The Time Has Come (the Walrus said)

I just finished reading a novel by PD James.

More fool me I suppose. I just don’t like the rather prissy way she writes, I’d figured this out years ago. But I got bored and picked one up a week or two ago.

PD James is now in her 70’s, or thereabouts, and it shows. The style of writing is from a bygone age, when words were crafted for how they sounded, as much if not more than what they meant.

Here is an example, which I found particularly irritating:

An arrow in white wood with the words ‘Perigold Pottery’ painted in black was fixed to a post stuck into the grass of the verge.

This sentance, at first glance, seems just fine. Once you start to analyse the grammar, it’s actually very difficult to understand. There are 7 subjects (things being referenced) here: the arrow, the wood, the words, the paint, the post, the grass, and the verge. In a single sentence!

This could be be re-written: “A post stuck in the grass of the verge had an arrow, showing the words ‘Perigold Pottery’”. Or it could be trimmed even more, and just say there was sign. Why all the excessive detail? It was of no relevance whatsoever to the story.

There are more examples than I care to go and find, that above is only notable because my irritation level had risen to the point where I wanted to grab a red pen and start marking up changes to the text.

Modern writing tends to be tighter, more terse, and requires far less hard intellectual work to read. Desirable, when we read for pleasure or to escape the hard intellectual work of the daily grind. Don’t give me more of what I’m trying to escape from!

Gah!!!