Fiction Editing

The other day the Guardian bemoaned the death of editing. Hark at them, you might say, given their fabled error rate. The article wasn't about newspapers though; it was about publishers of fiction and the demise of careful editing in that context.

After reading the Guardian article, I discovered that it was possible to download the first chapter of a new book called When God was a Rabbit. It was written by a 'debut novelist' called Sarah Winman, and I had heard that it was supposed to be exciting and fresh - so exciting and fresh, in fact, that it has earned itself a place on Waterstone's list of recommended books this season.

Sadly, I found it impossible to read beyond the first paragaph of When God was a Rabbit. It seemed that the Guardian's claims were correct, at least in this instance: the text appeared to have been left quite unedited. This is how it  goes:  

"I decided to enter this world just as my mother got off the bus after an unproductive shopping trip to Ilford. She’d gone to change a pair of trousers and, distracted by my shifting position, found it impossible to choose between patched denims or velvet flares, and fearful that my place of birth would be a department store, she made a staggered journey back to the safe confines of her postcode, where her waters broke just as the heavens opened. And during the seventy-yard walk back down to our house, her amniotic fluid mixed with the December rain and spiralled down the gutter until the cycle of life was momentously and, one might say, poetically complete."

The first thing that put me off was that long clunky first sentence, the use of 'this' in it (what other world were you thinking of?) and the overloading of trip with a mound of heavy words. The second thing that put me off was that long clunky second sentence - 'and ... and ... staggered journey... where'. The third and final thing that put me off was that long clunky third sentence, with its portentous mixing of amniotic fluid and December rain, its repetition of 'back', which has appeared already in the second sentence, and its random use of 'poetically' - thrown in presumably to add a bit of tone.

Had I been given the manuscript, I would probably have thrown it in the rubbish bin on the evidence of this paragraph. If I'd been told I couldn't do that, that the book was a work of genius, that I had to polish it up to make it a tiny bit more readable, I might have suggested this: 

'I decided to enter the world just as my mother got off the bus after an unproductive trip to Ilford. She'd gone to change a pair of trousers, but, distracted by my shifting position, found it impossible to choose between patched denims or velvet flares. Fearful that my place of birth would be a department store, she'd journeyed back to the safe confines of her postcode, where her waters broke just as the heavens opened. As she staggered the seventy yards down the road to our house, her amniotic fluid mixed with the December rain and spiralled down the gutter. Some might say that the cycle of life was thus momentously - perhaps even poetically - complete.' [In an ideal world that last sentence would be cut completely, but I have a feeling that it is probably one of the author's darlings.]

The author might argue that she was trying to create a special clumsy kind of style that would embody the sense of a gabbling narrator. I would say that she still has to charm the reader and that, although there is quite enough of the narrator's rather self-aggrandising silliness left in my version, if she accepts my changes her readers' eyes will no longer glaze over before they've finished the first page.

Not that an absence of elegance will matter to Winman or her publishers in the short term - all the money that might have gone into editing the text is being poured into promoting the novel instead, which should guarantee that it sells well, regardless of the quality of its prose. What we won't know for a long time though is whether, in its current semi-edited form, it will continue to interest readers once they aren't having it shoved down their throats by marketers. Will it ever become a successful battered penguin?  Only time will tell.