Peter Slater

The School of IKEA

I have before me Apes and Parrots, a volume of parodies edited by J.C. Squires and published by Herbert Jenkins Ltd. in 1928. It is clearly the product of another age – not least because most of the writers parodied, although they may not be exactly forgotten, linger in the public mind merely as names: their works, alas, having long-ceased to be read. When was the last time you, dear Reader, picked up a book by Crabbe, Southey or Thompson? Could you recognise Cowper’s style so well that a clever parody would make you chuckle? But there are deeper reasons why this book would be out of favour today, and the key lies in that very word style.

It is impossible to conceive such a book as Apes and Parrots, with its emphasis on a writer’s style – i.e. the distinctive grammar, syntax, word choice or verse form – being published today with parodies of contemporary authors because it seems that so many writers these days lack a distinctive individual voice. One may parody nowadays by setting, character or narrative, but not by style. The Harry Potter series of parodies – Barry Trotter and the Whojamflip of Whatever etc. are in every Waterstones and there exists a Fifty Shades of Chicken and, appropriately for our age, there is a Twitter Nunferno account ribbing Dan Brown.

Offer a random paragraph by Dickens, Conrad or Virginia Woolf and your average reader will be able to recognise each one without hesitation. But do the same for almost any recently-published novel and it is highly unlikely that anyone would be able to identify the author through her or his style. Why is this? What is responsible for this great outbreak of conformity?

I suggest a number of reasons, but foremost is the promotion of what we might call the IKEA school of writing and the injunction placed upon writers to chuck out everything that is individual or quirky or not strictly needed. Writers, editors and teachers of creative writing have developed an

obsession that has almost become a compulsive disorder for excising all ‘unnecessary’ words. ‘Don’t let words get in the way of your story!’ writers are constantly told: keep it lean and mean.

Creative writing courses are essential – writing is, after all, a craft that can be taught as much as painting or musical composition – but many have become industrialised factory farms and slaughterhouses of originality. Every word is dusted, every sentence polished and every paragraph placed just-so. We are stamping out distinctiveness, idiosyncrasy and the unexpected by adhering to a false notion as to what good writing should be.

Visit a bookshop and you find an unnerving number of new novels that seem as though written by One Universal Voice. The books are all obviously different, but so many are presented in the same eerily perfect way. Style, personality and, indeed, passion have been ruthlessly excised from too many modern novels. Imagine a contemporary editor or creative writing teacher faced with a page from Heart of Darkness: ‘Now, look, Jo, don’t you think you could cut at least one adjective from the sentence, “The air was warm, thick, heavy, sluggish.”?’

‘And Virginia, this bit from The Waves: “Tuesday follows Monday; and then comes Wednesday.” The reader knows this already.’

‘Will, I love Absalom Absalom, I really do but if I gave you a coupla dozen punctuation marks do you think you could fit them in somewhere in this chapter?’

Perhaps it is by their imperfections that we tend to identify the great writers and it is for these faults, I submit, that we love them. Is there a single contemporary author that is truly beloved in the way that many of us now treasure Charlotte Brontë, Virginia Woolf or Charles Dickens? We love not merely their stories, characters and philosophies but the rhythms of their sentences, the sounds of their words. When we read them we recreate their very voices in our minds so that in the act of reading we develop an intimate relationship between the writer and ourselves. Who can doubt the

impossibility of hearing the true voice of the author when almost every novel will have a page of ‘Acknowledgements’ thanking all who have contributed to the final creation? A babel of voices chatter through the pages. Behind many great writers in the past there often lay a great editor who would discreetly suggest cuts and alterations – without Matthew Perkins we would perhaps not rate Thomas Wolfe, F. Scott Fitzgerald or Hemingway so highly. Pat Covici edited not only John Steinbeck but also Saul Bellow among others. Steinbeck was a notoriously bad speller and pretty careless with punctuation to boot. After studying the original manuscripts, Professor Kathryn Sutherland has written of Jane Austen that her spelling was atrocious and her grammar slapdash: ‘a powerful counter-grammatical way of writing,’ is how she puts it. So even Janeites must acknowledge that their idol needed some discreet help. But all this was mere tidying and making presentable – a hoover round the room before the guests arrive. What happens now is drastic and tearing the heart out of innovation and identity.

So why is the IKEA school now so popular? Why have we swapped the warm intimacy of Middlemarch for the cold, clinical polish of Amsterdam?

This is the age of the fast forward and flick channel, buttons. We lose patience with extraordinary rapidity. We don’t want Conrad’s four adjectives in a row even if each one takes us deeper into the forest. We’re happiest skating over the surface. For example, how many people under forty do you know who simply sit and watch one television programme from beginning to end without also scrolling through Facebook, Twitter or their emails on tablet or phone at the same time? Our minds have become fidgety, so writers have come to believe that they have to tell their stories as simply and clearly as possible and then get the hell out of their readers’ lives. The assumption is that few readers want the sort of prose that lingers in the mind like music; but surely our writers should be defying the Zeitgeist of fidget and skim. The contemporary mechanics of writing make it too easy to cut words, substitute synonyms, cut and paste passages to any part of the text. Of course writers did this back in the day, but the sheer physical awkwardness of making changes meant that these would be limited.

We should not be cast into gloom, however. There are exceptions to cheer our shelves. In a single paragraph you can identify Salman Rushdie, Margaret Atwood and Nadine Gordimer. No doubt you will by now be panting to offer others who you consider to be independent voices. Exceptions, though, prove the rule.

Give me a writer who has worked in a circus, lived in a rainforest, laboured on a farm, whose prose reflects the energies of such life and has perfected her or his craft through constant reading. Let us eschew pristine prose in favour of the occasionally clumsy but ultimately more loveable reality of the less-than-immaculate. Don’t chuck out all the chintz.

Essay Prize Competition 2017 Third Place