"Darkmans" is apparently
Elizabethan thieves' cant for "night," however much that
helps. Not much, probably. I'll tell you, the description of this
book made it sound kind of interesting, but I probably wouldn't have
ended up reading it except for one key factor: it's eight hundred
fifty pages long. I know it's not rational, but I have a strong
tendency to fetishize sheer length in fiction.
Not bloated, multi-volume fantasy and the like, but for individual
novels, there's a real mystique. It probably has something to do
with the way I was so fucking intellectually timid
in my younger years, and would see such things as terrifying,
insurmountable obstacles. Now, they're just good fun. True fact: if
I'm browsing through books on amazon, and I see something that looks
interesting, my interest level will jump ten-fold if I scroll down
and see that the page numbers are closing in on four digits. I might
even become interested in something that hadn't
previously seemed appealing. Not--obviously--that shortness is a
deal-breaker, or indeed that length has any
relationship to quality. None of Angela Carter's novels are
particularly long, after all. But when it comes to appealing to me,
it helps! Naturally, sometimes these books turn out to be what
critics accuse them of being--pointlessly over-extended and
self-indulgent--but it's actually surprising how infrequently I come
away with that impression. Mostly with pre-twentieth-century stuff,
I think--Armadale, Emancipated Women, The Last Chronicle of
Barset. Although you can consider the fact that I don't
see Infinite Jest as excessive (even though it
clearly is), and take my opinions for what they're worth.
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