Sir, – Having loyally waded through the four Irish authors who have been both longlisted and shortlisted for the Booker Prize, I am exhausted. One reason for this is because three out of four of them have plumped for the new trend of abandoning quotation marks around pieces of dialogue. As a Joycean enthusiast I thought I had come to grips with long, unsegregated streams of consciousness. But trying to decipher a dense page of complicated argument between two or even three characters, without a comma, a capital letter, or a quotation mark between them is really tough going. I am quite prepared to be surprised or even challenged by any author’s style, but if reading their book means heavy labour for me, then I’m out. – Yours, etc,
RODNEY DEVITT,
Sandymount,
Dublin 4.