BOOKS & ARTS
without due care. (Moran wouldn’t, I imag-
ine, appreciate the unnecessarily clumsiness
of that final tangled double negative. Noth-
ing like an impassioned paean to attentive
sentence-writing to make you self-conscious.)
Fellow writing enthusiast Lane Greene
— an editor at the Economist — is no fan
of dogma either. In Talk on the Wild Side, he
celebrates the very fact that language is way-
ward, arguing that to try to contain it within
hard rules is to miss its point and its won-
der. The book covers some of Moran’s terri-
tory, but takes a step back for a slightly wider
perspective. Moran’s beloved sentences are
by and large a written form; Greene is con-
cerned with speech. But this preoccupation is
not about our language being debased, about
people not using it properly; instead his tar-
get is those who seek to control it, using
arbitrary and spurious (ahistorical, illogical)
rules to signify some educational, genera-
tional and indeed moral superiority.
Pedants and grouches and sticklers and
‘authoritarian scolds’ don’t come out of this
book too well. That’s not to say that Greene
takes an anything-goes, ultra-descriptiv-
ist attitude (i.e. people can do whatever
they want, and we merely observe what
they do rather than dictate it). On the con-
trary, he knows what he likes. It’s just that
what he likes is not people like N.M. Gwynne,
who combine fervent prescriptivism with
what Greene calls ‘an unerring instinct for
getting it wrong’.
Greene’s book takes in the inevitable
failure of quixotic — if sometimes admi-
rable — artificial languages, and the rapid
improvement in automated translation (this
section is particularly good). With well-
chosen examples, he demonstrates languag-
es’ resilience and variety (his subject is most-
ly English but he ventures abroad for a spell,
too). He takes Orwell to task over his naivety
about the uncomplicated benefits of uncom-
plicated language. Even Donald Trump and
Nigel Farage make an appearance (when
don’t they?). He is open-minded and dis-
cerning (if you need a basic rule: look at
what good writers do, and do that), but he’s
no zealot and no snob. Like Moran, he says
things that are hard to argue with.
Simon Pulleyn’s The Secret Life of Lan-
guage takes yet a further step back, to an
even loftier vantage point from which he
seeks to present simply ‘languages’ as his
vast subject — not just contemporary Eng-
lish, which is Moran and Greene’s shared
territory, but all of it. Across huge spans of
time, across vast expanses of space, in myri-
ad forms of use and notation: two pages on
Celtic languages, four pages on Chinese, six
on syntax, another two on runes. It pretty
nearly works.
There are factual slips, but only minor
ones; the bigger problem is that the format
doesn’t quite cohere. The terminology some-
times gets quite technical (of necessity, I’m
sure), but this register is set alongside jolly
a series of reflections on Robinson
Crusoe; a segment on psychoanalytical
dream theories examines interpretations of
dreams experienced by people living under
dictatorships. Elsewhere Benjamin revis-
its such 19th-century quackeries as Silas
Weir Mitchell’s notorious ‘rest cure’, which
inspired Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short
story, ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’. There are
cameos from David Hume, Roberto Bolaño
and, inevitably, Freud. In the midst of all this
is Benjamin herself, zombified by exhaus-
tion: ‘My head lolls with the effort of keep-
ing myself upright. My eyes are glassed over.
I am out of sorts with myself.’
She has tried all manner of remedies,
from valerian root and meditation to
Temazepam and Nytol. A hypnotic agent
called Zopiclone ‘puts you to sleep for six
or seven hours, but the next day it’s as if
a cat pissed in your mouth’. She finds arti-
ficially induced sleep a poor substitute
for the real thing — it renders her ‘heavy-
limbed, lug-headed, one-dimensional’.
A treatment known as sleep-restriction
therapy involves limiting your allotted
sleeping time by reference to a ‘sleep-effi-
ciency quotient’, calculated as the ratio of
how many hours you’ve slept vs the total
amount of time you’ve spent physically in
bed. Since she spends much of her waking
life doing elaborate sums to quantify her
sleep deficit, Benjamin quips that the col-
lective noun for insomniacs should be ‘a
calculation of insomniacs’.
When Benjamin’s partner — he has no
trouble sleeping, and is therefore denoted by
the alias ‘Zzz’ — observes that her writing
is most alive when she is most zonked-out,
she ponders whether her creativity might be
inextricably bound up in her insomnia. But
so what if it were? Our neuroses, she con-
cludes, are what make us human, and artistic
endeavour in particular relies upon ‘a will-
ingness to look at the world at a tilt’. Warm-
ing to this theme, Benjamin takes issue with
the fad for ‘mindfulness’ therapies and what
she calls the ‘glorious blankness’ of Buddhist
meditation. These practices substitute stupe-
faction for wonder, just as medical attempts
to cure people of their neuroses have tend-
ed, historically, towards lobotomisation of
one kind or another.
In a society increasingly enthralled by
the wellness industry’s cultish charms —
sustained by Big Pharma and a burgeon-
ing canon of self-help literature, and lately
bolstered by the advent of digital apps —
Benjamin’s is a refreshingly grounded and
sanguine voice. Her ethical stance recalls
the scepticism of a previous generation of
writers, such as Ken Kesey and Anthony
Burgess, towards overweening psychiatric
interventions. Dosing up on opioids might
get you through the night, but at what cost?
‘Enchanted sleep is dreamless,’ she writes.
‘And if you can’t dream, then how can you
entertain visions of a better world?’textbook-style illustrations, fun facts and
anecdotes; and this is all in a pleasingly spa-
cious spread-by-spread layout that suggests
it’s for dipping into, while in reality it best
rewards end-to-end reading. (The bit about
‘Languages of Mainland Southeast Asia’ on
page 110 requires you to have read about
‘Other Language Families’ on page 62 in
order to know what ‘areal diffusion’ is; the
reference to ‘aspect’ in the chapter on the
Pacific depends on your having read the Sla-
vonic chapter; and so on.) It’s hard to know,
in other words, whom it’s for. (Full disclo-sure: having just read Lane Greene, I con-
fess I hesitated a moment over the wisdom of
employing that slightly fussy ‘whom’.)
But for those flaws, there are many lessons
here for the newcomer, and it’s powered by
an undoubted enthusiasm — which is some-
thing all these books share. Moran calls his
‘a love letter to the sentence’; Greene’s
is ‘a love letter to language’. All combine
passion with expertise in a trio of books
that should please language nerds and
others besides.Sleeplesss nights and
endless daze
Houman Barekat
Insomnia
by Marina Benjamin
Scribe, £9.99, pp. 144A genre of memoir currently in vogue
involves entwining the author’s personal
story with the cultural history of a given phe-
nomenon, so that each may illuminate the
other. Mellow introspection and anecdotal
whimsy are spliced with tidbits of cultural
criticism; the prose is meandering and asso-
ciative rather than linearly expository.
This format can feel a little gimmicky, but
in the case of Marina Benjamin’s Insomnia
it is apt: the book’s digressive expansiveness
and collage-like structure evoke the feeling
of lying in bed at night with your thoughts
racing –
the freewheeling, seemingly autonomous trip-
ping through utter banality, the night-time
regurgitation of daytime crud... that moves like
an arm-linked chain of cancan dancers through
a demi-wakefulness that exists beyond any
conscious control.A passage on stimulants winds its
way back to the political economy of the
colonial-era sugar trade; a meditation on
the isolation of the insomniac promptsLanguage is wayward. Trying to
contain it within hard and fast rules
is to miss its point and wonder