speech feel more immediate and closer to the reader, but it has the opposite effect on me. I think what it does in my head is that it makes the spoken words sound flatter and duller -- I don't imagine them spoken aloud in a character's voice the same what I do when they're in quotation marks. But as with everything else in this thread, it's a matter of taste.
@Telford will be pleased to hear that I was already exasperated with the book as it portrayed local police officers as dishonest. I just didn't believe it. The implausible roundabout tail-back was the final straw.
I can easily accept that some local police officers are dishonest.
Tolkein. I found the Silmarillion to be hard work. I have read the Lord of the Rings twice but on both occasions I ignored the 'songs'
Man, for someone in the literary community this thread is kinda depressing.
But to keep it Heavenly, I'll just say that I dislike Hemingway's style (and Rupi Kaur and her ilk if they count as poets) and I think it's good to read things that challenge us even when they make us uncomfy. Sticking with something that is difficult to us is good! Anyone who has studied an ancient language, a thorny contemporary foreign language, or symbolic logic would probably agree.
@Trudy and @Nick Tamen, I can understand the irritation with Sally Rooney's dispensing with quotation marks but I didn't notice after a while. It didn't bother me in the least once I'd got used to it.
But like Trudy, I can't see what it added to the party. It may make the dialogue feel more immediate but as it's good dialogue anyway I think we'd have felt the immediacy of it had the quotation marks been retained.
Well the immediacy is precisely the point. You don't see quote marks when you're speaking with someone, so if you're going for immediacy it makes sense to dispense with them.
I do like Sally Rooney's writing, but I don't think the absence of quotation marks does make it more immediate. If anything, it makes the speech seem less like the actual words her characters use and more like the sort of thing they said.
I think it fits in with her aesthetic of millennial dissatisfaction though I can't quite put my finger on how.
I do like Sally Rooney's writing, but I don't think the absence of quotation marks does make it more immediate. If anything, it makes the speech seem less like the actual words her characters use and more like the sort of thing they said.
I think it fits in with her aesthetic of millennial dissatisfaction though I can't quite put my finger on how.
I guess I don't understand the distinction. It's all "what they said." It's a novel, prose fiction. They didn't actually say any of it because they're fictional characters.
IMHO if the lack of quotation marks forces you to stop and figure out whether you're reading speech or something else every sentence, it's apt to result in less immediacy, not more, as the reader is forced to struggle with an additional level of what-the-fuckery just to understand the text.
I think that's true in some works, and in those works I think they're drawing attention to the artificiality of the work. In others, I think it all just blends together, much as life is like. Jon Fosse's Septology is a good example of this. All of it flows together into the narrative mental space of one guy talking/remembering/thinking or what have you.
Man, for someone in the literary community this thread is kinda depressing.
But to keep it Heavenly, I'll just say that I dislike Hemingway's style (and Rupi Kaur and her ilk if they count as poets) and I think it's good to read things that challenge us even when they make us uncomfy. Sticking with something that is difficult to us is good! Anyone who has studied an ancient language, a thorny contemporary foreign language, or symbolic logic would probably agree.
I read Dickens's Pickwick Papers on an overnight train, when I couldn't sleep. The fact that I was stuck on a train with nothing else to do was the only thing that kept me going through the tediously slow opening. Once I got to about the mid-point, I started to rather enjoy it.
Well the immediacy is precisely the point. You don't see quote marks when you're speaking with someone, so if you're going for immediacy it makes sense to dispense with them.
Well, no, but you don't need quotation marks to tell which bits are them talking, and which bits are actions that they are doing, or some internal monologue, because you hear the noises that they make for the first, you see them doing things for the second, and you don't have access to the third.
If you want an experience that's more like what you get when you're speaking with someone, then what you're looking for is not a novel at all, but a playscript.
Comments
It's a long time since I read it but the premise was "visitor from enlightened planet visits religious society, produces stunningly novel objections to theism such as 'what about suffering'..."
Interesting also that some like both.
Just shows how diverse we all are in how we are wired.
Hemingway takes concision to an extreme. It gets tiresome after a while.
As for Joyce, I love his short stories and am glad somebody wrote 'Ulysses' and 'Finnegan's Wake' but am equally glad not to have to plough through them again.
On the issue of plots and characterisation ... Bernard Cornwell is 'all plot' and limited characterisation. Some literary fiction is all characterisation and no plot.
Perhaps the reason I find Austen verbose and Tolkien clear is because I want to hear about Tolkien's imaginarium and couldn't give a flying one about Austen's world. I know hers was much closer to the real one than Tolkien's, but perhaps that's the point - fiction at base is Making Stuff Up and if you're doing that, why not *Really* Make Stuff Up, from the place and time upwards than just make stuff up that looks rather like stuff that actually happens anyway?
It's really much the same reason that I can read a detailed account of a new dinosaur discovery but not take in a newspaper story about a football match.
BTW, as regards the long novels of some 19thC writers (Hardy for one), remember that they were writing for serial publication in magazines, and needed to come up with a certain number of words for each monthly issue.
Tess of the d'Urbervilles is, in the opinion of many, Hardy's finest novel, and Tess herself is one of the greatest female characters in English fiction...
Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone and The Woman in White are both quite long, but saved from tedium IMNSHO by featuring the points of view of several different (and wonderfully portrayed) characters, each writing (as it were) his or her own version of events as personally experienced.
No mention of a conductor ...
Another story, set in Edwardian London, with characters hopping on and off trams at Oxford Circus. There never were any trams (apart from the Kingsway Underpass) in central London.
Sure, but this is a comment on the content not the writing style.
It's not that I'm saying that I prefer reading social comedy from Regency England over very realised descriptions of fantasy worlds. Far from it.
What I am saying is that stylistically, I find Austen's pin-sharp prose more digestible than Tolkien's turgid and over-written style.
I'd also be more interested in reading the account of a discovery of a new dinosaur (or, rather, an old one newly discovered 😉) than an account of a football match. But the football account could well be better written than the paleontology one.
We are talking about writing styles here, not subject matter.
And @Gamma Gamaliel, it’s okay to feel the way you do about Tolkien. Everyone is entitled to be wrong about something.
If someone makes a case that Tolkien crafted highly detailed fantasy worlds then I'd applaud.
Tolkien certainly did that.
It's when people try to make out that his writing style is clear and a model of lucidity that I take my stand.
There's no definition of clarity or lucidity that I am aware of that can be applied to his novels. None.whatsover.
His prose is dense, over-written and turgid in the extreme. That's not to say he didn't invent entertaining plots and memorable characters. Far from it. But stylistically his writing sucks.
On the quotation marks thing. Joyce used em-dashes and I've seen plenty of them in recent Irish short stories.
The short story is bigger in the US and in Ireland than here in the UK.
Contemporary Irish fiction is well worth checking out.
If we were to talk about exemplary writing styles rather than execrable and loathsome ones then we'd be well advised to read Claire Keegan.
Now that's prose writing!
If Tolkien had taken lessons from her he'd have got straight to the point and cut the crap out of his novels. They'd be the slimmer but the better for it.
I can't for the life of me understand how people can criticise Dickens, Hardy or Austen for 'longeurs' and opacity when Tolkien out-opaques them all.
Sure, elves and hobbits and fantasy worlds are compelling. But that's down to the subject matter not the prose style.
As far as Tolkien is concerned, I'm really not seeing it myself. The level of detail seems normal for the genre. I wonder if you might give some examples of passages you think overlong, and how you'd rewrite them?
It's a style that definitely doesn't appeal to everybody; if you want a book to be immediately accessible, you'd do better to look elsewhere. I think Garner handles it very well. Sparseness is a difficult thing to bring off.
I thought Paton Walsh was a Catholic? (I haven't read the book but I thought it was in the vein of Golding's The Spire or some of Spark's books which are about the failures of Roman Catholics to live up to their religion.)
Seconded.
Sounds kinda like some of Kurt Vonnegut. The Tralfamadorians are space aliens with a sort of nietzschean philosophy of space, time, death, and hence morality, that's presumably meant to be shocking to Middle Americans.
It hasn’t happened with all books. I did finally just accept that the time was never going to be right for Huckleberry Finn.
For example, translations of Herman Hesse’s books into English seem to be quite varied in style. It is beyond me to know if that reflects the originals, but German friends tell me that Hesse “writes beautifully” in general terms. Nevertheless I find (e.g.) Siddhartha eminently readable (several times over) but Steppenwolf tedious, and the versions I have read do have different translators.
In general though, one stylistic device I can’t stand is to read a really potent opening chapter of a book, then you turn to chapter 2, subtitled something like “2 weeks earlier” to find that the rest of the book (or most of it) is going to lead up to the opening scene. Maddening.
Often when I do it the conventional way I find the ending disappointing. This way I'm not anticipating an exciting ending that doesn't happen.
When I get more time I'll see if I can reference some passages to illustrate what I mean. The point I'm making isn't that Tolkien is crap but that I can't for the life of me understand why people find him any more lucid than Dickens or Austen say when his writing is hardly known for its crispness and poise.
I don't think you'd find many critics/commentators who'd claim that Tolkien's prose style was anything to write home about, but he has his defenders in that respect as well as his detractors.
We pays our money, we makes our choice.
Please don't misunderstand me. I'm not saying he couldn't write nor that there aren't stand-out passages. There definitely are. He was also a consummate story teller.
I think that's the key here. People find stories about hobbies and elves and battles with orcs more exciting than marriages and social mores in Regency England or Dickensian characters with funny names in Victorian London.
But to say that Austen's prose style is more verbose or less engaging than his is a pretty big stretch.
Hence my contention that it's an issue of subject matter preferences rather than the style itself. Hence the preference for reading about a fossil discovery rather than a football match report. That's got bugger all to do with prose style and everything to do with content.
I'm not a huge Dickens fan but 'A Christmas Carol' and 'Great Expectations' are excellent I think.
Back in the day I much preferred big bustling Russian novels like 'Crime and Punishment' and 'The Brothers Karamazov' to stories about tinkling tea-spoons in Regency drawing rooms. But as I don't know Russian I can't comment on Dostoyevsky's prose style but only on the English translations.
I loved 'Huckleberry Finn' when I was a kid. I had my Dad's illustrated 1948 edition.
If we are talking terrific prose style allied to a cracking adventure story, there's 'Treasure Island' of course.
My chief complaint about Tolkien is the first half of the Fellowship of the Ring, where we spend whole chapters describing bucolic country paths, and very little happens. I think he probably did it on purpose, to contrast the hobbits' expectations and prior experience of life with what came next, but my pre-teen self almost gave up on it, because it was just so dull.
Unlike @Ariel, I enjoyed the Silmarillion though, although I'll agree that it's hard-going in patches in the middle.
Has anyone else read Janny Wurts's "Wars of Light and Shadow" series? I picked up the first book of the series from the bookstall at school when I was 16. The 11th and final book is due to be published next month. Her language in these books is deliberately ornate - this is a deliberate stylistic choice: whenever she's describing what she calls "the mysteries", the ornate multi-layered and multi-faceted language comes out, in a deliberate choice to hint at the complexities that exist beyond human perception. I find it quite effective (and I'm a big fan of all her work, but this series in particular).
With you there. I read the sample opening chapter of a medieval crime novel, which was a rather too graphic description of hanging, drawing and quartering. You trust the main character will be rescued from the scaffold, but don't really want the business of finding out how he got there. I like endings to come as a surprise.
I'm not sure that's true. I've just checked the chapters of Book I and I can't find one that's just about country paths, let alone a plurality. A great deal happens in Book I - not least the setting of the Ring in history.
I think you're trying to find an objectivity in these different writers' styles that is much less evident than you are implying. Content is vital to maintaining a reader's interest, which is why a 20 minute sermon can seem far longer and harder to maintain attention to than a two hour Marvel movie.
Yes. I've just read one like that and it is quite an irritating technique.
Re Tolkien:
I actually didn't mind that too much - you mean the party and all the chat, then the move from Bag End, the journey through the forest where they encounter (sort of) the first Black Rider, then the tramp through the rest of the scenery until they get lost and rescued by Bombadil. There's a lot of that. But I preferred it to the boring battle scenes later against the orcs, with Helm's Deep and the forces of Rohan and all that.
Translations can sometimes be obviously translations, but others are great - I think a lot of us probably enjoyed Tove Jansson's "Moomin" books as children without ever thinking about how they might have read in Finnish or seeing anything that suggested the books might not have been written in English originally.
Then again, I read Hans Fallada's "Alone in Berlin" a couple of years ago which simply didn't come across like the work of a native English speaker. The characters seemed quite suddenly excitable throughout the book (they'd be having conversations and one would suddenly start yelling or jumping to his feet and shouting). I haven't read any other German books in translation other than Emil and the Detectives so I can't judge, but it did remind me of The Good Soldier Švejk, which is a Czech book I read in translation.
In fairness to Tolkien he has undergone recent critical re-evaluation which defends his prose style against the snooty dismissiveness of earlier critics.
I've got to be honest. I find my visceral reaction against certain aspects of Tolkien's work lies in its sheer popularity. Or the way some fans seem to treat it with the reverence given to holy writ.
I think it was Auden who said he'd never argued so much over any other book. It certainly divides opinion. It's very 'Marmite' that way.
There is a swing and cadence to some passages which fits the mythic subject matter. He's also very clever in how he devises suitable dialogue for different types of characters.
I think it's only right that there has been recent critical re-evaluation and that has certainly redressed a dismissive imbalance from earlier critics.
What I still don't see is that he is any 'easier' to read than 19th century novelists. But then his prose is doing a different job to theirs. Within its own genre and frame of reference it fits the subject matter. I won't deny that.
I'm still not a fan but can certainly see the craft and skill in passages like that. Also how steeped Tolkien was in the rhythms and cadences of scripture and of epic poetry.
I'm certainly not taking that away from him.
Well, give it a go (again), but I don't think The Hobbit is by any means Tolkien's finest work. Some of his attempts to speak to a juvenile audience are excruciating...
Lord of the Rings is a long read, but worth the effort.
Of their time.
I do hate that so many fantasy books seem to have reviewers to carelessly throw out comments like "comparable to Tolkien" - well yes, the book is comparable to Tolkien, but more by contrast than similarity.
Roddy Doyle uses hyphens to open the spoken words. I like it, finding it easy to read, and adopted it for some short stories a long time ago. Perhaps it makes the writer feel closer to the fictional characters than doing it the proper way? I think that's how it worked for me.
Yes, very much so.
Agreed.
Re those examples from @Nick Tamen and @Stercus Tauri: I don't so much mind the use of dashes instead of quotation marks -- at least then you're still doing something to indicate the words that are spoken aloud. Neither Roddy Doyle nor Alan Paton are typical of the kind of thing I'm thinking of.
Just to give an example of what irks me with the lack of quotation marks, here's a short excerpt chosen at random from massive literary fiction blockbuster Sally Rooney's novel Normal People (as per @Gamma Gamaliel's comment above that "contemporary Irish fiction is worth checking out" -- but even if Gamma hadn't said that, Rooney is the first writer I think of for this, not because she started the trend by any means but because she so perfectly exemplifies what annoys me about it):
There are speech tags and paragraph breaks, so most of the time you actually can tell when someone's speaking aloud, but I just don't see what it adds to the writing, to write like this instead of using quotation marks.
I have heard the case made that taking out the quotation marks makes the speech feel more immediate and closer to the reader, but it has the opposite effect on me. I think what it does in my head is that it makes the spoken words sound flatter and duller -- I don't imagine them spoken aloud in a character's voice the same what I do when they're in quotation marks. But as with everything else in this thread, it's a matter of taste.
Tolkein. I found the Silmarillion to be hard work. I have read the Lord of the Rings twice but on both occasions I ignored the 'songs'
I was, of course, born in the land of Mordor.
But to keep it Heavenly, I'll just say that I dislike Hemingway's style (and Rupi Kaur and her ilk if they count as poets) and I think it's good to read things that challenge us even when they make us uncomfy. Sticking with something that is difficult to us is good! Anyone who has studied an ancient language, a thorny contemporary foreign language, or symbolic logic would probably agree.
But like Trudy, I can't see what it added to the party. It may make the dialogue feel more immediate but as it's good dialogue anyway I think we'd have felt the immediacy of it had the quotation marks been retained.
I think it fits in with her aesthetic of millennial dissatisfaction though I can't quite put my finger on how.
I guess I don't understand the distinction. It's all "what they said." It's a novel, prose fiction. They didn't actually say any of it because they're fictional characters.
I read Dickens's Pickwick Papers on an overnight train, when I couldn't sleep. The fact that I was stuck on a train with nothing else to do was the only thing that kept me going through the tediously slow opening. Once I got to about the mid-point, I started to rather enjoy it.
Well, no, but you don't need quotation marks to tell which bits are them talking, and which bits are actions that they are doing, or some internal monologue, because you hear the noises that they make for the first, you see them doing things for the second, and you don't have access to the third.
If you want an experience that's more like what you get when you're speaking with someone, then what you're looking for is not a novel at all, but a playscript.