Well written or not?
Cover from The List of Seven
Of the several books I'm reading right now, one stands out for it's superlative use of the English language. Mark Frost's The List of Seven has many examples of clever phrasing that I am fond of finding in any writing and has immaculate grammar in the narration whilst modifying it as needed for the various character's speech patterns. These laudable traits are found in many works, but seldom do they accompany a clear example of an author's complete mastery of vocabulary. No word is casually used and no word is wasted. Anyone can write with a thesaurus, but few can write with skill such as Mr. Frost embodies in paragraphs like this, from a scene of a New Year's Eve dinner two of the main characters are enjoying:
The last dishes were cleared away. Sparks lit a cheroot and warmed the honeyed nectar of his brandy over a candle. "So ..." he said, gaveling the proceedings back to order. "... as to my brother."The images invoked here could have been vastly different simply by changing the phrasing of the dialogue attribution and the mood of the preceding paragraphs would have been ruined. Writing of a simply ordinary skill level would have also worked, but not as well as this construct.
Rather a pity, too, as the story has yet to captivate me. As one of the seemingly innumerable variations on the Sherlock Holmes genre, it stuck me as clever initially but has thus far failed to capitalize on the ground it gained. In this instance, the Holmes-like character is a lower-middle class Dr. Arthur Conan Doyle who lives in a flat reminiscent of the famous 221B Baker Street flat any reader of good literature should recognize. And as homage to Dr. John Watson, the Doyle character is fond of writing tales of mystery and gentlemanly adventure, though in this novel his recent writings on the supernatural have gotten him involved with the supernatural that likely won't be explained away as was the haunting in The Hound of the Baskervilles. In most every respect, the tale reads like a good Holmes mystery. There's less of a penchant for stilted prose and more of an emphasis on the narrative carrying the action rather than the typical arm-chair style telling of the late 18th century. In my mind, these are improvements. Yet the story still lacks and my relish for Frost's use of language is the only toe hold I have for mounting this work. Hopefully it will pick up in the second half.
