Verbiage by Sandra Horn

          I feel a rant coming on. Fans of Margaret Drabble, A S Byatt and the like, should stop reading now. I have just plodded my way grumpily through The Gates of Ivory, muttering/shrieking 'less is more!' 'do we need to know that?' 'what was all the stuff about toxic shock syndrome, when it didn't actually happen? Was it perhaps a public health warning: Do not use old tampax and then leave them in too long? Fair enough, but what was it doing in this story?'
          Why this need to add things that don't advance the plot or shed light on the characters? Is it 'Oh well, I've done all this research and I must put it in somewhere'? I suspect it might be. I'm all for getting the facts right, but NOT for including them in great indigestible lumps, for facts' sake! It feels patronising, somehow.
          In Angels and Insects (ASB), the family is an obvious beehive metaphor. OK, got that - but then there is a superfluous academic discourse about bees, just in case one hadn't got it, I suppose. Grrr!!
          Somewhere between a short, bald list of facts and an overblown expatiation, there's the right and pleasing amount of them. It's hard to define 'right amount' but it's to do with what they add to the pictures in one's head - colour, spice, music...I might have been feeling grumpier than usual at The Gates of Ivory because it was such a contrast to the book I'd read just before, Frances Thomas's A Daughter of Helen.

          Here is Hermione describing her father's splendid hall:

Imagine what seems like a forest of columns, deep red, so that going through them makes you feel as though you're entering a magic wood. Inside, the light is glowing and shivering, and then you make out the coffered ceiling of cedarwood... 

          I was there! I could hear the young girl's voice tinged with pride and a little awe. I didn't need to be told where the cedarwood came from or how it was transported or how the columns had been dyed red, and I wasn't; it was an elegant sufficiency.
It made me think of the theatre and films; there is power in the words and the scenery and the pace and rhythm and how they all fit, but the whole illusion can be destroyed if the balance is wrong. Take the films of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings - terrific stories but no matter how clever cgi is/are, there are only so many times a bridge can break and people plummet downwards, or thousands of Orcs come surging over the screen, before it all becomes utterly tedious. Less is often more, and enough is quite enough, thank you.
I'm going now. I'm going to have a drink before supper. We're having fish with mediterranean vegetables and couscous. The drink will be fruit juice as I'm resting my liver after 10 days of excesses on holiday. We went to York, Halifax and Stainton in the Lake District. You didn't need to know any of that, though, did you?
Rant over.