Tick tock, the writer’s changed

It is a developing trend and appears to be catching on fast. Times after all are changing. And so must things around. Books, therefore, are becoming shorter! Novelists are being forced into packing more (story) into less (space). At least that is my observation. And it is a good thing — a kind of evolving compromise: Writers are saying (through their new approaches, ‘despite your iPhones and iPads and the accessibility of so much more, please keep reading.’). I seriously doubt one will ever encounter any more a book the size of A Suitable Boy (one that literally threatened to ‘strain your purse and sprain your wrist.’) Although only comparatively recent it is to be said that the book was ‘of its era’.

Technology has in some ways encouraged the fragmentation of attention — we appear unable to give one thing too much of our focus for too long, because there are so many other things jostling for attention — all of them available.

In Sydney, after one is done perusing the Sydney Morning Herald, one can just as easily, if one wished, leaf through the New York Times and the London Times on ones iPad. But can one?

Back in the day, the Indian Express was all we got delivered and that was devoured from back page to front (because it was always recommended one started with the Sports page, which recorded man’s achievements rather than the front pages which, with great predictability, catalogue the doom and gloom of the past 24 hours.)

After that, because one had oodles of time before the cricket began on the radio (and Sunil Gavaskar was on the verge of another double century in partnership with the doughty Chetan Chauhan threatening to overcome a 400-plus chase set by England) one picked up George Eliot’s Middlemarch (chronologically a much earlier wrist-sprainer than A Suitable Boy) with its very small print — the words like so many black ants on the page.

Today, interestingly, both books can be read without the threat of wrist injury, off a screen — in a sense that technology has turned them into lightweights! What one doesn’t have in abundance anymore, however, is time. It’s the same old clocks beating to the same old rhythm since the universe began, but suddenly the nature of how we use the 24 hours given to us in a day has changed.

And ‘availability’ has brought about that change. Just the other day, a friend was saying how even with music he found it hard to listen to one song straight through. In the past, the same person said he considered it a sacrilege to turn off a song in the middle.

Today, with YouTube, in the half-hour one sets aside to unwind with music, one wants to pack in as many songs — and one way of doing that is by listening to a short medley of them. A quick dip into the past — Talk Talk’s Does Caroline Know or Dum Dum Girl quickly fading into Dire Straits Skateaway in the midst of which one feels the urge to hear once more Pearl Jam’s Jeremy and then jump irrationally to French Cowboy’s It’s a Question of Time, perhaps because when one first heard it one thought it was an undiscovered Bowie song.

And so, in this present environment, current writers are literally ‘keeping it concise’. Three novels I’ve read of late have given me great pleasure, not merely because they are superbly crafted and brilliantly narrated, but because they allowed me to pick them up without being threatened by their size. The Burnt-out Town of Miracles by Roy Jacobsen; Out Shooting Horses by Per Petterson and The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka. Highly recommended literature for the current reader. My opinion, of course. Petterson and Otsuka brought tears to my eyes, but for entirely different reasons.

Dickens once said: “There are books of which the backs and covers are the best parts.” Not these three little gems.

Kevin Martin is a journalist based in Sydney, Australia.