I heard Vince Cable put the boot into David Cameron’s immigration policy yesterday and wondered how Central Office would spin it. What they came up with was:

“…Vince is a member of the Government and supports Government policy.  The words he chooses to do that are up to him….”

I grit my teeth, ignore the appalling grammar and instead turn to the way in which Mr. Cable chose to express his support for the Government. 

ANDREW MARR:
The Prime Minister has seized upon this as one of the big things that he is fighting about. He’s made it very, very clear that he is personally behind this. He’s going into an argument with the Europeans, currently the Bulgarian president, I think. Can you actually stop this happening, the 75,000 cap?

VINCE CABLE:
I think it isn’t going to happen. Nick Clegg’s made it very clear he’s not going to allow it to happen. I think there’s a bigger picture here. We periodically get these immigration panics in the UK. I remember going back to Enoch Powell and “rivers of blood”, and all that. And if you go back a century, panics over Jewish immigrants coming from Eastern Europe. The responsibility of politicians, in this situation, when people are getting anxious, is to try to reassure them and give them facts, and not panic and resort to populist measures that do harm.

Well, there’s spin and there’s self-delusion and I think Central Office have crossed the line.   What they are saying, if I understand them, is that Cable is choosing to say the words, “…it isn’t going to happen…” but what he actually means is “…it is going to happen…” No wonder everyone is confused.

I might have expect someone supporting the Government’s policy on immigration to say something along the lines of, “…I support the Government’s policy…” and not “…The responsibility of politicians, in this situation, when people are getting anxious, is to try to reassure them and give them facts, and not panic and resort to populist measures that do harm…”

I suppose that just goes to show how much I know about the English language.

A couple of discoveries have impelled me to revisit the topic of literary fiction.  Incidentally, I trust you notice that I have forborne to flank the term with the accustomed quotation marks, thus indicating my open-mindedness in the matter of this genre (if I am allowed to use so debased a term).

I have had a number of encounters with writers who are of the opinion that I am simply uncultured, untutored or just plain dim because I fail to appreciate the grandeur of their prose.  Now, in the face of such an onslaught, only a fellow with the self-assurance of the self-deluded could fail to have experienced a modicum of concern lest the supposition be true. Therefore,  I admit there have been times when I have thought, to put it crudely, that “it must be me”.

One of these times was when I recently encountered the work of John Farris.  I am not so ashamed as some might think I ought to be by the fact that I had never heard of him until two weeks ago but I’ll admit to being rather surprised by his fame.  I’m given to understand that he is a popular writer of scary stories, whom some believe to be rather more literary in his style than others of his ilk.  For example, according to Amazon, Farris has been “…long a master of the literary thriller…” and Richard Matheson claimed that he had “…raised (sic) the terror genre into the realm of literature…”.  Whilst I agree that this is not a particularly significant accolade (Matheson gave us the marvellous sentence, “…Talbot’s toes whipped like pennants in a gale…”) it nevertheless points to the respect Farris enjoys amongst some writers.

It was when I encountered some of this “literature” that I began to realise that my antipathy towards a certain kind of pretentious writing might be difficult for some to understand.  For instance, amongst the turns of phrase Farris offers are such marvels as:  “…He watched the rise and fall of her breasts with blurred yearning…”  (I know: breasts again – cf last month’s blog)  I googled the term “blurred yearning” and turned up three genuine results; two of which post-date Farris and one of which pre-dates him.  That one, though, is from a poem where it makes even less sense.  And there was this wonderful thing, which is either an appalling translation of a website hoping to flog protein drinks or some kind of catch-all tagfest.

“The focus is that silky with less than unrivalled compose, lifting depressed albatross with blurred yearning overturn up muscle worry up and muscle growth. And if you penury to develop muscle throng, you're luxuriant to persuade to abuse up "more" protein, to not at worst vouchsafe the muscles you participate in at this quite two seconds but to fullness more.”

Whatever the case, the term appears to me to be nonsensical but I mustn’t let that lead me to think that it’s just rubbish because, apparently, this type of conjoining of words is perfectly acceptable in some quarters.  I offer (from various sources),  

“…her sexually ambiguous Timex…”

“…swathed in stratagem…”

“…Spiers’s eyes popped extraneously from their sockets…”

Quoted in “Wretched Writing” Petras and Petras

And one more thing I noticed:  To me, this sentence “…He gravely touched her shoulder, tapping it twice, dropped his hand…” is not only clumsy, it is grammatically incorrect yet this sort of thing peppers Farris’ writing.  It also peppers the writing of lots of people whose work I have criticised.  Am I to take it that this is also acceptable? 

I am drawn to the conclusion that this is a species of writing certainly more common in, if not unique to American literature; however, I’m still not convinced that it’s good writing and I give thanks that I am not, as I had believed, alone.  For in my search to find out what it was that led some writers to believe that stringing unusual words together in unusual combinations automatically endows it with literary merit, I discovered that there is a respected group of naysayers, whose mission is to reveal that the Emperor’s dangly bits are on display.

Of these, I have chosen to begin with “The Readers’ Manifesto” by M.R. Myers, in which the author picks apart some of the ghastly prose that was infesting American literature at the turn of this century.  Needless to say, the work appears to be just as valid today.  I shall report back  presently.