High on the teetering list of all the things that, down the long arches of the hacking years, have dissuaded me from trying to cobble a novel is the dreary business of describing how the characters look. You have a picture of this person or that in your head, and your reader, having coughed up his £15.99, has every right to know what so-and-so looks like when he or she walks into a room, feels cheery or glum, gets on top or underneath this or that other person, eats his dinner, rides a horse, lands a fish, strangles his landlady, or any of the hundred-and-one things a character has to do in the course of 300 pages, but how can you be certain that the reader is getting the image as precisely as you intend? Oh, you can bang on about steel-blue eyes or broken fingernails or thinning hair or loping gaits or breasts like firm young apples, but even after umpteen pages of trotting out such and other details and thereby holding up the plot until the book gets bunged into the wastebin, the picture of the person can never be spot-on. Do you know what Jay Gatsby looks like, or Leopold Bloom, or Tristram Shandy?
The only path to accurate physiognomic communication would be to cast the fiction with transposed fact. Thus, if on page one I could write, ‘On October 3, 2002, Dr Jeremy Paxman walked into the study and hit Lady Archer behind the ear with a sockful of sand. The Maltese falcon was as good as his,’ all my readers would get the picture immediately, and we should be off to a corking start. But a novelist cannot do that, for all sorts of reasons.
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