"Six months' paternity leave would wreck relationships, " he opines. "Imagine women coming home to hear their old man banging on about the price of nappy sacks. But Mr Johnson, writing in The Daily Telegraph, reacted as if a mass castration programme had just been announced as compulsory. "How can it possibly be good for very young children to be closeted with their fathers, for six months," he asks, "when those men by the end are likely to be suffering from such acute cabin fever that they go half-mad in an intensifying hell of spilt Milupa and perfumed nappy sacks?"No more insightful was Brian Reade of the Daily Mirror. God knows the timid suggestions made by the Government last week for six months' paternity leave were not such a remarkable step in the direction of choice and flexibility for parents and children.
Will the adverb make it up with the doing-word, or will it lose its heart to a split infinitive?I'm hoping that The Sea, the Sea, the Sea, when it comes out, has no plot and makes me want to kill myself. I also hope it will not be what the illiterate call "a good read" More from Howard Jacobson. I know we are supposed to think Boris Johnson is a lovable bumbler, cleverly hiding his huge brain behind his messy fringe, and his lust for power behind his lust for influence But I think he's a dangerous fraud. You crave excitement and adventure? Engross yourself in syntax. What is the adjective doing to the noun, and does the noun deserve it? - there's a question to keep you on the edge of your seat. One might just as well complain of an abstract painting that it doesn't have a haywain in it, or a still life that it lacks a singing butler.Though Dickens plotted like a dervish, I would swap every coincidence and denouement he contrived for a single passage of description of the torpor of a Victorian Sunday in London, or the rains coming out again in Lincolnshire.In feeling made sensuous there is narrative enough for any reader, and all the story you want in the progress of a sentence or a thought. Just as it is impossible to write a novel that is without melancholy, so is it impossible to write a novel without a story.A story, mind, not a plot: it is a mistake to confuse the one with another.
For it is a story for a person of a particular appearance to walk into a particular room wearing a particular expression. No more need ever happen for my money, always provided that something or other is made vivid - maybe the person, maybe the room, maybe the expression, or maybe nothing other than the way the author feels or doesn't feel - absence of feeling being as good a story as any - about one or all of them.That a murder must be committed, that a love affair must be undertaken, that a wizard must descend before we are prepared to entrust the novel with our interest is utter philistinism. Character is plot as Henry James never tired of saying, and suspense, for those able to read, waits as much upon thought and language as it does upon event. Feel-good, in truth, is an insult not only to our intelligence, but to our dignity as well.The other thing a novel is not obliged to do is bother us with turbulent event. The Sea has come in for some stick for failing to deliver in the areas of plot, character and suspense.
