A unique interview with Booker Prize favourite Paul Lynch

[Sean]

The full interview is at https://auraist.substack.com/p/booker...

Below are the answers I found most interesting, as they focus not on the standard questions of biography and inspiration, but on Prophet Song's prose style and on Lynch's wider tastes in literary language.


Tell me about the register of the language. The vocabulary, the syntax, the pace.

The initial register of the language is part of that intuitive act and everything else follows from there. I don’t subscribe to the ideology of Flaubertian realism though I admire it as a reader. Excessive adherence to formalism does not reflect life, and so my sentences must be protean. Literary style should be a way of knowing how the world is met in its unfolding. And so I shape my sentences around the truth of the unfolding — in other words, my realism is memetic and presses its way into feeling, atmosphere, emotion, etc. Vocabulary, syntax etc., like mobilised troops, follow this initial command.

Could you recommend other well-written books, old and new, and also to name your favourite well-written passages?

Though the night sky is so full of stars, I find myself returning frequently to Conrad and Faulkner. As I Lay Dying is a book worth savouring slowly as it has writing of such extraordinary texture, intensity and penetration. At times, Faulkner seems to be pushing past the known and the visible into some other dimension. His noticing is unsurpassed: ‘The lantern sits on a stump. Rusted, grease-fouled, its cracked chimney smeared on one side with a soaring smudge of soot, it sheds a feeble and sultry glare upon the trestles and the boards and the adjacent earth. Upon the dark ground the chips look like random smears of soft pale paint on a black canvas. The boards look like long smooth tatters torn from the flat darkness and turned backside out.’

Conrad has an extraordinary ability for crafting an image that speaks to a profound metaphysical truth. There is a passage in Typhoon where the boatswain, in the midst of a storm, drops into a black coal bunker — black within black — and then proceeds to the hold which is full of Chinese coolies returning home after years away doing hard labour. As the ship is tossed by the high seas, their money chests have been smashed open and in the darkness of the hull, in the midst of the storm, they are tossed into a single mass of limb and belongings, fighting each other over their silver coins. And there you have Conrad’s vision of man.

Any prose tips Auraist readers won’t have seen elsewhere? Pet peeves, etc?

I have noticed a trend in contemporary fiction where certain writers do away with one aspect or another of traditional grammar or formatting without any justification within the book’s form for doing so. It’s the worst kind of pretentiousness. Every decision you make in the writing of your fiction must associate back to the meaning at the heart of the text.