More Pratchett Commentary in The Guardian

A few weeks ago, we joined in the internet outrage over an article in The Guardian by Jonathan Jones who disparaged the work of Terry Pratchett despite admitting he had never read any.

A week ago, Jones wrote another essay, this time after having read one of Pratchett's earlier novels, Small Gods. His opinion of Pratchett has not improved dramatically, although he at least acknowledges that he had "snorted contempt" for Pratchett in his earlier article, and he is able to identify some aspects of Pratchett's writing that he admires:

This is Pratchett at his best: expansive and lucid, taking one of the greatest ideas in western thought ... and having a bit of fun with it. ...

You can praise Pratchett for his witty exposition of big ideas, his creation of a fantasy world that gives readers an alternative home (and will surely one day become as seductive on screen as Martin’s Westeros has in Game of Thrones).

Perhaps most importantly, Jones now articulates clearly what he doesn't like about Pratchett relative to some of his own literary favorites: the quality of the prose. In Jones opinion:

[F]or some reason, the fantasy genre is a graveyard for the English language.

and

Pratchett’s deflationary jokes, like his Plato parody, are often funny in isolation, but taken together, they result in a determinedly unambitious, unexciting style. He seems to love handling clichés as if they were shiny pebbles:

“The sky was blue.”

“It was a million-to-one chance, with any luck.”

“Simony laughed bitterly.”

There’s nothing wrong with these sentences from Small Gods – the book is full of such expressions – but there is nothing special about them either.

That’s what I’ve felt previously when I looked at Pratchett’s prose, and following it for 397 pages has not suddenly transformed it into Henry James. The ordinariness of this writing is surely deliberate: it makes the book warm and friendly, like a normal chat with a normal bloke.

Why would anyone confuse this with the kind of literary prose it so emphatically does not want to be?

This is the difference between entertainment and literature – the novel as distraction and the novel as art. You cannot divorce a literary novel from the way it is written. Sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, literature is the words and nothing but.

Plenty of novels get published and loved that are not literature in this sense, but all I am saying, and all I was saying, is that I prefer the literary kind. I prefer it by a billion Ephebian miles.

You can praise Pratchett for his witty exposition of big ideas, his creation of a fantasy world that gives readers an alternative home (and will surely one day become as seductive on screen as Martin’s Westeros has in Game of Thrones). But you cannot say: “Pratchett writes really ordinary prose yet is a literary genius.” 

We can argue about what constitutes a literary genius, but I do not dispute Jones's right to value the quality of prose in a novel above other aspects of the writing. If that is what floats his boat, more power to him.

Indeed, I also take a great amount of enjoyment from the quality of an author's prose. One of my favorite authors is Peter Carey, one of only three two-time winners of the Man Booker Prize: in 1988 for Oscar and Lucinda and in 2001 for the True History of the Kelly Gang. Carey possesses a stunning command of the English language. At times his prose is so beautiful that I have to put his books down to savor for a moment the power of his words. Other times, his prose is (deliberately) extremely difficult, as with the aforementioned True History of the Kelly Gang, a historical novel written in a 19th century vernacular with little concern for punctuation or grammar. It is hard to read a Carey novel and not be impressed. But for both of these reasons, Carey's books are not immersive; the prose is simply far too visible. This is fine if you---like Jones and me---find enjoyment in the art of writing exceptional prose.

But there are times when I want to be immersed in a story. And for these times, invisible prose is what is needed. This also requires great skill even if, because it is invisible, it doesn't attract the attention of critics.

Kate Paulk makes many of the same points in a more strongly worded fashion over at the Mad Genius Club:

This, dear Mr Literary Columnist, is an example of making the prose invisible. Yes, it’s deliberate. Pratchett doesn’t want excess fancy getting in the way of the reader. If I stop to admire pretty words, you’ve lost me. I don’t remember Pratchett’s phrasing, I remember his characters. His situations. The subtle parallels he draws that show disturbingly plausible ways to go from civilized to barbaric. Dear lord, I can remember and talk about this and give bloody examples when it’s been something in the order of seven years since I last read the book.

Fuck prose. If I can remember the meaning of a book that long after I last read it when I’ve read – quite literally – hundreds of other books since then, that author is doing it right.

Paulk has a point. She is more interested in debating the meaning of the term "literary" than I am:

Ah. No. Literary prose does not mean the contents contain literature. Usually the opposite is the case. Unless, of course, you happen to be a pretentious wanker who wants to impress people with how much he knows about Arte. ... 

And as for Jones's claim that:

Sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, literature is the words and nothing but.

I concur with Paulk's view is that this is

Bullshit. The stuff that’s the words and nothing but? That’s the stuff that will be forgotten in a generation, if it lasts that long. The things people remember and love? That’s literature. ...

Oh, yes, you can, sir. Real literature, the kind of thing that lasts past the flash-in-the-pan praise of the pretentious fashion-slaves who call themselves literary? That has meaning. Meaning that percolates and matures and emerges sometimes years later in the realization that there was a lot more to that fun romp than you’d have thought at first.

Well said!