The "unreadability" has more to do with the grim, epic Anglo-Saxon cadence he was invoking than any actual failure on his part, or his editor's.
Also his poor word choice, lousy pacing, extended distracting digressions to cover things unimportant to the story, habit of leaving plot threads hanging for hundreds of pages while he moves on to something else, and the fact that he wrote an entire book set *after* his story ended, in which no new story was begun.
If your argument is that he wasn't TRYING to write a coherent novel, okay, sure - but he was writing a novel, and deliberately doing it badly in a way that a semicompetent editor could have fixed is not really all that different from accidentally doing it badly in a way a semicompetent editor could have fixed.
It's like... doing a "comic book issue" where you have a splash page of an aardvark pope and then 30 pages of white-on-black bricktext explaining why women are evil and exist only to contaminate the author's precious bodily fluids. It might be ART, it might even be an entertaining read - but it ain't a comic book in anything approaching the standard sense.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-03-19 01:30 am (UTC)Also his poor word choice, lousy pacing, extended distracting digressions to cover things unimportant to the story, habit of leaving plot threads hanging for hundreds of pages while he moves on to something else, and the fact that he wrote an entire book set *after* his story ended, in which no new story was begun.
If your argument is that he wasn't TRYING to write a coherent novel, okay, sure - but he was writing a novel, and deliberately doing it badly in a way that a semicompetent editor could have fixed is not really all that different from accidentally doing it badly in a way a semicompetent editor could have fixed.
It's like... doing a "comic book issue" where you have a splash page of an aardvark pope and then 30 pages of white-on-black bricktext explaining why women are evil and exist only to contaminate the author's precious bodily fluids. It might be ART, it might even be an entertaining read - but it ain't a comic book in anything approaching the standard sense.