sebastian faulks a week in december review

And I doubt he gets much credit for it.īirdsong (1993), Faulks’s most sweeping and successful novel, his Paradise Lost, has, as its third sentence: ‘The town side of the boulevard backed onto substantial gardens which were squared off and apportioned with civic precision to the houses they adjoined.’ At first glance, this has a certain orotund fineness to it which either you like or you don’t, but when you look closer – I had to use the OED – you find that the Latinate words are very purposefully derived by way of French: adjoindre is more common in French than its equivalent is in English and ‘precision’, here, carries a meaning that is slightly less obsolete in French than it is in English, that of cutting off or trimming, making the sentence just tautological enough (‘squared off’, ‘apportioned’, ‘precision’) to turn it into a display of how elegant variation can be when you know your stuff.

One contemporary English novelist has nearly his way with words: particularly in the early parts of his novels, before the excitement takes over and the plot runs out of time for such niceties, Sebastian Faulks chooses his words – his participles, his adjectives, his compound nouns – with more scholastic care than any writer I can think of. He doesn’t just choose the right word: he chooses the right word for the wrong – for the pleasingly obstinate – reason. Anywhere else but in Milton, you might feel grateful that a nice-sounding word has been chosen over one of its synonyms. There aren’t many writers who are such literalists when it comes to the etymological uses of words: you’d have to have Latin coming out of your ears to think of making the meaning of the word a word is derived from more significant than its actual English usage. There are probably more sophisticated reasons for admiring Milton, but I always liked the way his Satan was ‘involved in rising mist’.

Sebastian faulks a week in december review