I am currently reading a book called The Face of Battle (A Study of Agincourt, Waterloo and the Somme).
I have made it to page 25 when I came across this one sentence:
It is, and for many writers past and present is not very much more than, the study of generals and generalship, an approach to the subject which can sometimes yield remarkable results – the American historian Jac Weller’s three modern studies of Wellington in India, the Peninsula and at Waterloo, for example, convey a powerful sense of character and are informed by a deep and humane understanding of the nature of early nineteenth-century warfare at every level from the generals to the private soldiers – but which, by its choice of focus, automatically distorts perspective and too often dissolves into sycophancy or hero-worship, culminating in the odd case in a bizarre sort of identification by the author with this subject – an outcome common and understandable enough in literary or artistic biography but tasteless and even mildly alarming when the Ego is a man of blood and iron, his Alter someone scholarly meekness and suburban physique.
The sentence is too long - his tendency to do this (include too many subordinate clauses) is one of the reasons I enjoy John Keegan’s books less than I expect to - but I found it easy enough to understand and I’m not sure replacing dashes with brackets makes a lot of difference. (Hey! 51 words - not bad )
And yeah, it took me probably 20 pages to get into the rhythm of the prose, and to get used to keeping track of the subject through several dependent clauses, an implied parenthetical, and a couple of tangents, before arriving at the verb. Most of the first chapter was gibberish and I had to go back and read it again after making the adjustment.
Since then, though, it’s been golden. I’m halfway through Waterloo and already it’s a great goddamn book.
It is over-long, but not really confusing or difficult.
He simply appears to be saying that the study of war often seems to devolve into an analysis of the character of generals, which sometimes leads historians to identify with their general-subjects.
Which identification in turn can distort history and is sort of odd when the subject is really a murdering bastard.
[hypocrite mode]
It is not dumbing things down to express oneself coherently; the interjection of long parenthetical clauses detracts from the readability of the passage. This is particularly onerous when the concepts being discussed are themselves recondite. Keegan could have expressed his thoughts with equal precision and much more clarity in several ways. For instance, he could have moved the remark about Jac Weller to a separate sentence at the end of a paragraph. He could have put it in a footnote. He could have refrained from separating his verbs and objects pointlessly. He could have broken the sentence into several smaller ones. He could have used semicolons. But he chose to engage in rhetorical masturbation instead. The quoted passage is pointlessly and obnoxiously obscure.
[/hypocrite mode]
One imagines our tweedy professorial type reading a journal article on Feminist approaches to literary theory … while secretly in his mind he’s Ghenghis Khan, murdering his grant committee with steel sword, riding his snorting, iron-shod steed through lecture halls filled with inattentive students - smashing their bones under its great hooves - on his way to mercilessly ravage the librarians before a bonfire of thesis papers.
