Youth! Youth!

Peter Rozovsky, who is rightly a stickler for grammatical exactitude, has expressed the view that older writers are better at their trade than younger ones.
Since I read mostly gardening books and reviews of current literature on the Internet and do not tend to disturb myself with most of the flood of contemporary literature, I have no way of deciding whether or not this is the case.
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Recently I read "Le Grand Meaulnes" in both French and English again and enjoyed it even more than when it was first discovered as a mandatory text in university.   I like to think that there must be young writers about who have the sensitivity to language, place and character shown by Alain-Fournier, but I have no way of finding out unless I start reading fiction again.   Every writer is now greeted as some sort of prophet or phenomenon probably for fear they might respond badly to criticism or that their books might not sell.  Also, most people under the age of forty seem to have taken to having a "real" job, if they are lucky enough to find one or are busy trying to fulfill their potential which seems to be the recent replacement for having a career path.  The visual arts and the Internet are attracting more young energy than writing at the moment, even if the flood of enthusiasts attending creative writing classes is on the increase.   From chatting with friends, creative writing is now very much a social activity for retirees, poets and short story writers rather than for novelists and dramatists.   Finding a publisher must be a nightmare in the volatile print market that is threatening literature at every turn. <br><br> I grew up with the concept of the young genius and was always a great fan of the writers who fell in the Great War, notably the poets, and who never lived to mature into people who might have blessed the world with even more remarkable works of art.
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Then there were the warning figures like Wordsworth who grew into a frightful bore, or Rimbaud who took to commerce. <br>Having expended all his literary energies he showed the good sense to know when enough is enough.
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I have realised, with some surprise, that I have never known a writer who has not managed to secure their position, financially at least by having a profession to back them in case of financial necessity.   And the ones who write in our national newspapers and who make a great virtue of never having attended any third level institution seem to me to be a bit over self indulgent when it comes to defending their position as self taught experts.
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I take the view that anybody with access to a dictionary and a thesaurus can learn or even teach themselves to write but there is more to the game than meets the eye.  The question is always there as to whether it is worth doing.   After three years subjected to a degree in French and English in the early 1970's I had developed not only writer's block but had almost become aphasic thanks to constant contact with the greats of our culture.   Why bother to set pen to paper when everything seems to have been said already.   However, some writing is adequately enough paid and with thrift it can supplement a couple's income and, something I still find astonishing, it actually causes pleasure for others. <br> So I used submit pieces to an educational magazine and finally did spend six years as a hack. <br><br> At the moment I'm looking round for  reasons to continue blogging.   Friends who have never been subjected to the grind of trying to write politely about some horror in order not to get sued ask me why I don't write more often.   Even after twenty years the rows that broke out over next to nothing in journalism are fresh in my mind.   Most of them were fuelled by alcohol in those days but   having a preposition out of place should not be ground for GBH and I still remember a spot on a stairs in Fleet Street where I used stand, look at the ugly choice of colour on the wall and wonder if emigration might not be the most sensible option.   In those days, while the property boom and hyper inflation in London was a cause for near hysteria, the last thing on my mind was to analyse why economics were such an incomprehensible force in everybody's lives.   I just wanted peace and quiet.
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This is why "Graveland" has been such an interesting read over the past few days.   The central protagonist, Ellen Dorsey, aged 41, does seem a bit long in the tooth to me to be taking on the risks associated with investigative journalism that ensures she ends up getting involved in violence in a way that is usually left to the police.   However, since the character is an American, I suspended disbelief and knuckled under to try to find enough sympathy for her actions to read the book through to the end.   At the risk of offending Mr Glynn, I have to admit that while the book is astonishingly insightful, I could not go along fully with the premise that "intuition" had to be called up as a motivation for some of Ellen's decisions.   Her own soul searching on the subject seemed to be a weakness in the psychological profile of what is otherwise a well rounded and quite sympathetic character.   <br><br> Alan Glynn is not an Existentialist. <br>  He has referred in an interview to his interest in characters who seem to have no moral compass and while he does not dish out lorryloads of judgement his work is "old fashioned" in the very best sense.   I've always disliked the amoral writings that flooded Europe after World War II and consider that Genet, while a genius, was not the sort of person one would invite round for tea.   Apart from the fact that he might steal the cutlery and regardless of his evident genius, he sounds seriously scary from the biographical notes that I bothered to read. <br><br> Alan Glynn's novels are more reassuringly rooted in a more altruistic world. Since there are always people who are willing to put themselves out to help others and since human nature has vast reserves of generosity I don't think that people are more selfish these days than they were when I was young and Glynn's novels bear this reassuring premise out. <br><br> His writing addresses moral decision making in a way that looks like a cross between "The Duchess of Malfi" and a sound as a bell Zane Grey.   Much has been made of the fact that in the light of the two brothers who were on the run  after the Boston Marathon bomb attack in April 2013 "Graveland" is a very topical and important book indeed.   However, the psychology of two brothers and the pecking order involved when they turn to violence is long established in the canon of Western literature.   Many bloggers have been afraid of giving too much information as it might prove to be a spoiler for anybody who reads for the plot alone, but having read Shakespeare, I found little to surprise or shock in the younger student characters who are the catalysts for catastrophe at the core of the novel.

<br><br>There are many innovations in Mr Glynn's writing style and I tended to chuckle from time to time at his dry sense of humour.   The social media, notably Twitter, is used to very good effect to drive plot forward by introducing new information.   It acts as a sort of Greek chorus in a story that could be categorised as melodrama rather than true tragedy.
<br><br> I leave it to the experts in genre to slug it out among themselves as to where current paranoia thrillers might fit into the scheme of things.