An open reply to Ian Sales' "Ten Greatest Authors"

[lproven]

This is a vastly over-long response to a blog post here by my friend iansales. It seemed too big and involved to leave as a comment, so consider it a sort of open letter.

Interesting stuff, because some I really agree with and others I couldn't disagree more.

As you well know, I consider Harrison & Jones, based on multiple books - 4-5 each - to be unreadable tosh, incoherent, directionless, almost plotless and with prose so laden in pretentious styling that even a sentence can wind me up. Light, I maintain, is a lousy, deeply flawed novel and I would never recommend it to anyone.

Crowley: I've only read Little, Big, a book which I devoutly hated and laboured mightily to finish over nine painful months. It did have engaging elements but he meticulously and methodically threw them away, killing off every engaging character, alienating the reader from each scene and time they'd got involved in.

Park - again, I've only read one: Soldiers of Paradise, as glowingly recommended by Vikki Lee France. I found it stultifyingly dull - I can't remember anything about it except that I had to really wade through what felt like a far longer book than the mere page-count would suggest. The only evocative or atmospheric thing about it was the cover art, from this edition.

Lawrence: again, I've only read one, and like Park or Crowley, it's put me off the rest for life. Sons and Lovers was the single most boring novel I have ever read and nothing about the prose or description struck me at any point. I was reading it as an extracurricular for my Eng Lit 'A' level and I was actively looking for stuff to write about. Nothing. Plotless rambling; sheer tedium.

Fowles: The French Lieutenant's Woman also formed part of my 'A' level. To me an utterly unappealing novel, from blurb or review or description: I'd never have read it if I didn't have to. Oddly, I enjoyed it, though. Quite a lot - I read it at least two or three times, which is praise indeed. Genuinely clever structure and engaging writing. But similarly, nothing else of his has ever remotely appealed in any way - but I ought to. You gave me a copy of The Magus a few years ago, which I will try at some point.

Burgess - I've only read A Mouthful of Air and Language Made Plain (more or less the same book in different editions, and non-fiction). I loved them, passionately. I even tried to memorise the Pushkin poem. Wonderful stuff and it made me want to read more of him. Again, you've given me one of his novels, I think. I'll try it one day, but I am filled with trepidation.

Durrel Sr I was put off from by the affectionate piss-taking in the books of Durrell Jr, whose books I loved unreservedly in my teens. I may only have room for one Durrell, I don't know. Gerald changed the world and made it better; Larry wrote some pretentious books for highbrows. I know which I relate to far more.

WG Sebald, I must confess, I have never even heard of, for which I feel bad.

And then you queer the pitch with Stan Robinson, half of whose books I adore and which moved and affected me, and most of whose other work I still really enjoy even if it lacks the power.

The Mars books, the Science in the Capital books (in with which I include Antarctica), the Three Californias - all are stunning.

Pacific Edge is the one true future of the human race, the only option we have that doesn't destroy us, and we've already thrown it away. We're heading for the Gold Coast only we'll die before we get there. But PE is an important book.

Then there's Icehenge, the Memory of Whiteness and stuff like that - odd yet powerful. The Years of Rice and Salt didn't quite come together for me, although it's still interesting.

And then you get plain ol' weirdness like Galileo's Dream or A Short Sharp Shock that I don't quite know how to deal with.

I think we have almost diametrically-opposed tastes and the crossovers are merely coincidental. You and Simon Bisson have the most eclectic yet catholic reading tastes I know - you really should get to know one another. Simon seems to read mainly in SF and comics, like me, with little mainstream fiction. You both like much that I like, though rarely as much, and love things I hate.

I mean, your list of top SF writers would probably pretty much overlap with my list of the worst, those to be most diligently avoided.

It vexes me. It fascinates me. I feel there must be some common element to the stuff you love but which repels me; I wish I'd kept in practice at the sort of literary dissection that got me a decent 'A' level, so I could analyse the differences. (But of course, that was analysing books and writers, not readers.)

There is something, though.

So here's yet another stab at limning it.

What I consider to be prose that is so ornate, so over-wrought, so stylized that it fails as prose, you actively enjoy.

For me, a great novel contains a great, exciting, engaging plot and great characters (some lovable, some hateable, maybe, but affecting, that get inside you, that you get to know as closely as friends) wrapped in good prose. The words are just the container. They should be clear, allowing you to get at the contents, not obstructing you - but if they are pleasing, if they are in themselves pretty, then that's a benefit, but in most cases, for me, almost the best prose is prose you never notice.

It's like my friend David Julyan, who scores Hollywood films; he did Memento and the Descent and several others. His friends sheepishly admit to him that they like the films he does but don't notice the music. Dave always says that if you notice the music, he's failed. His job is to set the mood, set scenes, create or dispel moods. If you see him doing it, he's been too clumsy and screwed up.

Good fiction writing is like that for me. A novel is like a fragile sculpture in a glass vessel. Like some ever-moving, four-dimensional version of one of those seaside souvenirs full of layers of coloured sand. You hold the jar full of story, and your hands caress it and stroke it, but it's mostly the contents you're there for. No contents and it's just a pretty bottle. The contents are of course shaped by the container. It's a whole. Take away the container completely, you have just a heap of sand, the colours muddyed, the beauty lost.

This is why I seldom really enjoy translated novels - whatever the lovely sculpture was, what you get in translation is usually the contents decanted into a cheap plastic coffee jar. You can see the shape of what was there, but it doesn't sit right in the new vessel and much of the delicate detail has been unavoidably lost. Great translators can get round this, but it's ineffably difficult. The only writing I truly love in translation is Réné Goscinny's Asterix stories, where they are supported and shaped by Albert Uderzo's art. This is sand-scupture with its own skeleton, and in translation, Anthea Bell and Derek Hockridge added their own, transcendently-brilliant shapes to the words. The topical pun-laden French flesh is stripped off the bones, but Bell and Hockridge replace it with new prose with new names full of new English puns. My French is so poor that I can barely perceive the wit in the original, but I've had it explained to me. Those who can appreciate both tell me both are brilliant.

But I'm getting off my point.

I appreciate these sculptures as a whole, but mostly for the contents; the containers are the shaping factor, the skeleton, but they're not the whole nor even the important thing. The beauty of a living animal is not its skeleton, it's that covered in the flesh and the skin and animated by its life: it's the whole. A stuffed gazelle is plangent and a little tragic; a living one on the veldt is grace and elegance incarnate. The play of the muscles is integral. Even the twitches as it's bitten by flies.

If the jar is gnarled with curlicues and bullseyes and fronds and struts and loops like some Chihuly sculpture, that is a distraction, it subtracts from the whole for me. Yes, an interesting bottle helps make it, but the art of the bottle-blower for this notional sand-sculpture is making it pleasing to the hand and mostly the eye while not hindering it. (Aside: I love Chihuly's stuff. It's almost alive and it enchants me. But they're not containers. Glass just happens to be his medium.)

But the ones you value most seem to me to be bottles of fine undyed beach sand, maybe in subtle layers. There might be a faint pattern there, maybe some feint background lines, but they're just there to provide a backdrop for the brilliance of the glasswork. Whereas I see a bottle that is far too busy and won't allow me to see the contents, and when I peer frustratedly and annoyedly through to see what I expect to be the real artwork, I see nothing special. A boring alternation of dark and light ripples, like that left behind by the waves. Pretty but dull, largely meaningless. The works you like seem to me to be where the prose shines and coruscates, where it flips and trips and whirls like some mad frozen explosion, and if you can't see through it very well, it doesn't matter, because it's the glass that is the art, the contents are just the canvas and its backwash of faint colour.

What irritates me, enthralls you, and perhaps vice versa.

KSR is a case in point. Robinson's prose occasionally intrudes into my appreciation. He needs more commas, dammit, and the very stream-of-conscriousness flatness just occasionally jars me out of the revery of appreciation, makes me stop and go "hang on, he said what now? Here, hang on, you can't do that!"

"The elevator cable rose out of the socket like an elevator cable," he wrote in Green Mars, and I did a mental double-take. It may be descriptive but it's like identical rhyme in verse - it irritates me.

To go back to my overstrained metaphor, he makes containers which are notable for their stark simplicity and utter lack of adornment, their extreme minimalism. If he were an industrial designer, his stuff would be sold in Muji among other stuff whose outstanding characteristic is its utter lack of outstanding characteristics. He carefully hand-blows bottles whose spartan geometric lines make it look like the most anonymous mass-produced ones stamped from a mould; the craft is in the apparent lack of artifice.

But then, occasionally, as if by accident - I honestly can't tell if it is or not - but just to confound you, there's a tiny bubble or a cloudy patch, just highlighting that this is a one-off, artfully made to appear without art.

His is a striking prose style, as, I am sure, are those of the others you cite as your best. Fowles' prose is, as I recall from the one example I've read, quite unornamented, but the cleverness of TFLW is in its framing device, the breaking of the fourth wall, the author repeatedly dropping out of the storytelling to write directly, person-to-person with the reader. It'as very bold and very rare in fiction I've read - the only other example that springs readily to mind is the Princess Bride by William Goldman, er, I mean, S M Morgenstern.

(I nearly wrote William Golding, as in, Lord of the Flies. Now there is another book I read for my 'A' level and really really hated. I would guess you'd rather like it, Ian?)

I'm not going anywhere with this, I'm just trying to understand what the it-seems-to-me-must-be quite profound difference is between What You Like (and I hate) and What I Like (and you hate).

For instance, remind me, where do you stand on the man I think is probably the greatest writer of SF working today, Iain M Banks? (Not, oddly, Iain no-M Banks, whose stuff I tend to find a little annoying. I snap up every new IMB book like a ravenous man would a fine meal, but I have a large and growing to-be-read pile of I no-M B.)

Or the most masterful stylist and scene-setter in SF this century for my money, Jack Vance? His worlds are more evocative than any I know; nobody conveys alienness like Vance, be it in time or space. His best writing has an almost eerie other-worldliness that I loved as a child and teenager. Saldy I almost never come across any stuff by him today that I've not read, but when I occasionally do, it still works.

How about John Clute, whose non-fiction I find to be unreadable, opaque and screamingly unbearably pretentious and the single novel by whom that I've read - Appleseed - was every bit as bad?

I would love to get to the bottom of this, but I fear we never will...