There is no one way to write a novel. That’s surely obvious. In an essay on François Mauriac, Graham Greene declared himself ‘tired of the dogmatically “pure” novel, the tradition founded by Flaubert and reaching its magnificent tortuous climax in England in the works of Henry James’, whose novels, one may add, do satisfy Burgess’s call for ‘a journey into the unknown’ with the prose conveying ‘the difficulties of that journey’ — difficulties for the reader too, often enough. Instead Greene applauded Mauriac as ‘a writer who claims the traditional and essential right of the novelist, to comment, to express his views . . . Even the author, poor devil, has a right to exist.’

There is pleasure to be had from following a novelist on a voyage of exploration, one in which the style reflects uncertainties, a novel written as it were in answer to the question, ‘how do I know what I think till I see what I’ve said?’. But there is equal pleasure, if of a different order, to be got from the novelist who, like Mauriac or indeed Waugh, uses events, not to change characters, but to reveal them. If one style, hesitating, probing, mazy, is suited to one kind of novel, then a different style, lucid, terse, epigrammatic in judgment, fits another.

The truth is that almost any style, even the plainest and most clichéd, weary man-of-the world manner, such as Maugham’s, may do very well if it accords with the author’s material. A novelist may write admirably, like Hemingway, in short, simple sentences, clear as a mountain stream, or, like Proust, in long, twisting ones, full of qualifications, a style like an overgrown garden full of unexpected delights. To my mind only that style which draws attention to itself and distracts from the matter is intolerable. But here too others disagree, finding rich pleasure in, for instance, Nabokov.

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