I’m still working my way through The Pale Horseman by Cornwell, and am now about halfway through it. (As can probably be guessed, the Potter series has been consuming a large amount of my reading time!)
I’m enjoying The Pale Horseman well enough: the setting is interesting (Anglo-Saxon England), the characters are decent. But, as I’ve mentioned before in my posts about other Cornwell books, his writing could be better. A lot better. In particular, the man has a terrible problem with run on sentences. I’m truly surprised that many of his monstrous bits of prose haven’t been caught by editors.
While reading some of the book a few nights ago before going to sleep, I ran into an enormous construction. See how long you can hang on. Also, if you’re going to read it out loud – take a deep breath! Okay, here we go:
I let him drive me, then dodged to my right where my left foot slipped and I went down on that knee and the crowd, close behind me now, took in a great breath and a woman screamed because Steapa’s huge sword was swinging like an ax onto my neck, only I had not slipped, merely pretended to, and I pushed off with my right foot, came out from under the blow and around his right flank, and he thrust the shield out, catching my shoulder with the rim, and I knew I would have a bruise there, but I also had a heartbeat of opportunity and I darted Serpent-Breath forward and her point punctured his mail again to scrape against the ribs of his back and he roared as he turned, wrenching my blade free of his mail, but I was already going backward.
One sentence! My, my. I don’t know what Cornwell was after there. Perhaps he was trying to catch the speed and tenseness of a one-on-one sword fight, but if that was his goal, I think he failed. All the sentence did for me was give me a bit of a headache. I doubt it truly is the longest sentence ever, but it’s still pretty damn long. Someone mail that man some periods.
Comments 11
Would you believe Wikipedia has an article about such things?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longest_English_sentence
Posted 06 Aug 2007 at 6:57 pm ¶Periods? Periods were in shortage during the Roman times. Try to find a speech in Latin or Greek, there are like no periods. This may explain the James Joyce’s Ulysses mention in the wikipedia article.
Posted 06 Aug 2007 at 7:35 pm ¶Slone: Hah. Yes, I’d believe it. Furthermore, it doesn’t surprise me in the least.
Stavanger: I’m not familiar with Latin or Greek speeches; got a link to an example?
Posted 06 Aug 2007 at 10:03 pm ¶It reads really hastily (think horse race reporter style) so you may be right about the catching the speed thing. I don’t think it’s the length of the sentence but the complete lack of structure in it: if I did the ‘and then… and then… thing in an essay I’d definitely not be taken seriously. Long sentences can be OK: I remember the first time I read Charles Dickens: a sentence per paragraph!
Posted 07 Aug 2007 at 10:07 am ¶Renee: I see what you mean. If it had a bit more structure, it might be okay. Unfortunately, the “lack of structure” seems to be a common problem with Cornwell. He tries to put too much information in each sentence, with little logic behind it, so often, he ends up with.. well, a mess.
Posted 07 Aug 2007 at 10:33 am ¶Brrr *shudders* Thanks for warning me
Posted 07 Aug 2007 at 10:47 am ¶Just reading up on the 52 books in 52 weeks thing and it looks fantastic! I want to do it too but with writing a master thesis I’m not sure whether I’ll pull it off. Might start in September – new uni year, new life (without uni I hope!).
Renee: I’m not even working on a master thesis, and I’m way behind.
I really wanted to get 52 books in, but I guess the effort counts for something. I know that, even though I won’t achieve 52 in 52, I have read a lot more books this year than I would have if I hadn’t tried the 52 thing.
Posted 07 Aug 2007 at 11:29 am ¶Stavanger is right, of course. I always thought Joyce’s entire Ulysses was the longest sentence ever. I quit halfway, btw. This one’s chaotic and vibrant, that’s true. Not sure it’s brilliant or sloppy writing, though.
PS The Wikipedia article does need cleanup. If only we knew some people interested in ‘lit and lang’…
Posted 07 Aug 2007 at 6:58 pm ¶I’m interested in lit and lang, but I don’t have time (or, admittedly, the inclination) to clean up a Wiki article. I know, I know. I’m terrible.
Posted 08 Aug 2007 at 5:27 pm ¶The longest sentence in English literature/language belongs to writer Nigel Tomm. His book “The Blah Story, Volume 4″ consists of one sentence which contains 469,375 words or 2,273,551 characters (with spaces).
Posted 23 Nov 2007 at 12:11 pm ¶Hi, Bambi. Thanks for the comment!
That’s quite a long sentence. I thought Faulkner was bad!
Posted 24 Nov 2007 at 10:01 pm ¶Post a Comment