Orwell, clarity, language and power

There is an odd strain of 'anti-Orwellianism' starting to appear, as evidenced in this essay in the New Statesman, in which the author argues that Orwell's famous correlation between insincerity and long words is no longer true, that indeed,"When politicians or corporate front men have to bridge a gap between what they are saying and what they know to be true, their preferred technique is to convey authenticity by speaking with misleading simplicity."

I have some sympathy with the view that:

There is a new puritanism about the way we use words, as though someone with a broad vocabulary or the ability to sustain a complex sentence is innately untrustworthy. Out with mandarin obfuscation and donnish paradoxes, in with lists and bullet points. But one method of avoiding awkward truths has been replaced by another.

And I tend to agree that literary language is sometimes needlessly austere, as is the mantra to show and not tell.

But, having been confronted with a fair share of official bullet points and managerial language, I would say that bullet points can be perfectly deceptive in their plainness, and that the language of policy remains one of vagueness, distortion and opacity, where acronyms, keywords and catch-phrases (plain though they may be) conceal intention as surely as Latinate phrases.

Although Orwell favoured clear, plain language, I'm sure he was under no illusion that short words and blunt sentences in and of themselves could not be used to conceal political intentions. Long words, circumlocutions, were in Orwell's time the marker of political deception. Now talking points, market-speak and bullet-points have the same function. My only reservation is that the later also corrupt and diminish thought, making the liar duller rather than devious -- but then this is what newspeak was for.

Beginning in 2013

Few things are as creatively daunting as starting a new writing project, particularly a novel. I'm one of those writers who always begin at the beginning with writing, even while the end is a distant, vague shape on the horizon. Nothing is as revised, edited, read and reread in anything I write as the first chapter of a novel.

But I ask myself this morning: why start to write if your topic is not daunting? Why undertake the work if it will not test all your skills as a writer?

This, and a personal loss, will explain why my posts have been scanty since the start of the year. The Raven's Seal is holding up well with reviews and recognition. Astute readers will guess from my Goodreads reading profile the starting point of my new work, but the endpoint is still remote.

The End of Dickens's 200th

It's now the end of the bicentennial year of Dickens's birth: a great year for Dickens scholars and writers. As the next year starts, I can only speculate about how strangely Dickens's concerns come back to us in new forms, how poverty and need and the intransigence and short-sightedness of power - frequent themes and tensions in his work - recur with equal urgency two-hundred and one years later.

This year, I'm encouraged by the generous reviewers on Goodreads and the support of my readers to begin a new mystery. There will be a Dickensian link (perhaps subtly so), and a thematic connection to The Raven's Seal, but I am also inspired by some other favourite authors (Conrad in particular) and new experiences to move in an interesting direction.

Character and Choice in The Two Towers

Slow reading Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings can expose surprising nuances in the text. One of the criticisms of Tolkien I've come across is that his characters are uninteresting, flat, reflexively good or heroic, yet their heroism lacks depth because ultimately it is easy, all achievement and no sacrifice.

Yet in the first chapter of The Two Towers we see Aragorn at his lowest: confused, grieving, doubting himself and all his actions. He has no clear path, and rather than confidence and assertion he is trapped in uncertainty. The choice (pursue Frodo and the Ring, or rescue Merry and Pippin) is by no means clear, for the one requires the sacrifice of innocents, the other a terrific risk to the world. In truth, Tolkien has derailed the quest narrative precisely to bring his characters to this point of testing.

One of the odd pieces of received wisdom of modernism in literature is that 'good' characters are inherently dull, whereas 'flawed' characters are automatically interesting. But making the right moral choice is often a complex problem for the good character but irrelevant to the selfish. The interesting choices, then, confront the good and not the bad, and reveal depth in these characters.

Tolkien does not show us Aragorn's bravery or skill in combat in this chapter, but rather his compassion and forbearance for Boromir (the failed hero, lost on the quest). This is what restores Aragorn's sense of direction and sets him on the uncertain path to his inheritance.

Cities and mysteries

A recent piece in The Guardian, London: fantasy's capital city, has me thinking about mystery, imagination and cities.

'Mystery is the doorway to fantasy' the writer remarks. Quite so, but then mystery is one of the basic wellsprings of plot and story, as Dickens so often demonstrated. When I wrote The Raven's Seal, I used one of the techniques of fantasy by making my setting, the city of Airenchester, wholly imaginary. In this way, it was the ideal stage on which arrange and play out my mystery.

The urban mystery, the attempt to pose the reality of the city as a mystery and then unpick it, is one of the oldest forms of mystery. I've always been attracted to cities of the imagination, from Italo Calvino's Venice to M. John Harrison's eerie and unforgettable Viriconium.

'Mystery is also the doorway to reality,' the writer concludes. Airenchester has always been a character in The Raven's Seal, as vividly drawn and present. I hope that Airenchester's fictionality, its fantasy, also tempts the reader to look behind the facade and imagine the mechanisms, the subterfuges, social forms, expectations, dreams and ideologies that drive and support it.

Literary names and updates

I was thinking recently that someone ought to, if there wasn't already, make a study of the function of names in literature. In an odd instance of synchronicity, it seems that that book is here: Literary Names: Personal Names in English Literature by Alastair Fowler, reviewed in the London Review of Books (linked).

Several readers have noticed that I take a suggestive or descriptive approach to names in The Raven's Seal. This is not just a Dickensian technique, though Dickens was a master namer, but a way to tag or expose something about a character that can be wonderfully evocative. In fact, there are several buried clues to character in The Raven's Seal that I'm waiting for an astute reader to notice, but even if they remain unseen, they add something to the texture and sense of a character.

There is a very warm review of The Raven's Seal on the historical novels society site, and in this guest post for the Historical Fiction Society I write a little about composing The Raven's Seal and the way historical details were brought into and shaped the story.

Dickens and his 'mysteries'

I'm back from travelling in the USA, stopping in Nashville and San Francisco. San Francisco, wonderful city that it is, puts me in mind of Dashiell Hammett and The Maltese Falcon.

I admire the classics of American 'hard-boiled' mystery, particularly Hammett and Chandler, because these mysteries, with their intense action and dynamic interaction between the detective and the crime, are so different from the detached English style of detective fiction. It reminds me that there really is no one kind of mystery, and that a mystery plot is not necessarily confined to an intricate, logical puzzle with a definable solution, conducted solely as a game between author and reader.

Dickens, for instance, was drawn to mysteries and mystery plots. He dropped a murder into Bleak House, and we can be pretty sure that The Mystery of Edwin Drood was going to be the portrait of a murderer, but he resisted the idea that he would use mystery to baffle, trick or even fool the reader. The guilty figure in a Dickensian mystery is usually pretty clear (see 'Hunted Down', for example). Dickens used mystery to create suspense, to draw us into stories, to make the reader wonder, and also to illuminate the darker recesses of the human mind. Dickens did not want his reader to solve a mystery, but to experience many mysteries. His detectives could show a sharp light on certain events, but the light also made the shadows dance.