Poor writing spoils good yarn
By James Parker |
March 2, 2012, Friday
|
Print Edition
Print Edition
BAD prose is arrestingly weird. It stops the clocks and twists the wires. It knits the brow in perplexity: What the hell is this? What's going on here?
I was brought up short, for example, very early in Matthew Pearl's latest novel, "The Technologists," by the following line: "Incredulously, the captain extended his spyglass." I wavered and then stopped. How does one incredulously extend a spyglass? And what else can one do incredulously?
To the narrative, anyway: The year is 1868, and the captain is incredulously extending his spyglass in the direction of Boston Harbor, where a disaster is unfolding. Schooners and pleasure steamers and barks, their compass needles all awhirl, are crashing into one another and sinking. Some malignancy has fritzed the instruments! A couple of days later, on State Street in Boston's busy financial quarter, all the windows spontaneously melt. Cue the panic in the streets.
Two bizarre and terrible irruptions, two sets of unexplained phenomena. The metropolis is clearly under siege - but by whom or what? And what will happen next? Enter the Technologists, an A-Team of students, informally convened, from the newly established Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Here I began to enjoy myself. Pearl has clearly wallowed in his research, and "The Technologists" is pretty good on the societal and cultural forces arrayed against the fledgling MIT Tribunes of the Industrial Revolution, warriors of enlightenment, pushing back the darkness with their inventions, its students and faculty are blackguarded left and right. The Harvard swells mock them for their closeness to the factory floor; the workers, who fear automation, throw tomatoes at them. ("Technology will bring God's wrath!") And the city fathers, hating their Darwinism, conspire against them.
The archenemy in "The Technologists" is the one they call "the experimenter": the entity responsible for the colliding ships in Boston Harbor and the melted eyeglasses on State Street. The Technologists have pegged him for a rogue scientist, a trickster with test tubes, and slowly, by trial and error, they draw a bead on him. They must stop him, for he represents Science's shadow: a magus-like manipulator of matter, in the service not of knowledge but of fear.
There is romance, there are fisticuffs. Laboratories explode. One Technologist is haunted by his memories of the Civil War.
What we have in "The Technologists" is basically a ripping yarn with some war-of-ideas apparatus and plenty of period furniture, the whole accompanied by bad writing that is very distracting. In a more ironic text, or one more aware of the possibility of pastiche, it might work; but Pearl appears to be using his 19th-century setting as a license to write extra-badly.
I was brought up short, for example, very early in Matthew Pearl's latest novel, "The Technologists," by the following line: "Incredulously, the captain extended his spyglass." I wavered and then stopped. How does one incredulously extend a spyglass? And what else can one do incredulously?
To the narrative, anyway: The year is 1868, and the captain is incredulously extending his spyglass in the direction of Boston Harbor, where a disaster is unfolding. Schooners and pleasure steamers and barks, their compass needles all awhirl, are crashing into one another and sinking. Some malignancy has fritzed the instruments! A couple of days later, on State Street in Boston's busy financial quarter, all the windows spontaneously melt. Cue the panic in the streets.
Two bizarre and terrible irruptions, two sets of unexplained phenomena. The metropolis is clearly under siege - but by whom or what? And what will happen next? Enter the Technologists, an A-Team of students, informally convened, from the newly established Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Here I began to enjoy myself. Pearl has clearly wallowed in his research, and "The Technologists" is pretty good on the societal and cultural forces arrayed against the fledgling MIT Tribunes of the Industrial Revolution, warriors of enlightenment, pushing back the darkness with their inventions, its students and faculty are blackguarded left and right. The Harvard swells mock them for their closeness to the factory floor; the workers, who fear automation, throw tomatoes at them. ("Technology will bring God's wrath!") And the city fathers, hating their Darwinism, conspire against them.
The archenemy in "The Technologists" is the one they call "the experimenter": the entity responsible for the colliding ships in Boston Harbor and the melted eyeglasses on State Street. The Technologists have pegged him for a rogue scientist, a trickster with test tubes, and slowly, by trial and error, they draw a bead on him. They must stop him, for he represents Science's shadow: a magus-like manipulator of matter, in the service not of knowledge but of fear.
There is romance, there are fisticuffs. Laboratories explode. One Technologist is haunted by his memories of the Civil War.
What we have in "The Technologists" is basically a ripping yarn with some war-of-ideas apparatus and plenty of period furniture, the whole accompanied by bad writing that is very distracting. In a more ironic text, or one more aware of the possibility of pastiche, it might work; but Pearl appears to be using his 19th-century setting as a license to write extra-badly.
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