T C A Srinivasa-Raghavan: That deft touch

Many, many years ago, before even the Emergency, and of course before this paper was born, when the winter in Delhi used to be cold and the sun shone crisply through the smogless clear days, I took it upon myself during a quiet and mildly inebriated afternoon to instruct a particularly combative friend on how to improve her taste in reading.

She could do so, I said, by switching from the lugubriously contrived angst of the likes of Sartre, Gunter Grass, Kafka, etc to better writing. "Good writing should give you a tingle," I said, "you know, everywhere."

Her somnambulant reverie thus shattered, she became quite incensed. Partly it was the cheap rum I had bought to mix with the cokes she had brought along; but mostly I think it was because of the implicit suggestion that reading could, indeed ought to, be fun.

She said some pretty wounding things to me, not all of which were entirely spiteful or untrue. Hedonism has always lacked admirers in the less thoughtful parts of academe.

Before leaving, she delivered the coup de grace. She reminded me of what R K Narayan once wrote about, if memory serves me right, Qurratulain Hyder, who had written a nasty review or something.

Poor taste, Narayan said (according to my friend), was trying to be an arbiter of other people's taste.

Her erudition often trumped my wisdom, a forerunner of what was to come on TV as it seeks to go intellectual, what they call "kauva chale hans ki chaal" (the crow pretends to be a swan), so to speak.

For the nonce, I had lost by an innings and 1,000 runs, and swore that henceforth I would only drink vodka during the daytime.

Unspeakably deflated ever since then, I have wondered about what constitutes good writing in novels: plot or style?

The callow, silly and knee-jerk response from those whom I have intermittently asked over the years is to say both. Truth, as we can see, is mostly banal.

The secret
But a good story can be told badly, and a bad story can be told very nicely. Given the choice, what would you prefer, I have asked.

Most people have said that they prefer a good story, confirming my private belief that these philistines would not recognise good writing in a month of Sundays. Their numbers are especially large in India, of course, where, thanks to the Central Board of Secondary Education's strange methods of teaching languages, the ability to detect even that little whiff of excellence in the first few pages - or even lines - has died out almost completely.

Never, if you will, have so few pearls been cast before so few … well, you do know the saying, don't you?

For example, take the following three delectable but dismayingly underestimated writers in India: Kingsley Amis, John le Carre and Anthony Burgess, all three of whom had that deft touch that never fails to send shivers down the spines of pretenders.

The cognoscenti in England have appreciated them, but mostly for the wrong reasons: Amis, because he was an alcoholic misogynist or at any rate that was the image he cultivated; Mr le Carre because he wrote good and different spy stories; and Burgess because he was, oh, so prolific and a critic to boot, that too with a surgical scalpel.

Mr le Carre used to have a strong plot in his earlier novels and the writing wasn't so good. But even then, it was several whiskers over the rest. As the years went by, the plots became marginal and his writing soared.

The other two just wrote and let the writing take them somewhere, anywhere. It was as though they were playing the blues, contained within the 12 bars of the story in their case but allowed them to wander freely otherwise. The plot was their base.

Their writing is like Sachin Tendulkar's shot selection, instinctively perfect and therefore ultimately unteachable.

Improve it
Mr le Carre writes in a laid-back, mocking English drawl, his latest being The Delicate Truth. Not what you'd call a gripping page-turner but superb, if somewhat elliptical, craftsmanship. The last four or five books have been mostly this with a barely a new story or plot. But what a style, Sirjee!

Amis wrote in an equally elliptical style, his books full of the most acid observations about people generally and English people particularly. His last was called the The Biographer's Moustache. One read him as one would drink a good Johnny Walker, with smug pleasure.

But it was Burgess who was the real master, in whichever way you can describe writers - story, plot, genres, treatment, you name it. His Mozart and the Wolf Gang was only one example, there being around 40 others, each as distinct from the other as the 200-odd musical works he wrote. If you have missed reading these three, I must commiserate with you.

But go on, start now, it is still not too late. Improve your taste in reading.