Thinking out Loud...

Listen.

For me, prose is like music: it has tone, pitch, rhythm, beat, melody, harmony. Like music, it is continuous, unified, evocative. I can feel this in my mind's ear: the right words in the right place, like the beat of the drums or the strum of the guitar. Or how a certain line would resonate through the reader like a violin in a master's hand.

Like music, there is good prose, average prose and bad prose. Bad prose is jangling and discordant, jarring to the ear, a cacophony of shrieks of metal on metal. This includes Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, words that seem to have been copied from movie scripts, flat and lifeless. Like listening to Beethoven's 5th on a single note.

Average prose is more common. You rely more on the story you read: you are entertained, amazed, wondered, saddened by it. But: don't you wonder if there could be more to it? Like being enchanted by elevator music instead of Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings.

Good prose varies. There is prose that seem like orchestra music, some as spartan as a flute playing in the night. And some that are like drums, a catastrophic car crash of words that is still alluring to the ear-- or, in this case, to the eye. This is because there is a certain order, a comprehensibility to the writing and the structure of words. A case in point: Steve Aylett. From his book Toxicology--

Seemed she should learn to smile when she was unhappy, to stop laughing, to speak up, to never speak to strangers, to share guilt for the acts of strangers, that strangers made the laws of the land, that the laws of the land valued things over life, that life ended if a stranger decided it, to be where she could be found, to feel one thing and do another. How could she hang so many contradictions in one skull?

You can hear the beat of Aylett's prose, like African drums or European techno, reverbrating through your skull and echoing in your ears as you mouth the words.

There is also the more simple prose: one word after the another but still evocative enough to wrap the reader in a dream-like lullaby. Consider Kevin Brockmeier's story, "The Brief History of the Dead":

The dead were often surprised by such memories. They might go weeks and months without thinking of the houses and neighborhoods they had grown up in, their triumphs of shame and glory, the jobs and routines and hobbies that had slowly eaten away their lives, yet the smallest, most inconsequential episode would leap into their thoughts a hundred times a day, like a fish smacking its tail on the surface of a lake.

Or this opening line from a story by Theodora Goss, like violin music from an open window:

I sit in one of the cafés in Szent Endre, writing this letter to you, István, not knowing if I will be alive tomorrow, not knowing if this café will be here, with its circular green chairs and cups of espresso. By the Danube, children are playing, their knees bare below school uniforms. Widows are knitting shapeless sweaters. A cat sleeps beside a geranium in the café window.

There are others whose prose is straightforward but whose beauty shines from within like a trumpet solo. A paragraph from Graham Joyce's Requiem:

Before crossing over to Stokes's spartan study he'd unlocked his form room to collect a few personal possessions. He'd inspected the stock cupboard at the back of the classroom. There were some tapes and slides, and several books and magazines, all of which he'd bequeathed to his successor. His desk drawers contained little besides scrap paper and a wallet of photographs taken on school trips, but it all had to be cleared. He'd found a paperback science-fiction ombibus, one of the pages marked by a leaf of paper. He'd taken out the marker, on which was written: This fleeting life. Get bread and milk and I will love thee.xxx

On the other hand, there is my one and only shame, Jonathan Carroll. Unfortunately, I'm not much for Carroll's books but I cannot resist his lines, like this one from The Wooden Sea, a jazzist's delight:

One day a guy walks into the station house leading a dog the likes of which you have never seen. It's a mixed breed but is mainly pit bull covered by a swirl of brown and black markings so he looks like a marble cake. But that's where his normal stops because this dog has only three and a half legs, is missing an eye and breathes weird. Sort of out the side of his mouth but you can't really be sure. The way air comes out, it sounds like he's whistling "Michelle" under his breath.

And then there is Kelly Link. I don't suppose I have to say anything anymore about Link's prose, now do I?

So I say once more: listen.

Listen.