You will, of course, have guessed by now that this tale is told in the present tense. All historical novels nowadays seem to be so written. There is probably an EU directive about it. Some novelist once told another novelist that they could make their writing more vivid that way, and everyone fell for it. The result is this sort of thing:

Dinner is a festive occasion compared to breakfast. After a brief blessing, housekeeper Satsuki and the sisters eat tofu in tempura batter, fried with garlic and rolled in sesame; pickled eggplant; pilchards and white rice. Even the haughtiest sisters remember their commoners’ origins when such a fine daily diet could only be dreamt of, and they relish each morsel.

I’m afraid that any author prepared to write, without irony, ‘relish each morsel’ is not going to be turned into a vivid one by a shift of tense alone. Where did this widespread habit come from? I’m guessing, in part, from the conventional narrative style of screenplays. Perhaps there are other signs here of a longing for the big Hollywood movie, and the novel is prepared to meet the agents halfway.

In the same category falls Mitchell’s atrociously Dan-Brownish habit of rendering style indirect libre and characters’ thoughts in italics. Certainly Mitchell’s narrative resources here are dismayingly thin, and overwhelmingly limited to the two things that film does naturally — dialogue and an observation of something moving. The full range of novelistic possibilities is hardly even envisaged, and what Mitchell is prepared to do is often placed in awkward juxtaposition. Obsessively, and with unnaturally mannered effect, a line of dialogue is interrupted with small-scale, trivial action, or stage directions:

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