At 10:35 on an early summer's morning, John Lanchester sat down at his study desk, switched on his new Dell computer, opened up the word processing programme that the computer had come with and began

well in a sense he's coming home - The Debt to Pleasure was all about the unreliable narrator. I mean i thought it was ok when I read it, but i was also 16 or so, and given the conspicuous shitness of this, i'm wondering if wasn't very good after all.

again, i worry i'm loading too much on it - if i just read through it in a spare moment it would be relatively unobjectionable. but there are so many questions you find yourself asking that your entire notion of what fiction is, what it consists of, starts coming undone.

i'm going to get a beer, and do a bit more, but i think this is going to need to extend into two sessions tbh. liveblogging reading lanchester turns out to be more time consuming than anticipated.

why the fuck am i doing this.

i wonder if it would be worth reading 'one of the classics' with a similar semantic regard...lanchester lends himself very well to this sort of deconstruction, mind - it might end up being arduous in a different sense

i'm currently reading 'decline and fall' - my first waugh, amazingly - and ofc finding it hilarious & true - and while he is no grand stylist he has a comic terseness - the notes you don't play etc - that bulwarks himself against such prying. trying to think of published satire that overreaches quite like lanchester - it's hard

i usually try to pay this level of attention to at least part of what i read. i remember doing it with Jane Austen, and you could take so much on a semantic level (i mean obviously she was a genius at it) that applied in a complex way to the book as a whole). likewise george eliot

I mean doing it with Lovecraft, for instance, might produce something unsympathetic and comical, which would ignore the substantial value of the thing as a whole.

with Capital, i just remember being incredulous, that it was impossible to ignore the semantic cackhandedness and failures of writing and intelligence. it draws attention to itself.

I must admit i sat down to this reading with a certain amount of 'let's take the piss out of lanchester' in my mind, but actually i find myself becoming irritated and surprised again at the sheer badness. And as NV said, he's getting paid for this shit. People are waving it through.

i would say waugh was a great stylist (unless by grand you mean in the style of 'grand novels', which, no, he definitely isn't). as someone once pointed out he could write an entire page of dialogue without any indication of who was speaking or how, and you would be able to follow it all the way through, both who was saying what and in what tone. Often the bits of speech would only be two or three words long.

Decline and Fall is a masterpiece of style I think. I mean, again, I'm not expecting Lanchester to be that, but its the egregiousness of his failure that is so galling.

i'm still sitting here mulling over 'and full dark was imminent'.

maybe it was immanent

lol.

hold up, NV:

My mood called for something not-modern, something substantial; if the conference was to be the epic waste of time it promised to be, I would at least come back with some happy memory to show for it. Winter. Dickens. Yes. My finger hovered for a moment over A Christmas Carol, but although this would have been seasonally appropriate, I dislike the narrative apparatus of that particular tale. I have no interest whatsoever in the supernatural or the magical or any such claptrap. I despise myths and legends and their ilk. I believe that Richard Dawkins does not go nearly far enough when he says that astrologers should be prosecuted for fraud.

also this is very bad.

'a happy memory', or 'some happy memories', not 'some happy memory' you twat. that's not just a point of grammatical order, but sounds so silly as to be comical. again.

also yes yes we get it about the narrator's feelings about magic ffs.

Winter. Dickens. Yes.

Instead, priests and imams and monks and rabbis from every religion should be thrown into prison, unless and until they can prove the truth of their claims.

do you think we could work up a fatwah on lanchester?

yes i did mean 'in the style of grand novels' - waugh was obviously in full control but not given to flights of verbiage. apologies for not making that clearer

no what3words results for winter.dickens.yes, and yet

https://map.what3words.com/winter.chickens.keys

what's your game lanchester

it takes a powerful writer to make me feel sympathetic towards Dawkins tbf to the boy Lanchester

i think I'm going to need a break. the next (long) bit where he attempts to download Great Expectations to his phone while in the church is so bad that it's defeating me.

If it had been otherwise I would have waited until I was on wifi before downloading the book.

also

'Rău!' she said, shouting, pointing at my phone and then at the grave. 'Rău, rău, rău!'

https://youtu.be/WQreH2QZ_zc

haha

… i woke up a year or so back mouthing the phrase "sarcophagous jelly"

― mark s (mark s), Saturday, February 25, 2006 12:49 AM (eleven years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

>:(

oof. sorry for your loss. live long enough and you will live to see your dreams turned into laboured less good versions of themselves for the literary journal reading public.

i wonder if it would be worth reading 'one of the classics' with a similar semantic regard...

i've close-read a bunch of (since his shade is apparently being downloaded in vain) m. r. james on freaky trigger over the last few years and the most/worst you land on is odd lacunae in the plot -- sometimes actual errors, but just as often ambiguities, intended or otherwise, that deepen the story… but then james had a superb ear for mimicry, of a wide range of historical material (perhaps not working-class speech patterns lol), which served him well right down to the atomic level in his sentence-making. lanchester here is the epitome of "telling not showing" in the bad sense: basically bcz he has no such ear

au contraire, with the narrator he's doing an excellent job of mimicking a bad writer.

this story has prompted some jamesian close reading of my own so it's not all bad.

I was complaining to Fizzles about the semantic goofiness of the first paragraph of Lost Hearts just last week.

No 'I took out my mobile and opened the Audible app,' though.

He could use it to listen to the Capital novel.

no indication that the unreliable narrator is an actual masochist.

some of James's stories are weaker than others but i've never found much fault with his prose or his ability to sketch vividly and concisely.

coffin liquor in the front, coffin poker in the back

Came in late to this, glad there is more to come!

i wanted to expand on thomp's point about MR James. cos when you said that about Lost Hearts my immediate response was 'oh come on, it's MR James, the master, a writer in the rare (unique?) position of having perfected a genre!' And then I went and got Lost Hearts off the shelf and read the opening para and thought 'oh actually that is a bit weird.'

It was, as far as I can ascertain, in September of the year 1811 that a post-chaise drew up before the door of Aswarby Hall, in the heart of Lincolnshire. The little boy who was the only passenger in the chaise, and who jumped out as soon as it had stopped, looked about him with the keenest curiosity during the short interval that elapsed between the ringing of the bell and the opening of the hall door. He saw a tall, square, red-brick house, built in the reign of Anne; a stone-pillared porch had been added in the purer classical style of 1790; the windows of the house were many, tall and narrow, with small panes and thick white woodwork.

for me, the only *really* awkward bit there is 'it was, as far as I can ascertain' going into observed activity. Tho actually writing it down now, and reading it again, I think it's a legitimately telescoped transition from antiquary finding out about an unusual story into the detail of the story (sort of voiceover into actual filmed scene). iirc thomp you also took exception to the manner of delivering the architectural detail. that i minded less, i think it just goes with the MR James territory.

voices are: antiquary > into authorial narrative > 'what the boy saw when he looked at the house was this' (the boy did not think 'Queen Anne period house etc).

but examined closely i can see that it can feel a bit awkward.

i mean i'm not naturally a very editorially close reader, though as i said earlier, with Jane Austen, or with Swift especially, really close reading is very rewarding, as you separate out the layers of meaning and suggestion. But one of the reasons I've never really got on with Henry James is that i find the experience of reading him a bit pernickety. And yes I know I've got some cheek saying that here. But the thing is, and it relates to one of the wider fundamental questions about Lanchester, reading him forces you into it. You find yourself wading through the brambles, and then you become so tangled up you have to start hacking away at them.

and again, chatting with my flatmate yesterday, it comes back to the point about how the hell this gets published in the first place. I've met an editor from the LRB. He was intelligent, alive to nuance, and had just recently picked up Julian Barnes on a point of style.

My feeling is that any decent editor getting this story via the email app that comes with their desktop computer would immediately see all the problems, would find themselves heavily marking the first few paras before putting their pen down and going 'oh god'.

because, and i think this is unique in my reading experience - so well done, John, I guess - once you start trying to suggest tweaks, or tug at stray threads, you realise that its untweakably bad, that the whole fabric is coming undone. then you will find yourself scrawling 'rewrite this' and then you will realise that in fact no amount of rewriting will correct the problems, and normally of course you would reject it, but you can't because Lanchester is the LRB equivalent of unsackable, so you just end up writing FUCKING STET (sorry, stet) at the top of the page and waving it through.

I think this is because Lanchester's failures of style are often clearly linked to his failures of imagination (the graves thing that NV pointed out upthread, the structural incapacity with metaphor). he can't work out the semantics of his imagination because there is no imagination, no worked internal thought. it's just the manipulation of cliché and the setting out of hand-me-down images/concepts. It's the worst of the english middle-aged, middle class prematurely senescent male mentality: inherited, unexamined 'sense', a form of privilege that has to do nothing to earn attention.

this is seriously bad writing, and its badness is existential.

happy new year everyone : )

got to do some bits, try and sort out this hangover, go for a walk in the park etc, but will be picking up for another session later.

HNY! The LRB should publish a collated version of your Coffin Liquor analysis

re lost hearts: yes, it's a move he later got much better at, quilting together the layers of documentation and shifting angles of observer perception so that you weren't muddled the way you are a bit here (viz how does 22-yr-old stephen know or care about all this boring grown-up architectural detail, which is key to MRJ's version of the gothic pathetic-fallacy lens) (ans = he doesn't, someone grown-up -- possibly one of MRJ's beloved guidebooks, has supplied this element, but it's just been C/Ped instead of given proper attribution) (the list of necromantical titles later in the story is also quite proto-lovecraftian: tho a *far* more convincing act of forgery than mr mad fkn arab)

(i notice in the FT piece on it that tom ewing says it's an early story, which it is, that MRJ came somewhat to dislike: i don't know where he knows this from though)

the LRB should publish this whole thread! alan bennett retire bitch

(actually i like alan bennett and the ironic use of twitter bitch-memes shd be avoided if at all possible)

"MRJ was dissatisfied with the tale and only included it in GSA at the request of his publisher, who wished to make the book larger," according to Joshi. Not that that gets us anywhere.

The 'ascertain' is bloody weird. Also the later "Two incidents that occurred about this time made an impression upon Stephen's mind." Also "On the table in Mr. Abney's study certain papers were found which explained the situation to Stephen Elliott when he was of an age to understand them." All of these seem to transgress the line between the implied narrator and the omniscient authorial in ways I'm not keen on.

-

I wasn't dissatisfied with the architectural detail per se ('and Stephen sees this how' is probably reading James by the standards of the generation after his own) but having the context made weird for me made me think about the weirdness of this kind of fictional knowledge in general.

On reading this passage I am asked to conceive of 'a stone-pillared porch etc.' I do not know what 'the purer classical style of 1790' looks like. There is no way that I can get back from this nominally ekphratic exercise to a visual image. And yet the knowledge that this porch is built in this style is still capable of doing some kind of work towards my construction of the fictional scene.

(actually i like alan bennett and the ironic use of twitter bitch-memes shd be avoided if at all possible)

I guess it's related to my long-running epistemelogical query, viz., what is going on in the reader's head when they read this squib of John M. Ford's:

I don’t recommend playing with God. It isn’t that he cheats, exactly. But the other night we were in the middle of a game, I was about thirty points up, and He emptied out his rack. ZWEEGHB. Double word score and the fifty-point bonus.
“Zweeghb?” I said.

“Is that a challenge?”

“Well…”

“Look outside,” He said. So I did. Sure enough, there was a zweeghb out there, eating the rosebushes, like Thurber’s unicorn.

But none of this will help us get to the bottom of the badness of John Lanchester.

it was, as far as i can ascertain, a quarter of four on the afternoon of the fifth of September in the year 1811 that a post-chaise made perhaps a decade by bindle and sons of norwich drew up before the door of aswarby hall, in the heart of the east central english country of lincol

("ascertain" is indicative of the ethos of the narrator james is presenting us with, that he is tolerably certain that everything that follows is true -- and this certainty rests on, within reasonable limits, a measure of fact-checking)

i didn’t get round to this and went and saw an ingmar bergman film for light relief instead.

winter light relief

but i’m delighted to say i have two more days before i go back to work so will continue tmrw.

indeed. xpost

faster you fucker!

(actually i like alan bennett and the ironic use of twitter bitch-memes shd be avoided if at all possible)

I actually misclicked the link for Bennett's diary in this LRB and got the Lanchester story by accident. It even started 'Monday', so it took me a sentence or two of going 'WTF?' before I worked out what I had done.

Lol James

Here for the retire bitch memes those are good!

I love this thread. Thank you, Fizzles.

ha ha james m.

and thanks tokyo r - it's a pleasure.

and I realised that as i was walking around the park the other day. it *is* a pleasure. lanchester's prose exerts a weird fascination. i remembered william empson's good question about whether we saw Shakespeare as great because of the amount that had been written about him. we've stared so much at him, and written about him and considered him so much that he seems everything. No, concluded Empson, because other writers would not be able to sustain that level of interest. We've been able to write so much about him because his writing has proved inexhaustible by time or changing attitudes.

in Lanchester, as i said upthread, you can pick at specific problems of syntax and style in Lanchester, and then realise you need to extend the problem of syntax to general manner, and then on to general approach, and then to the whole point of fiction, and ultimately the representation of the world itself. there is that connection between the failure of syntax and the act of imagining in lanchester that makes it fascinating, a connection of the microcosm and macrocosm.

this made me realise that lanchester has something he shares with empson's analysis of shakespeare - he is inexhaustibly bad. does this mean in some sense, in an aesthetic of badness, he is

good?

Good not Bad: A dialectical approach to the imaginative prose of John Lanchester.

of course it doesn't. he's awful.

right, last day of the holiday for me, I must spend it wisely. i've got a full pot of tea, a bowl of porridge, and Obnox on the stereo. Let's do this.

what stopped me in my tracks last time was a long-is passage about him trying to download Great Expectations to his Audible app over his data plan in a church crypt, while the old woman with the shawl shouted rău rău rău at him.

one problem with this sort of live blogging version of close reading is that it's bad for judging tempo, plus the column format of the LRB means that sections can look longer than they are, and in lanchester's case that means the badness seems to go on for longer than it actually is. and it's not even amusingly bad, it's just, ugh, it's just dreck:

The implication was that she was objecting to my using my mobile at that particular site, where as it happened the data signal was helpfully strong. I decided to make light of the situation.

'Nothing wrong with my data plan, madam!' I said. 'It's covered under my UK allowance!' Which in fact happened to be true. If it had been otherwise I would have waited until I was on wifi before downloading the book. One can run up very substantial data bills otherwise. But my levity did nothing to appease the hag.

'Rău, rău!' she kept shouting. And then, stretching for what little English she knew: 'No! Very bad!'

I am always polite and reasonable, even when provoked.

'You are a silly, silly woman,' I said to her. 'Go away.' My words had no effect, but the download was soon complete.

no fascination here, just something akin to embarrassment at someone taking a shit on the literary table. and i don't mean, you know, sullying the memory of Henry James or Jane Austen, but someone smearing their shit over anyone whose put their thoughts and imagination down to some effect.