Spare me the purple prose

If you are very observant, you may have noticed that I am currently reading "The Memory Room" by Christopher Koch. He's a great writer and I am enjoying the book but there's one thing about it that I am a bit iffy about. It relies heavily on diary extracts as a narrative device, and to this day I think the only book I have ever read which portrayed diaries at all accurately was (tragically) "The Secret Diary Of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 and 3/4".

One of the great (perhaps the only great) diary-based books is (in my mind at least) Bram Stoker's "Bram Stoker's Dracula". (It's actually just called Dracula, but have you noticed that people always call it "Bram Stoker's Dracula"?) I think Stoker pulled off this stunt because it is Gothic horror, and it just seems plausible that in the face of such soul-chilling evil that the protagonists would keep detailed diaries in order to preserve their own sanities. But also, in the time in which the novel was set (and written for that matter), people actually did things like write each other long letters that lasted several pages!

The problem with translating this to a modern novel is that people just aren't like that any more. No-one sits down and carefully crafts beautiful descriptions of the weather and scenery and the ambient sounds and smells in the course of documenting their everyday life. It seems to me, as I sit here in the dim light of my computer as it whines faintly, half-drowned out even by the distant midnight traffic noises from the nearby roadworks that throw up a fine dust that settles on one's bedclothes during the day and inks the sky vermillion every evening, that no-one in their right mind could be bothered to do it because it's incredibly time consuming and pretentious and I have to get up early tomorrow to get a good park at uni and it's already a quarter to one.

I think James Elroy could probably write a good diary-novel. "Got up at noon. Sheets were scorched from cigarette butts again. Too drunk to write more." And so forth. Hmm - sounds like a blog. Maybe not such a good idea...