New books and old gripes.

I thought I’d break new ground for myself and order books that got good reviews in the Independent. Not entirely a successful exercise. The ‘mystery’ I chose, by D.J.Taylor ‘At the Chime of a City Clock’ I didn’t like at all though it was set in the 1930’s an era that usually interests me. Frankly I was bored. The characters were’t interesting enough and the story dull. The writing is good but there is a wealth of difference between mere style and sparkling entertainment. I do like the cover design though.

The other novel is so far producing more pleasure pheromones, though I feared for it to begin with. “The Still Point” by Amy Sackville. The young (woefully young from my point of view... younger than my youngest child...) writer is acclaimed in the blurb as a sister to Virginia Woolf with a passion for icebergs. For the first two pages I was disposed to dislike it. Too many adjectives I thought. Emperor Joseph II criticised Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro for having too many notes and that has often come to my mind when I’m reading pretentious, poorly written, literature.

Eventually I changed my mind. A narrative began to emerge like patterns of raindrops on a rain-spattered window (see - style is catching!). I was pulled in and now I am enjoying it.

This journal is full of lists of things that annoy me. In my own defence I want to say that I am equally easily delighted by people and happenings. Now I’m going to add to the list. Just as I was getting hooked into the storyline, Amy uses ‘devouring’ where ‘eating’ would have done perfectly well. Devouring is a good word but its place is in figurative usage in my opinion, not in a simple sentence talking abut a child eating a sandwich.

Choice of language exposes people. Women who refer to their uterus as their ‘womb’ annoy me. I haven’t analysed my reaction, I leave others to do that, but to me it sounds sort of coy, earth-motherish and biblical, all of which are euphemisms for dimwittedness in my book. Oh dear.

Then there are the ones who say someone has ‘collapsed.’ Buildings collapse when the contractors use poor cement. Sandcastles collapse; a house of cards collapses; financial institutions collapse. People have heart attacks or strokes, suffer from anaphylactic shock, are traumatised by events or prostrated by grief. They don’t collapse.

It’s not the imprecision that grates, it’s melodramatic and that is never as convincing as more controlled wording.