The Land Surveyor

Is Hollinghurst really a good literary writer?

I can't imagine I am alone in finding Alan Hollinghurst's prose style affected, but worse than that, as really dull. He writes like I would find myself writing if I was trying to give a ponderous literary-sounding sheen to some commonplace description or observation, and as such I actually find it almost laugh-out-loud embarassing. And to hear all the fine praises he gets, now in abundance after winning the UK's premier fiction Booker prize. Put to one side the snobby upper-class, high-art milieu he seems to find so intriguing (reminds me of Jeffrey Archer brand name inserts more than anything else), but I just think he doesn't stand one second's comparison with any of the really good writers of crackling prose.

The Guardian has helpfully printed an extract from his Booker prize wining novel, and as an illustration I'm going to set it side by side with some randomly chosen passages from Saul Bellow's "The Adventures of Augie March" and Jonathan Franzen's "The Corrrections". Yes I know these are top of the pile books, but Hollinghurst has just won a major prize, and my point is not just that he is not as good, but that he is laughably not within a lifetime of getting close.

Here's Hollinghurst from "A Line of Beauty", chosen by the Guardian: (my marking in bold )

When the women had gone, he went back upstairs, but in the remorseless glare of the news, so that the flat looked even more tawdry and pretentious. He was puzzled to think he had spent so much time in it so happily and conceitedly. The pelmets and mirrors, the spotlights and blinds, seemed rich in criticism. It was what you did if you had millions but no particular taste: you made your private space like a swanky hotel; just as such hotels flattered their customers by being vulgar simulacra of lavish private homes. A year ago it had at least the glamour of newness.

Now it bore signs of occupation by a rich boy who had lost the knack of looking after himself. The piping on the sofa cushions was rubbed through where Wani had sprawled incessantly in front of the video. The crimson damask was blotted with his own and other boys' fluids. He wondered if Gemma had noticed as she sat there, making her inanely upsetting remarks. He wasn't letting her in here again, in her black boots. Nick felt furious with Wani for fucking up the cushions. The Georgian desk was marked with drink stains and razor etchings that even the optimistic Don Guest would have found it hard to disguise. 'That's beyond cosmetic repair, old boy,' Don would say. Nick fingered at the little abrasions and found himself gasping and whooping with grief ...

I mean the passage is full of cliches, lazy phrases and portentous but meaningless judgements . The conceit about hotel decor is an obvious and boring one, and even the idea about all the boys stains etc. on the fancy furniture is somehow just contrived and uninteresting. There's nothing to smile, chuckle, or sit upright for in any of it, but plenty to groan and wince at.

So for comparison, two masters, who would never use "inane", "tawdry" or "conceitedly" where some thick narrative description should be doing the work instead. And also you can feel a totally different verve compared to the winsome detached self-regard that pervades Hollinghurst's narrative voice.

Here's from Bellow's "The Adventures of Augie March", fourth random passage I looked at, but pretty much anything would be great:

I took a room on the South Side, in a house on Blackstone Avenue, four flights up, three of mingy red carpet and one of thready wood, up in the clumsy dust, next door to the can. Here I wasn't far from the Nelson Home, and as it was Sunday morning when I set myself up and I had time, I went to visit Grandma Lausch. By now she was almost like everyone else in the joint, to my eyes having lost her distingusihing independence, weakened, mole-ish, needing to look around for her old-time qualities when she greeted me, as if she had laid them down, forgetting where. She didn't seem to recall what grievances she had against me either, and when we sat down together on a bench in the parlor, between some silent old people, asked me, "And how is - is 'jener', the idiot?" She had forgotten Georgie's name, and it horrified me; yes, it sent me for a loop until I remembered to think how small a part of her life compared with the whole span she had spent with us, and how many bayous and deadwaters there must be to the sides of an old varicose channel.

And here's Franzen from "The Corrections", randomly looking for a piece of description, this from pg 452:

Cindy had gone thick around the middle and looked, Denise thought, far worse than she had to. Her features were lost in foundation, rouge and lipstick. Her black silk pants were roomy at the hips and tight at the ankles. Brushing the cheeks and weathering the tear-gas attack ofCindy's perfume, Denise was surprised to detect bacterial breath.

Cindy's husband, Klaus, had yard-wide shoulders, narrow hips and a butt of fascinating tininess. The Muller-Kaltrau living room was furnished with baroque loveseats and Bierdemeier chairs in sociability-killing formations. Softcore Bougueraus or Bouguerau knockoffs hung on the walls, as did Klaus's Olympic bronze medal, mounted and framed beneath the largest chandelier.

Gary Younge on the US election in the Guardian

I don't want to make it a theme on this blog to react to horrors committed by columnists in the Guardian - it is my paper of choice after all - but this one today was a shocker:

Writing about the US election, Gary Younge sees the prospect of Bush getting re-elected and asks what should we think of the US electorate if this happens. He doesn't want to call them stupid (that's nice of him) but clearly he thinks there can be no good case for actually choosing Bush. So if he wins it must be down to - wait for it : "a lack of much of an electoral alternative", because Kerry also supported the war in the Senate, and he likens the choice between Bush and Kerry to that between Chirac and Le Pen in the last round of the French Presidential election.

I would just ask him why Kerry won the Democratic nomination ? It seems obvious that it was because he was seen as the candidate most likely to win the election, and that if a strident anti-war candidate like Dean had been chosen there was a strong fear that he wouldn't have had a chance of winning against Bush. And this was a political calculation based on a more comprehensive understanding of the US electorate than Gary Younge's.

How can a key commentator for the Guardian on these elections be so crass in his analysis, and only 4 weeks away from the election? Thank god for blogs so we can easily read sensible stuff !

David Aaranovich on “faith”

I’m not sure how much one should engage with Aaranovich because it could become a depressing lifetime’s occupation, but this piece in the Observer yesterday was such an appalling mess that I was staggered that it could appear in a national broadsheet by someone adjudicated by his peers to be “Columnist of the Year”.

He recounts how an Islamic theologian tells him that only religion gives a “proper basis for ideas and morality”. Instead of just flatly rebutting this absurdity Aaranovich segués into talking about the distinction between “secularism” and “atheism”, seemingly conceding that atheism is indeed “arid” but secularism is better because it “holds the ring between competing faiths” rather than denying them. For the record, secularism in Webster’s Online is defined as “indifference to or rejection or exclusion of religion and religious considerations”. Aaranovich’s misuse of the term “secularism” is at the heart of why his article is a mess. For Aaranovich to say “my secularism is more important than my atheism and binds me with those who have faith and those who have none” is effectively meaningless. If he is an atheist, he rejects religion, and he can’t “bind himself” to those with a faith.

He invokes “secular Jews” and “secular Muslims” in support of his wrong-headed understanding of secularism, but to me these terms refer to people who have a respect for the fact that their cultural identity is bound up with a religion but who no longer profess the religious faith that was at the heart of that culture. And in that sense I am happy to call myself a secular Christian – I understand that Christianity is an important part of British heritage and that it shaped (and crucially was also shaped by) much of what one would call British culture. But sensitivity to the historic role played in a culture by religion is not inconsistent with rejecting all claims to “revealed truth” of that religious worldview. To me that’s what secularism is, and it’s not that different from atheism.

He then seems to reassert his own atheistic belief but then tacks on this: “Even so, it seems impolite and unnecessary to tell a practising Jew that I set her faith absolutely no higher than the voodoo of Haiti or the idol-worship of the poor old Philistines.” I personally think this is pretty demeaning about voodoo and non-Abrahamic religions anyway which frankly have no less cultural validity than the nice lady’s Judaism. But it seems that the nub of Aaranovich’s argument is that David just really doesn’t want to be impolite to respectable people who have a religious faith. But I would say that if you believe that the claims of revealed religion are bullshit, you really have to be happy to say so, or get out of the business of cultural commentating.

And then he carries on wittering, saying that there is no real difference between Catholicism and Anglicanism. Well he should check out some of the amusing stuff here about Blair being told not to take Mass and having to wait until he leaves office before he can convert to the Old Faith – the distinctions seem pretty real to the people who take these things seriously.

But Aaranovich the theologian does not stop there. He blurts out “have you polled them?” on a radio show in response to a Muslim saying in some cultures women did not want equal rights. From being so desperate to be sensitive to the lady’s Judaism he has zero sensitivity for the cultural traditions of Islamic societies and bashes them with a blunt assertion of the superiority of the values of modern western culture. I don’t want to make apologies for repression of women that goes on in some Islamic cultures, but resistance to western “modernity” among these cultures is much more broad-based and cannot be simply delegitimated by a crass call to “poll” whether people want western values or not. He might anyway be surprised at the negativity of the result.

And he carries off on this to condemn all the established religions for their unequal treatment of women and suddenly he seems to want “secularists” [sic] to fight religions head on, but not of course with anything too confrontational like a headscarf ban, but with “stronger arguments” and “stronger alternatives”. How these “holding the ring between religions” Aaranovich-secularists are going to come up with any arguments at all in the theological morass he starts them from seems a bewildering prospect.

Media and hostage taking in Iraq

I don’t want to sound insensitive to the appalling plight of the British hostage Kenneth Bigley in Iraq, but it is extraordinary to watch how this kind of story transfixes a national media, to the extent that in this case it “casts a shadow over the UK Labour party conference” and shows the “sophistication” of the terrorists (quotes from the Observer) in pushing Iraq back to the top of the news agenda in the conference week.

We avert our gaze every day from the heart-rending griefs of others all around us, whether at home or abroad. Military policy, whether in Iraq or elsewhere, requires that the awful bloodiness of its consequences be shielded from the view of the democratic public which has no stomach to observe the sharp end of what is entailed by being “strong on defence”. Military force requires for its effectiveness a necessary complicity on the part of the media not to undermine the political support for it by being too graphic in its reportage of the carnage.

The media chooses every day not to show inconsolable mothers, wives and children bereaved of their sons, husbands and fathers. It chooses every day not to show dead bodies, amputees, people blinded and mutilated by conflict. Yet each of these griefs represents a genuine piece of potential reportage. So when the chief editor of ITV News says they are being “terribly, terribly cautious” about reporting of hostage situations it seems to be slightly surreal. Somehow a collective media decision has been taken – and this is true across Europe – that the chilling drama of hostage-taking, deliberately undertaken to humiliate national governments, represents front page copy, whereas merely dead bodies or broken lives, devoid as they are of any “what happened next” cliff-hanging tension are merely quiet statistics to a public not willing to endure seeing these tragedies close up every day. As Polly Toynbee elegantly argued here, the BBC, and any other national flagship media outlets, cannot justify their reporting decisions based on what the sensationalist media sees as significant. The issue at stake is precisely one of determining what is appropriate media reporting in a war situation, and these organisations precisely ought to be attempting to set this agenda and not be following one made by others. Perhaps we are in a situation where sensational grief-stricken dramas which are callously undertaken precisely to get the attention of the media will always be front page news. If so, just don’t let us hear how “terribly, terribly cautious” media executives are before they serve this to us again.