Arts & crafts

I take back what I said only the other day about historical detail in fiction.
I'm reading A.S. Byatt's The Children's Book, an intricate Art Nouveau gem, layered and woven and brimming with Victorian and Edwardian detail, which is just as it should be for the era, and a triumph of "tell, don't show" (yes, I do have that the right way around).
Points of view are as slippery as a Pre-Raphaelite sprite, descriptions are as richly detailed as Lalique masterpieces, and bald historical fact is not trussed up or embedded in dialogue: one is simply updated by the narrator on the progress of the Boer War or anarchist assassination attempts.
Of course - of course! - historical detail is only annoying and excessive in clumsy hands, and Byatt's hands are masterful.

Thrillers aren't always thrilling

Just finished reading Sarah Waters' latest, The Little Stranger.
It's an odd read.
I get what she's attempting, I really do. But does it work?

In one sense, yes. The setting is a dilapidated country house; the point of view a local lad made good, a doctor, as dull as dishwater, just a little obsessed with the house and its family. Strange things start happening there, sad and violent things, and you know there'll be tears before bedtime (actually, there won't be, because most of the characters are too stiff-upper-lip). All nicely realised.

Waters is doing what she does best, recreating a genre, or perhaps era, of fiction: absorbing it, reliving it, and somehow conveying its essence in both plot and language (if not character). It was pitch-perfect in The Night Watch and Fingersmith. It may be close in this - post-war ghost stories are not my thing.

But it's pretty boring.

The second strange event had me absolutely spooked, though that's not hard since I get too scared to watch the most run-of-the-mill police show on TV. Apart from that it was difficult to engage as a reader, and even more difficult to care about any of the characters.

The central issue is obvious, and one with which many authors have grappled: the unsympathetic narrator.

It's not that Doctor Faraday is completely unsympathetic. We appreciate the class anxieties, the son of the former maid now able to enter the big house as a friend. But, as one reviewer noted, "Waters gives herself a sort of handicap with the dull doctor's narration. This indirectness, which in cruder hands might have led to a yawning insurrection in the reader, becomes essential to the novel's unsettling power".

I missed the unsettling power and felt saddled with the dull doctor, and having figured out the supernatural element about halfway through, plodded on laboriously and loyally to the end.

It also seemed to me that Waters' usual control of her historical detail seems to have gotten away from her: the meticulous descriptions that worked so well in The Night Watch became even more words to wade through here, and seemed often at odds with the doctor's character.

Tricky stuff to pull off, and points for trying, but it doesn't really work. Millions disagree, I'm sure, and it was short-listed for the Booker alongside Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall, the eventual winner; a triumph of the unsympathetic narrator who wins us over completely and utterly.

Note to self: The more historical fiction you read, the less interested you are in historical detail. And remember this warning, since you are currently entangled with a dangerously borderline unsympathetic narrator.

Sharp as

The view from my reading desk: Joan and Jackie helping through the window.




My next book may have to be The Joy of Pruning.
The love of pruning applies, of course, to both gardening and writing. Today I've been doing both.

I feel quite sorry for the cotoneaster, since objectively it's a pretty little thing - one has orange berries, one has red, both quite lovely at this time of year but, sadly, a pest plant in this area.

I feel less sorry for the spare adverbs and adjectives, not to mention gushes of passive voice - can one gush passively? I suppose not - now cluttering up my laptop memory but no longer, happily, my manuscript.
How they got in there in the first place is beyond me.

Purple hebe and purple prose, all gone in one day.
Perhaps the new title should be 101 Ways With Waste.

Tweaks

Gorgeous weekend at my own sacred place.



Final proof-read of the new manuscript. Think it's OK. Then was too stupid to read anything but old gardening maagazines, Vanity Fair, and a Robert Harris thriller.

One day my reading brain will return to normal. I hope.

Some days

"It is tiresome to write a novel, and more so to read it"

~ Théophile Gautier (on whose words I have been hanging all day)