The air is heavy and still. It would be unpleasant if we were not so close to the ocean. I spent the morning reading in my bedroom, sitting on a rocker that I dragged in from the deck and planted as nearly beneath the ceiling fan as the bed allowed. I finished, finally, F R Lucas’s Style: The Art of Writing Well, a book that I am going to keep close by for frequent re-readings. It would be easy to dismiss Lucas as a mid-century don with dead white males on the brain (I was wrong about his not mentioning Jane Austen, but in fact he does not cite her for style), his grasp of the classical style is every bit as sure as such a grasp must be.

However, from the beginning of recorded time some temperaments seem born to prefer Dionysus, others Apollo. Men have never long agreed how drunk they liked art or literature to be. Most critical quarrel are about nothing else. For myself, I have come passionately to prefer sense to sensibility, and even cynics (if one must have either) to rhapsodiests and rapturists. To argue which gives more artistic pleasure is futile (though nothing seems able to stop men arguing about it). I can only suggest that humanity seems throughout its history to have suffered far worse from mental intoxications and fantaticisms that from any rare excess of sober reason. Both the Apolline and Dionysiac tribes have produced memorable writers; but the bad writer of the Apolline type can seldom become anything worse than a bore, whereas the bad writer in the Dionysiac style may prove a mere maniac, disseminating mania. In short, though the pleasure-values of literature are outside argument, its influence-values seem to me in favour of balance and restraint. One cannot destroy Dionysus (as Pentheus found to his cost). And Dionysus has his gifts. But there are other powers better to trust that he.

There you have it: lucid, supple, confident, and unobtrusively pleasant. And one other thing, that it would not have occurred to Lucas to strive for: unquestionably adult.

When I put Lucas down, I picked up Orley Farm, mindful that Lucas dismisses Trollope’s style as “undistinguished.” Can that be the right word for so distinct a voice? Lucas is certainly not above the views of Sir Peregrine Orme about genlemen, and Trollope’s prose betrays not just legal training but an interest in the legal view of things, which he often presents in with a dry jocularity that a connoisseur of style might find somewhat subfusc. It nevertheless appeals to me. I loved reading Trollope for years — until his peculiar ideas about a heroine’s love life became disagreeably insistent (indeed, I’m reading Orley Farm because Lady Mason, although “not intended to be the heroine,” is such a formidable central character) — and my own legal training made me even more appreciative. If you ask me, it’s Dickens whose writing is undistinguished: lurid, sentimental, and cheap.

Orley Farm comes as a great relief after Ivo Stourton’s mordant little masterpiece. The Book Lover’s Tale belongs on the shelf with Lolita, though perhaps not in the adjacent slot. The novel is narrated by a stylish and cultured man who steadily, one might almost say remorselessly, reveals himself to be a vacant narcissist of psychopathic heedlessness. His moral character would not be out of place in the darker novels of Ruth Rendell. But Stourton has risen to the unforgiving challenge of allowing an unattractive antihero to tell his own story in his own voice, while gripping the reader’s interest and, even, sympathy. Matt de Voy presents himself in stately periods that — drolly and hideously by turns — plausibly betray his second-rate mind as well as his ethical nullity. As he talks (and he’s a charmer), you look over his shoulder and see what his self-absorbtion prevents him from seeing. There is a strong recollection of the Eighteenth Century, of the ancien régime, in Matt’s impassioned determination to seduce a client’s wife; there were times when I wondered if I was reading Clarissa (a novel that I have not, in fact, read). The prose, very distinguished by Lucasian standards, is clear and varied; although never fussy, it steers clear of slang.

Claudia Swanson, the target of Matt’s amorous campaign is a lovely woman; I couldn’t help thinking of Michelle Williams’s portrayal of Marilyn Monroe: smart, but damaged by beauty. At the end, it is she who apologizes to him — for restoring to her the use of her first-rate mind. I cannot recommend the book too highly, and I hope that the American edition, when it appears, will be more effectively promoted than Stourton’s first novel, The Night Climbers, which really ought to have been a smash hit.   

Three chapters of Orley Farm a day: that’s my plan.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Friday, August 24th, 2012 at 11:41 am.