Speaking of text books as I was in the last post
(see immediately below), readers might like to listen to one of the best
writers of English to have put finger to typewriter key in the last hundred
years or so. I am thinking of George Orwell. Of course there have been many
masters of style—a few of the best known are Conan Doyle, P.G. Wodehouse,
Raymond Chandler and, in a slightly different way, Philip Larkin. But Orwell
was the master of prose-as-pane-of-glass (his analogy). It should, he said,
interpose no distorting lens between the reader and the mind of the writer.
Followers of this blog might like to listen to some of the
programmes being broadcast in the current series on BBC Radio 4 about George Orwell. I have listened to every one and they are all interesting. But of
particular relevance to this blog is the issue of clarity of writing. That
comes out most clearly in Orwell’s journalism. I never thought of his novels as
all that great. They certainly had a stylistic clarity, but fiction requires more
than that.
However, if readers want to listen to a fantastic example,
which is also extremely funny, of Orwell’s journalism at its extraordinary best, I
recommend the programme which is devoted to reading his article about the life of a book reviewer. That is journalism of the highest order. I doubt if anyone has ever written a better description of what Orwell wanted to
describe—which, being Orwell, was more than mere book-reviewing, of course, closer to the then current state of English literary civilisation. Try it!
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