Writers

There are some authors whose writing has somehow captivated my imagination and made me want to read everything they ever wrote. I haven't figured out quite what it is about their work that is so compelling or precisely what if anything they might have in common. And, although they have very differrent styles, they all write in a way that keeps me reading. Here's three of them.

Robert Louis Stevenson. Treasure Island and Kidnapped are two of my favourite books of all time. Both are classic adventure stories, featuring complex dramatic characters and events. Long John Silver is a sympathetic villain but does he only do the right thing out of self-interest? Squire Trelawney is a fine upstanding, law-abiding, English gentleman who cares for Jim Hawkins but his primary motivation is greed: to get his hands on the treasure.

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde - an examination into the tension inherent in the duality of human nature and the relationship between the conscious and unconscious mind. We are talking fundamental dichotomy here, Dr Freud. And a cracking good story.

P G Wodehouse. No complex plots or characters, but splendid use of the English language and gentle humour, mostly satirising the English upper class. As personified in the Jeeves stories, the 'servant' is invariably cleverer and more able than the 'master', and the aristocracy comprises mentally neglible buffoons indulging in half-witted and trivial schemes. A dynamic synthesis of the class struggle, or what? And Wodehouse is a master at making up silly names: Augustus Fink-Nottle; Boko Fittleworth; and G. D'Arcy 'Stilton' Cheesewright to name but three.

Kurt Vonnegut. It was Vonnegut who introduced the concept of the 'chronosynclastic infundibulum' in The Sirens of Titan; "...where all the different kinds of truths fit together..." Chrono means time; synclastic means curved towards the same side in all directions; and infundibulum means funnel. Vonnegut messes about with the notion of time elsewhere in his writings, notably in Slaughterhouse Five in which Billy Pilgrim is pitched about in time randomly. His themes, however, are ultimately pessimistic although many of his characters are optimistic: the futility of war-mongering, the vanity of humans, the venality of western society. But he can be funny with it. It's that old dichotomy thing again.