At the risk of sounding like one of those warbling thesps who bang on about the “dangers” of the stage and the “high-wire act” of live theatre, I suggest that going for a fancy style in prose can also be a risky undertaking. One textual faux pas can put the whole enterprise in jeopardy. For example, I have started reading Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children around four times. At each false start I am halted by the same odd description. A character is grandly described as having a “Nabokovian brow.” I mutter to myself: what the hell is “Nabokovian” doing here? Does Messud mean that the character has a forehead like Vladimir Nabokov’s? But I’m not sure if the Russian’s forehead is sufficiently renowned to deserve it being archly applied as an adjective to a fictional face. But what is more dubious about the phrase is that by dropping the term “Nabokovian” like a stone into the narrative, Messud is trying, you feel, to take a shortcut to high-brow cachet by associating her prose with Vladimir Vladimirovich’s.

Doubtless, such aesthetic quibbling can seem a bit precious. But there are cases when overripe writing is clearly disastrous.

For example, in Saturday’s Irish Times, Olivia O’Leary gave a rave review to Kevin Myers’s bonking-and-bombs account of his journalistic stint in Belfast during the early 1970s: Watching the Door. She gives us a whiff of “Colonel” Myers’s inimitable style…

Another bomb, near the RTE offices, went off as Myers arrived. He was reminded of biology classes at school and dissecting rabbits. “And it was the smell of rabbit entrails that now filled Donegall Street, in part vanilla, in part raw steak, in part anus-fresh excrement[…]”

Unfortunately the figure one is reminded of is not, say, Michael Herr, Chris Hedges, or Thomas Ricks but–alas–loopy wine pundit Jilly Goolden attempting to describe an Asda-label plonk.

And as for the “anus-fresh excrement”–I’m almost embarrassed to admit that it made me think of a slogan for high-grade garden manure.