Paul Clifford by Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
My rating: 1 of 5 stars
How I wanted to prove the bastards wrong. Unfortunately, how right they were. I recently picked up not one, but two big, handsome volumes from the collected works, thinking I should give the old boy a proper chance again. Cost me nearly nothing, but the time sadly wasted. Here's the novel that named the bad-writing-contest: "It was a dark and stormy night..." What's bad about it turns out to be that that was the last sensible thing he wrote in it.
Bulwer-Lytton hadn't a style so much as a seemingly inexhaustible capacity for the inexact, the exaggerated and the swank. Evidently the man could not write so much as a declarative sentence without decking at least the verb in fancy-dress. Maddening. No one ever says what they can "expostulate." No one ever walks but they "perambulate." No one does anything much, for that matter, that they mightn't better have done in half the words in which he insists they do it. Worse, there's no point to any of it. It's Dickens without a thought, a point, the slightest discernment or deviation from type. What makes the whole business unreadably bad is that the man clearly had nearly every other requirement of a first-rate novelist; character, invention, sympathy, intelligence and tact. What he lacked was taste, any real sense of humor or confidence in the English language.
What a lot of ponderous hooey.
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