On Style

[coalescent]

In the sort of non-fiction (educational) writing I do at work, there is without question such a thing as Good Style. Clarity is vital; it's all about presenting information in a logical and easy-to-follow way. Structure is also important; key statements should be placed where they will have the greatest impact. I'm still learning, but those are the basic goals, and they mean that for a given piece of writing there often is a Right Way, or at the most several closely related Right Ways, to do it.

Fiction writing, obviously, isn't like that. Style in fiction writing serves many goals, and is usally about tone and mood as much as it is about story and character (and a dozen other things), so it becomes much harder to say whether something is well-written or badly written. The goalposts vary. All meeting abstracts (for example) have the same objective - but it's likely that each story will have its own objective. Style is the lens through which a story is viewed; it may be clear or cloudy or fractured for effect, as the writer pleases.

In a way, I suppose I'm saying that the writing I do for work can be assessed objectively, and that fiction has always to be assessed subjectively. There are nine-and-sixty types of Good Writing. Does it work for me?

And yet, and yet...some types of Good Writing are more equal than others. Some pieces of writing are subject to critical consensus, and if someone doesn't appreciate them well, it's just that their tastes are shallow and unrefined. This, inevitably, is where genre snobbery comes in: sf writing doesn't do the things that literary critics look for, so it's bad writing.

Does this ever get inverted? 'This sf novel does do the things that literary critics look for, so it must be good writing' - even if it doesn't do the sf well? immortalradical might claim that Light falls into this category (correct me if I'm wrong), and I've been feeling tempted to argue that Jon Courtenay Grimwood's Arabesk novels might be considered in the same way.

I finally got around to reading all three over the past couple of weeks, and it was a real struggle. I found the profusion of splice-commas, half-sentences and mid-section perspective shifts confusing, tedious and, to be honest, downright ugly...but everyone else in the whole world has praised Grimwood's writing for its pace and style. They've also praised it for being naturalised - rather than being novels about an alternate world, they're novels that seem to have come from an alternate world, so you don't get the 'outsider looking in' viewpoint so common in sf. Intellectually, I can recognise that as a huge achievement, but emotionally, I found that the stories he chose to tell didn't interest me. I wanted the Arabesks to engage with their world more than they did.

Ultimately, I'm having trouble deciding what I think of the series. It's a bit like one of those line-drawings of a cube: the ones you look at and see that they're coming out of the page, then blink and look again and see that no, they're going into the page. I can see one interpretation or the other, but never both at the same time.

This is a half-formed argument, so I'm sure I've left many points out. What do you all think? Is there good style, bad style? How important is it? What do others think of Grimwood's books? Am I just being a genre bumpkin who's unable to appreciate alternate story modes?

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