It’s a Cruel Way to take Her Away

And still Mr Dawkins has to wait. I finished Mrs Dalloway last week and having found Atonement by Ian McEwan at Oxfam for 99p, I have gone on to start that. It is odd that my first attempt at Mrs Dalloway led to an early jettison without understanding; as I said I wasn’t ready to start a book that appeared to be as disjointed and stream-of-consciousness as Ulysses. However, after seeing the film I gave it another go. The film acted as explanatory notes and made it so much more interesting. For reasons which are clear in my own mind, this reminds me of the issue of the Babel Fish from Hitchhikers, where the actual speech heard acts as some sort of decode for the brain waves which the fish puts out after it hears the speech. The film and the book seemed like these two components. I know! How pretentious do you want Mondays to be?

Atonement is supposed to be Ian McEwan’s best book though after getting a sixth of the way in, Amsterdam still seems better. It does seem to have some self-referential things; stuff that must be about the author himself, or maybe I just can’t imagine any authors not writing about their own experiences or beliefs. There is always something in any writing that betrays the author; witness Adrian Mole forcing in all sorts of things about his own experiences – newts, the fall of the Russian Communists, the sun on the shopping precinct. Actually, I am sure Hemmingway would have been happy to be close to a tank during that day in Moscow. Word is shouting at me about wordiness, which obviously means that no writer am I. There! Happy with that?

How far away are we from designing a word-processing program that can go beyond the standard grammar checks and force you to write in the style of an author of your choice? Word very often throws up what it thinks are bad styles when they would be considered creative in real life so the edge of the envelope, the definition of what is correct or incorrect must be very fuzzy. We could manipulate that fuzziness to provide a gentle nudge in the direction of a particular style. I see a list of authors in a drop down in the grammar and style settings. Its probably already available as are most things you can think about.