The Mysterious Affair of Style

 I'm halfway through editing a book, a novel, I wrote a decade ago. It's a very interesting process. The book is funny - it's meant to be, so, phew - and I'm enjoying the chicane plotting, its sheer pace. Lots of stuff happens in this book and, over the intervening decade, I've forgotten most of it. So I'm enjoying meeting these characters and their world. It has a thrilling quality. It's set in the early sixties criminal London I know more from films than books. That dreary black and white world just before the Beatles changed everything. Hats and belted raincoats are worn. Food is bad. It's always raining. Everyone smokes and wears brilliantine. Foreigners are suspect, homosexuality is illegal, there are bomb-craters all over London, and women are dolly-birds, repressed spinsters or carping chars. It guys the certainties of post-war Britain. The jokes are certainly not on the ration. Reading it back hasn't felt like National Service. 

But...

A decade ago, I could not write a sentence. I didn't know where to put the punctuation. There were lines in this manuscript so passive I had to use a stick to goad them into meaning. There were unnecessary "hads" and "thats" in every paragraph. Practically all reported speech started with a "Well,...". There were no compound adjectives, there were spelling mistakes, dropped full-stops, and it wasn't even double-spaced. And I sent this to people. To publishers. At the time I was outraged that they never replied. I didn't get rejected, I got ignored. But while those publishers were ignorant pricks and barely human and the fuckers will rue the day, they were sort of right. I wasn't even meeting them halfway. I suspect they looked at my M/S, saw the single-spacing and were over-joyed. We don't have to bother with this one. He has disqualified himself with basic formatting issues. 

They're busy. Those sluice piles tower over them. I understand. 

I'm slowly editing it into coherence. It's very me. Whatever that means. I can identify a certain "me-ness", but I'm not entirely sure what it is. Style. Perhaps style is just what happens when you fail to achieve perfection. Style is your mistakes, your failings, while you scrabble towards what you really want to be writing. 

It's the story of a Greek God, working as a policeman in 60's London, and getting caught up in the mystery of a rain-making machine.  Who in the hell would write a book like that? Who would want to read it? We shall see.