<b>T C A Srinivasa-Raghavan:</b> Small is necessary

There is nothing more delectable, especially as you grow older, than to criticise the changes that inevitably occur in whatever is your fancy - politics, religion, history, mathematics, the fine arts, biology, zoology or whatever.

The trick is to savour the changes and not get very angry about them as so many people do. A little irritation perhaps but no rants, please.

In the specific context of this column, which is about books, I have noticed a silent change in the style of writing novels. As an example, consider the passage below. It is the first paragraph of Thomas Hardy's Far From the Madding Crowd:
 

"When Farmer Oak smiled, the corners of his mouth spread till they were within an unimportant distance of his ears, his eyes were reduced to chinks, and diverging wrinkles appeared round them, extending upon his countenance like the rays in a rudimentary sketch of the rising sun."

That's 47 words in one sentence which has four commas and one "and". A few paragraphs down, there's an even bigger one:

"He wore a low-crowned felt hat, spread out at the base by tight jamming upon the head for security in high winds, and a coat like Dr Johnson's; his lower extremities being encased in ordinary leather leggings and boots emphatically large, affording to each foot a roomy apartment so constructed that any wearer might stand in a river all day long and know nothing of damp - their maker being a conscientious man who endeavoured to compensate for any weakness in his cut by unstinted dimension and solidity."

This one has almost the double the number of words, 87. It also has one comma, one semi-colon and one dash.

We like it small
As the 20th century progressed, and the mass market developed, sentences started to become shorter. At first the change was imperceptible. Even the Mills and Boon novels of the second and third quarters of the 20th century were able to accommodate compound sentences.

But now that we are in the 17th year of the 21st century, all pretence has been given up. Virtually no sentence in a book published in the last 15 years - at least the ones I have read - has more than 20 words in it. And that is a rarity. The general rule is 12 to 15 words.

This came home to me with great force as I was reading Keki Daruwala's superb new novel Ancestral Affairs. It is about a Parsi lawyer in Junagarh in 1947 who has been sent there to advise the Nawab on the impending changes in India.

The book is a perfect example of short sentences, a sort of haiku of prose. I don't know if that is Mr Daruwala's original style or if it has been imposed by the editors at his American publisher, HarperCollins which calls itself the "second largest consumer book publisher in the world".

Consumer book publisher? What's that?

Never mind, though. The short sentences make it very easy to read these books, which seem to be made - not quite written - for flights that last about six hours, return.

If you are on anything longer, you need to buy two books. Most people I know take one serious book for the first hour of the flight and a novel for the rest of the time. That's when they aren't watching films or dozing in an alcoholic haze which, I must confess, is my preference.

Why we like it small
You can try practically any author of the last two decades and you will find the same thing: that story-telling has changed in form. A Scandinavian sparseness and simplicity has replaced the old baroque style.

I would offer three main reasons for this. But there could be more which may occur to you.

First, as HarperCollins has discovered, books are no longer read, they are consumed. So you need to make them bland, at least in style, like the kimchi you get in even Korea now.

Second, books need time in order to be "consumed" and it is only during travel or holidays that there are no intrusions. But since these periods tend to be brief and since people like to "consume" the book fully - they want to know what happens in the end - necessarily the style has to be easily swallow-able.

Third, English has become a lot like Chinese where it is enough to know 2,000 characters. Likewise, in English, now you need to know only about 1,000 words which may be fine for the reader but cramps the writers a lot whose individuality as lost.

But then, who cares for them?