All right, Ive been posting the funny aphoristic bits from Rose Macaulays The Towers of Trebizond, but they arent really what it is about so Im going to do two more serious, even possibly analytical posts. First, one on style. Macaulay uses the word and more than any writer I have come across for years, and for some time I didnt figure out why. It was only when I read this sentence, in which the narrators gone to see the reputed house of Lazarus: We went to Bethany, in the cool of one evening, but still the burning heat of the day lay about in patches on the white dusty road and on the little hill where Bethany stood, a tumble-down Arab village among olive trees, and the house of the nice Bethany family was pointed out to us at once, and it did not look very old. Now there are other things happening in that sentence, notably the telescoping of time and place in the reference to the nice Bethany family, as though Martha, Mary and Lazarus were 20th-century neighbours in Cambridge, but essentially the cadence, particularly of the last two clauses, is Biblical. Indeed it reminds me rather of a later author, Stefan Heym in The King David Report, a novel written in a sort of Old Testament pastiche style. This is natural enough given the novels theme, which Ill do another post about; for now its enough to say that Laurie, the woman narrating, was brought up in the Anglican Church and that her mind is still very occupied with it. Macaulay, like the King James Bible, uses and in a lot of situations where a style guide would suggest a full stop. Fortunately she hadnt read any style guides, because her way is right for this book. Though the sentences can be very long, they are never rambling or complex; you dont get lost in a web of subordinate clauses and the only thing the substitution of and for full stops does, apart from providing the Biblical echoes, is to give the whole narrative a quite individual, hypnotic rhythm; it is slowed but never stopped, moving from one thing to another with its own internal logic in the way a dream does. There is a sense of inevitability, of one thing leading to another in ways that arent obvious but seem inescapable, and I think a surprising amount of that is achieved via this one stylistic trick.
Posted on: Sun, 17 Aug 2014 09:27:13 +0000
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