TIG: Why I loved this book and will never read it again

[Chaz]

Scott wrote: "I don't think he's trying to be clever. His style just isn't in fashion these days. He reads, to me, like a 19th century novelist."

I understand and we do differ in what we prefer but the nested clauses drive me nuts. Now, I'm reading The Great Gastby at the moment (1920s, not 19thC I know) and Fitzgerald can use a sentence that is eight lines long but when he does the sentence flow from beginning to end and I'm not left at the end of it thinking, "Who is the subject of this sentence?", "How does this clause relate to the previous one?" or "How many layers deep am I in these awkward nested clauses?".

Example from Gatsby Ch 3, p40: "The groups change more swiftly, swell with new arrivals, dissolve and form in the same breath--already there are wanderers, confident girls who weave here and there among the stouter and more stable, become for a sharp, joyous moment the center of a group and then excited with triumph glide on through the sea-change of faces and voices and colour under the constantly changing light."

Now that is a great sentence, but notice how each clause flows directly into the next to give you a really evocative feeling of being an observer walking through this throng and being swept up in it whilst remaining an outsider.

You say that Kay reads for you like a 19th century novelist but I disagree. It may be unfair to compare Kay to Hardy or Tolstoy but he is not in their league and you wouldn't find his sentence structures in their works. And he can't write an action scene like Eriksen ;).

All this to say, I agree with Sky. Thank you for your poems.

[Chaz]

P.S. I loved Simmons use of language in Hyperion and how he changed his style as he changed storyteller. The first story is the one with the most purple and descriptive language but for Simmons that is a reflection on the character of the priest who's diaries we are reading. When reading Brawne's chapter in contrast it was very direct and blunt in language. This really enhanced that book for me. I am not afraid of description, my specific issues with Kay are with sentence structure and a lack of subtlety when a point is made over and over rather than trusting us to have picked up on his meaning the first time.

[Scott]

Part of the issue with a discussion like this is that somebody's gonna feel like they're being called out for not being perceptive enough. I have to disagree with your assessment, but ultimately what we're talking about comes down to a matter of taste. There are things I dislike about Kay's writing (I think he ought to steer clear of any modern dialogue, for example, and I couldn't get through his Fionavar books), but I simply don't see what you see. His prose seems to me to be clear and flowing, his descriptions serve to draw the world more clearly, and his insights into his characters are deep. We're just going to have agree we like different things.

[Chaz]

Scott wrote: "We're just going to have agree we like different things."

I think we can manage to do that.

[Fredgarber]

I have two reasons why I liked the book and will never read it again:

1. I felt Kay writes like he has stumbled across a series of paintings. Each painting captures a particular moment: The Singer At the Funeral. The Conspirators in the Lodge. Battle of the Night Walkers.
I feel he makes up a little story for each character in the scene. Most of the time, he notices that there are some of the same people in each painting. The musicians in the Funeral become the spies in the Lodge become the Lost Prince and his retinue.
I think this is why his writing seems so... ponderous. Stephenson writes a lot of words, but I don't want to skip most of those. Tolkien is verbose, but not slow paced. It's because each of Kay's word contributes beautifully to the description of the scene in the "painting," but each painting sometimes needs a lot of extra words to shoehorn it into the same book as the other paintings.

2. Because the Palm all shares a common language and culture, I never got a sense of Tigana. Did Tigana people dress a certain way? Did they have a different language? Different foods? Different architecture? Different music or dance or technologies? No to all of it.
Why should I care that Alessan is trying to become Prince of Tigana instead of trying to become Prince of Lower Corte? "A rose by any other name would smell as sweet" - so what does Tigana smell like? It smells like hometown pride - a feeling I don't have.

So to sum up, to me Kay has written a novel that describes a beautiful set of paintings that tell a story, instead of a novel that tells a story, and Kay wants to invoke Hometown Pride in his reader instead of evoking it.