Tender isn't the night.

[davywavy]

One of the problems of having spent my formative years gamely reading all of the world's great literature that I could get my hands on is that these days I'm having to make do with the world's ho-hum literature instead.
This thought struck me with force this morning as I was looking for somehting to read on the train to work and my eye alighted on the half-read copy of F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender is the night which has been sitting by my bed for some weeks. Like the copy of magical beasts and where to find them in Harry Potter, it squats there, malevolently daring me to try and read it, glaring vilely and promising dire retribution should I so much as pick it up.
For the life of me I can't understand how Fitzgerald has got the reputation he has (apparently he's a regular on A level English Lit reading lists); his prose is supremely unengaging, his characterisation repetitive and leaden, and his preoccupations (not matter how rich, successful, and pretty you are you'll never actually be happy. So ner) bloody irritating. This book reminds me in some ways of Yukio Mishima's Forbidden Colours; in that I'm bloody well not going to let it beat me, so I'll put my head down in a determined way and make it to the end if it kills me.

This leads me to the question I'm asking of you lot today; who, in your opinion, is the most over-rated "great" author? Is it perhaps Dickens, whose tiresome 'jokes' and supremely punchable characters are so beloved of English teachers everywhere? Perhaps it is Anton Chekov, who could do with just lightening up? Or perhaps someone more modern like Will Self, who you just want to punch and punch and punch until he takes the hint and stops? Let me know your thoughts.

Oh, and if anyone can recommend anything good to read I'd be grateful. I've got bloody Albert Camus next unless anyone can save me.

Comments

[crocodilewings.livejournal.com]

Tolkien.

Drawn-out, stilted and bland isn't a style, it's a method of torture. He's taken as the benchmark by which the whole of the subsequent fantasy genre is measured, but his actual prose is dire. He had next to no grasp of pacing, or even what actually makes for an engaging read, which is why we spend two hundred pages reading about how incredibly loooong and draaaaawn ooooouuuut the social habits of giant talking trees are, or how craggy and grey the grey, grey craggy grey crags can seem, but salient plot points that are necessary to the story getting from one place to the other are just inserted like some sort of distasteful chore, completely unembellished, and not in a stealthy "let's whiz the plot along for a dramatic change of pace" way, but simply in disregard for them.

The story of Lord of the Rings isn't actually too bad. Carefree innocents cast into a world of intrigue, human failing, corruption and dark sorcery, combatted not only with martial might but noble sacrifice, staunch camaraderie and strength of will, in which the most unlikely become heroes. Sadly, he takes this story and turns it into one about prancing midgets and inescapable homoeroticism.

How, how can you spin that story out to eleven thousand pages? Let's just have a look at it, shall we? First hundred and fifty is Bilbo's birthday, which, in a very long-winded way, explores the simple, carefree world of the Shire. That this happens before we learn the whole of Middle Earth is going to be consumed by the wrath of the Dark Lord Sauron means this loses impact, as we don't see it in a light of what will be lost if this comes to pass. True, it shows the source of the unlikely heroes-to-be, and provides a state they can fall from, but The Hobbit managed to do that in about 20 pages, and that was full of dwarves to boot.

Then let's look at the last hundred and fifty pages; the bits that happen after the proper end of the book. Sauron has been defeated, the ring has been destroyed, the repercussions are felt and a semblance of balance has been restored to Middle Earth. Then they go home. Only they don't just go home, they gooooooo hoooooooome. Saruman gets shot somewhere along the way, and it's all highly poetic and in contrast to his once mighty status that he dies lying in a muddy road full of arrows, but aside from this bit of narrative tidying this stretch is still, true to form, long and tedious.

About 40 pages of third-rate masturbatory poetry, rhapsodised by all and sundry in the book as the wittiest ditties to be penned by the hand of hobbit, which are, in fact, just plain bad, inserted in all the points that succeed in killing any sense of suspense. A couple of hundred pages about trees. Sure, they talk, but they still behave like trees. The Ents could have possibly been made more interesting by having them as inanimate foliage, so they wouldn't have said "HOOM" as much. What kind of word is "HOOM" anyway? About two hundred pages of Frodo and Sam in a forest, being hungry and saying how much they love each other. Once is the sign of brothers in arms, twice is true friendship that will never die, three times and they may as well be wandering through Hampstead Heath.

Oh, and so many of his sentences begin with "they". They did this. They did that. Then they did this. If you handed that in to an A-Level English teacher, you'd never hear the end of ridicule.

Don't get me wrong, Tolkien was a genius. He was a true prodigy when it came to linguistics and his worldbuilding skills were beyond compare, but his actual writing sucked so much it drew blood. Ultimately, that's what Lord of the Rings is. It's Tolkien flexing his incredible imagination. He just could have done with flexing it a little better.

[crocodilewings.livejournal.com]

Oh, and Frankenstein is pretty crap as well.

[rosamicula.livejournal.com]

Frankenstein - badly written, no doubt, because she was a 18 year old girl trying to write like a 40 year old man, but the range of scientific, literary, moral references she touches on is pretty impressive.

[rosamicula.livejournal.com]

I couldn't agree more. The writing is dire. I could have wept when this was voted the nation's favourite book.